Whether your goal is losing weight, building muscle or just maintaining you current weight, there are different ways to track your food. Today, we are going to talk about using your hands to help you track. This is a perfect ‘entry level’ method if you’ve never tracked beforehand and is a nice transition into becoming more aware of what you’re eating.
Do you need to track?
There’s a bit of a stigma behind tracking, but it doesn’t need to be a negative thing. Learning how to appropriately monitor what you’re eating can even improve your relationship with food!
It’s not about ‘good’ or ‘bad’ foods- sometimes you have macro goals to stick to or maybe you’re just lowering your calories. Often, tracking your food, just for a short period of time, can help you become more aware of your eating habits and just outline that maybe you’re not eating enough before a training session.
Using this method, you can avoid apps that can potentially not be the right method for everyone.
The hand portion method.
Its pretty self explanatory, but this method uses your hands to track intakes of food by measuring portions sizes in relation to your palm, thumb and fist.
Benefits of this method include:
- Hands are portable. They come with you to work lunches, restaurants, social gatherings, etc.
- Hands are a consistent size, providing a consistent reference.
- Hands scale with the individual. Bigger people need more food and tend to have bigger hands, therefore getting larger portions. Smaller people need less food and tend to have smaller hands, therefore getting smaller portions.
- Hand-size portions can help you track food choices, nutrients, and energy simply and easily. This saves time-consuming and often unnecessary weighing and measuring, which most people don’t need.
Cons of using this method:
- This is tailored to people who eat more whole foods- this is due to certain foods containing more than one macronutrient. For example, breaded chicken. This would generally be considered the protein source of a meal however, because of the bread it would contain ‘hidden’ carbs that could misrepresent the true caloric and macronutrient properties of the food.
- Although it’s a great initial tracking method, it’s not the most accurate.
Hand tracking in practise-
For most moderately active men, this translates to a daily intake of about:
- 6-8 palms of protein-dense foods
- 6-8 fists of non-starchy vegetables
- 6-8 cupped handfuls of carb-dense foods
- 6-8 thumbs of fat-dense foods
This provides about 2300-3100 kcal, 180-245g protein, 205-270g carbs, and 85-115g fats.
And for most moderately active women, this translates to a daily intake of about:
- 4-6 palms of protein-dense foods
- 4-6 fists of non-starchy vegetables
- 4-6 cupped handfuls of carb-dense foods
- 4-6 thumbs of fat-dense foods
This provides about 1400-2100 kcal, 115-170g protein, 125-185g carbs, and 50-80g fats.
As you can see this is obviously a vast range of calories provided and that’s why you’ve still got to be a little bit aware!
So, is it worth while?
Yes! It’s definitely a good introduction to tracking your food and eating habits. Its perfect for those who are looking to create more awareness surrounding their appetite and food intake.
As previously mentioned, this will not be the perfect method for everybody due to inaccuracies in caloric and macronutrient intake that can arise from food choices.
But!.. If you’ve never tracked before this is the perfect way to start.