How to control portions without obsessing

Counting calories turns eating into an exam

In theory it sounds great: you weigh your food, log everything in an app, add up macros three times a day and that's that. In practice it's a grind that wears you down. If you've tried it, you know why it's so hard to keep going: every single meal turns into a math problem.

What does work are simple rules, tricks that get you close to eating well without having to track every gram that lands on the plate. Here are 7 that I use myself and that genuinely work.

1. Use your hand as a measure

Your hand is proportional to your body, which makes it the best measuring tool you own, and you carry it around with you everywhere anyway.

• The palm (without fingers) equals protein. A portion of chicken, fish or meat the size of your palm.
• The fist equals vegetables. A fist of cooked vegetables, or two fists of raw salad.
• The cupped hand equals carbohydrates. Rice, pasta, potato. Whatever fits in your curved hand.
• The thumb equals fats. Oil, butter, nuts. A portion the size of your thumb.

It isn't perfect. It does get you very close without weighing a single thing.

2. Eat slowly and wait before going back for more

Your brain takes around 20 minutes to register that you've eaten enough, so if you wolf the plate down in 7 minutes and go back for seconds, you eat more than you needed. When participants across some twenty experiments were made to eat slowly on purpose, they ended up eating less and were no hungrier at the end of the meal. Chew properly, put the fork down between bites, talk to whoever is sitting next to you. If you're still hungry after 20 minutes, go ahead and serve yourself more. It will almost never happen.

3. Half a plate of vegetables first

Before the protein or the carbohydrates go anywhere near it, fill half the plate with vegetables or salad, which automatically shrinks the space left for the more fattening part, without any sense that you're taking something away from yourself. The size of whatever sits in front of you decides more than you think: across experiments run with children and adults in wealthy countries, people ate more simply because the portion, the pack or the plate was bigger. It's a silly trick and it works beautifully.

4. Do not drink your calories

A soft drink has 140 calories, a "natural" orange juice 110, a beer 150. Three of those in a day is 400 calories that take away no hunger whatsoever. Children and adults have been followed for years, and every extra daily serving of sugary drink came with a little extra weight. Drink water, black coffee or herbal tea instead. Liquid calories are the easiest ones to remove and the ones you miss least.

5. Put protein in every meal

Protein is what fills you up most: eggs in the morning, chicken or legumes at midday, fish at night. Put protein in every meal and you'll feel less like snacking between meals than you would with any bar or "healthy" snack. If you are also aiming to lose fat, a full day is already laid out here: What to eat to lose fat without hunger.

6. Plan only the next meal

Sunday meal prep for the entire week sounds great, but keeping it up week after week is simply too much effort. Plan only the next meal instead. What are you having for dinner? Decide before 4 in the afternoon and the ingredients will be waiting for you when you get home. Easy.

7. Stop eating when you are at 80%

This comes from Okinawa, in Japan, where it's an everyday rule at the table. The idea is simple: don't eat until you're full, eat until the hunger goes away. The difference sounds small and it's enormous. Full is too much, not hungry is just right.

Some foods bring that 80% point around a lot sooner. Here they are: Eat this and stop being hungry all the time.

Shopping well gives you an advantage

Your local market makes eating well easy. The fruit, vegetable and fish stalls carry fresh produce all year round: olive oil, fish, seasonal vegetables. The Mediterranean diet isn't a trend, it's simply a normal way of eating. Make the most of that, and your body will thank you.

If you have made it this far, the topic clearly hits close to home. When that happens, it sometimes pays to stop improvising and talk to a personal trainer on the Costa del Sol. Not forever, just to start off on the right foot.