How do I estimate portions without a food scale?

• Oils, butter and sauces: easy to forget and calorie-dense. Log them separately.
• Eating out: a study measuring lower-calorie restaurant and packaged meals found the restaurant ones had on average about 18% more calories than stated, and the packaged ones about 8% more. US rules allow a label’s actual calories to be up to 20% above what it states.
• Self-reports run low: in a classic study of people with obesity who said they couldn’t lose weight on low-calorie diets, participants reported eating far less than they actually ate, by almost half on average. Most people’s errors are smaller, but they usually run in the same direction.

If you can, weigh your usual foods at home for a week. You’ll learn what your normal bowl of rice or serving of chicken really weighs, and your estimates afterwards get much better.

Then let the scale referee: if your weekly average weight isn’t moving as planned, adjust your target rather than chasing perfect logging (how often to weigh yourself).

In GymStreak you can snap a meal or describe it, for example “two eggs on toast and a black coffee”, and Spot logs it against your calorie and macro targets. Tell it the amount when you know it, like “150 g of chicken”, for a closer estimate.