TempoLife › Features › Video explainers › portion-size-without-scales

Estimating a portion without scales

The viewer gets a hand-based estimate they can use in a restaurant, and an honest sense of how wrong it can be.

There are no videos here yet, and this page does not pretend otherwise. TempoLife has published no explainer videos, so nothing on this surface is watchable and there is no player anywhere on it. What is published is the script library: the full storyboard for each explainer, ready to shoot.

The hook

“You will not weigh your food in a restaurant. Here is the next best thing.”

First four seconds. It states the surprise outright rather than promising one, because a promise is a reason to scroll and a surprise is a reason to stay.

Why this topic is worth 70 seconds

A palm of protein, a fist of vegetables, a cupped hand of carbohydrate, a thumb of fat. Those four references are the whole video.

Hands are personal. A large person needs a larger portion, and their hand is larger too. That coincidence is exactly what makes the method work.

This is also the video that gives kitchen-scale-averse viewers a way in. Not everyone will weigh food, and this method still gives a defensible answer at a restaurant table.

Weighing is accurate and nobody does it away from home. Hand-based estimates are a widely used convention, they scale with body size, and they are always available — which makes them the practical answer even though they are less accurate.

The script is careful to say how much error is involved, because a portion guide that oversells its precision is how people end up trusting a wrong number.

The storyboard

Read it as a script

The voiceover column, in order, is the whole piece:

You will not weigh your food in a restaurant. Here is the next best thing.

Your hand is roughly proportional to your body, which makes it a portion guide that adjusts itself. A palm for protein, a cupped hand for carbohydrate, a thumb for fat, a fist for vegetables.

Convert those to grams and then to calories, and you can estimate a plate in about five seconds. It will not be exact.

Honestly, it can be out by a fifth or more, especially for anything with oil or sauce in it. That is still far better than not estimating, and far worse than a scale.

Weigh at home to calibrate your eye. Estimate everywhere else.

Then check the food itself on TempoLife.

Every number this script shows

The gram figures behind each hand gesture. Hand-portion sizes are a widely used convention, not a measurement.

Nothing in the storyboard above quotes a figure directly. The beats refer to numbers and this table supplies them, so a script written months ago cannot go stale against its own data.

Production notes

• Demonstrate on real plated food, not on props. The whole method is visual comparison.
• The error beat is not optional. Say the number out loud.
• Show a hand of an ordinary size, and say that the method scales with the person.

Closing card

Check what a portion costs at tempolife.app/calories

General information, not medical advice. These scripts describe averages across populations; nothing in them is a diagnosis or a treatment recommendation.

Source: Figures computed from the TempoLife food database (USDA FoodData Central SR Legacy) and the 2011 Compendium of Physical Activities · checked 2026-09-02

What the script points at

• Portion sizes
• White rice
• Chicken breast

Other scripts

All scripts · Listen to the guides