Fruit and Veg Portion Calculator

The version I actually use

Fist for carbs. A closed fist of cooked rice, noodles or a bun is roughly what 50g of dry grain turns into, and that's a reasonable single-meal portion for most adults. Fruit uses the same fist measure — one fist-sized piece, once a day, covers what most people need without turning into a bowl of fruit salad.

Palm for protein. Not the whole hand, just the palm, fingers excluded. A piece of meat or fish the size and thickness of your palm is close to 50g raw, which lines up with what a doctor at Guangdong Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine described in a public health talk on portion control — she put it as roughly a pinky-finger's thickness of protein per meal, about 50 to 100g a day depending on how much you need.

Double handful for leafy vegetables. Cup both hands together and whatever leafy greens fill that space is roughly 250g. A single-hand "grab" of the same greens comes in lighter, closer to 100 to 150g, which is why most of the health-bureau versions of this method specify two hands, not one, when they're talking about hitting the daily vegetable target.

Where I got it wrong at first

I assumed all protein-dense foods scaled the same way by hand size, and they don't. A palm-sized cut of pork is close to 50g, but a palm of a denser fish like mackerel comes in a bit heavier, closer to 70 to 80g, because the flesh is denser than a cut of meat with more visible fat and connective tissue running through it. Whole small fish that fill an entire hand, rather than sitting in the palm, land closer to 100g once you account for bone and skin you won't eat. None of these are numbers I'd bet the farm on to the gram — hand-portion charts vary a bit between the version a diabetes clinic hands out and the one a gym coach posts — but they're close enough to stop me either underfeeding a meal or piling on more protein than I actually need.

Nuts are where I was properly off. My idea of "a handful" was whatever I could physically grab out of the jar, which is closer to a small fistful than an actual handful, and one of those benders can run 300 kcal or more without me noticing because nuts don't fill you up the way volume usually suggests they should. The figure that actually shows up in nutrition reference tables is 15g for a 90 kcal serving, which in real terms is more like a dozen almonds or half a small handful cupped in your palm, not the fist-sized scoop I was doing. I now portion a week's worth into little containers on a Sunday because otherwise I clearly can't be trusted around a bag of cashews.

Oil I genuinely had no sense of at all. I cook a lot of stir-fries, and I was just tipping the bottle until the pan looked right, which is a terrible way to gauge anything. The rule of thumb — the actual thumb, from the tip to the first knuckle — comes out to about 10ml, roughly two teaspoons, for a day's cooking oil. I poured that amount into a spoon once just to see it, and it was noticeably less than what I'd been using for one meal, let alone a whole day. I haven't gone back to eyeballing it since.

What "one serving" actually means

This is the part that had me confused for a while, because I'd seen it written two completely different ways and assumed one of them was just wrong. Some posts say one serving of grain is 50g, one serving of vegetables is 100g, one serving of fruit is 100g. Other places quote a serving of vegetables at 500g and fruit at 200g. Both numbers are floating around under the same label, and it turns out that's because they're answering different questions.

The 50g / 100g / 100g version is closer to "what a normal meal-sized portion looks like," the kind of figure a fitness account posts for someone building a plate. The 25g grain / 500g vegetable / 200g fruit version comes from the actual food exchange system Chinese hospitals and dietitians use, where every category is scaled to hit the same 90 kcal, and vegetables need to be a much bigger pile than grain to get there because they're far less calorie-dense. Once I understood that the two systems are solving different problems, the numbers stopped looking like a contradiction.

For day-to-day eating rather than clinical meal planning, the number I actually keep in my head now comes from the Chinese Dietary Guidelines (2022): at least 300g of fresh vegetables a day, half of that dark-coloured, and 200 to 350g of fruit. That's the one I check myself against, not either serving-size chart.

How I actually hit that in a day

500g of vegetables used to sound like an entire farmers' market in one sitting, and that was the main reason I never got close to it. Splitting it across the day made it stop feeling absurd — something like 100g at breakfast if I have eggs with spinach, 200g at lunch, 200g at dinner. On a Wednesday a few weeks back I wrote down exactly what I ate to check the number: 150g broccoli, 120g tomato in a salad, 80g spinach thrown into a stir-fry, 80g red pepper, 70g fresh shiitake with dinner. Added up, that's close enough to 500g without a single meal feeling like a chore, and the mix of colours meant I actually wanted to finish the plate instead of pushing the same pile of one vegetable around.

I don't hit an exact number every day, and I've stopped trying to. Some days land closer to 350g, others closer to 500g, and the guideline itself only sets a floor at 300g rather than a fixed daily quota. What actually changed for me wasn't precision down to the gram — it was noticing the meals that had almost no vegetables in them at all, which happened more often than I'd have admitted before I started paying attention.

If a vegetable box or a market trip lands you with something you don't recognise, our vegetable identifier is a faster fix than guessing whether it's ripe or how it's meant to be cooked.

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