A digital kitchen scale is the most accurate way to track what you eat. It is also the single most common reason people stop tracking. Weighing every component of every meal is fine at home on a quiet Tuesday and impossible at a friend's table, in a work canteen, or on holiday.
The good news: you do not need gram accuracy to make progress. You need consistency, and to land within roughly 10% of the truth.
Why 10% Is Good Enough
If you are eating around 2,000 calories a day, a 10% error is 200 calories. That sounds like a lot until you compare it against the alternative — most people who abandon tracking record nothing at all, which is a 100% error.
A moderate deficit is around 300–500 calories a day. Estimating consistently within 10% still leaves a clear, workable signal, and you can adjust from the results: if the trend is not moving after three weeks, lower the target slightly. The estimate does not need to be perfect to be useful, because you are calibrating against real-world results anyway.
Hand Portions
Your hands scale with your body, travel everywhere, and need no batteries. This is the most widely used no-scale system:
A typical meal is one to two palms of protein, one to two cupped hands of carbs, one to two fists of vegetables, and one to two thumbs of fat. Adjust upward if you are larger or very active.
Plate Fractions
For mixed meals where individual items are hard to separate, estimate by area instead:
The additions are what people miss. A salad is genuinely low-calorie until two tablespoons of dressing arrive, at which point it is not.
Common Reference Objects
Useful when nothing else is to hand:
Learn Your Regulars
Most people eat a fairly small rotation of meals. You do not need to estimate them forever — you only need to measure them once.
Spend one week weighing the ten or so meals you eat most often. After that you have a calibrated mental reference: you know what 150g of chicken looks like on your plate, and what your usual bowl of oats weighs. From then on the estimate is educated rather than invented.
This is the highest-return week of tracking most people ever do, and it is temporary.
Where Photo Logging Helps
The situations that break hand portions are the ones where you did not cook: a restaurant plate, someone else's dinner party, a canteen tray, a dish with six ingredients you cannot identify.
Photographing the plate handles these well. Pacali identifies the foods and estimates the portions from the image, and you can adjust anything that looks wrong before logging. It removes the two hardest parts of estimating without a scale — recognising what is on the plate and judging how much of it there is — in a few seconds.
What Still Deserves Precision
A handful of things are worth measuring even when you are otherwise estimating, because they are calorie-dense enough that a small visual error is a large calorie error:
Everything else can be estimated. Vegetables in particular are barely worth measuring at all.
The Point
The best tracking method is the one you keep doing. A perfectly weighed week followed by three months of nothing loses to a roughly-estimated year, every time.
Start with hand portions, calibrate once with a scale, photograph the meals you did not cook, and stay tight on fats and liquid calories. That is accurate enough — and, more importantly, sustainable enough to actually work.
