Weighing food works. It also has a dropout rate somewhere north of "most people, by week three." If you've tried logging and quit, the useful question isn't how to be more disciplined — it's how close you can get without it. The answer is: close enough that the difference doesn't matter.
How much you actually need
For someone lifting regularly, the research clusters around 1.6 g of protein per kg of bodyweight per day (about 0.7 g per lb), with diminishing returns past roughly 2.2 g/kg. Two adjustments worth making:
- Dieting? Go toward the top of that range. Protein is most protective of muscle when calories are scarce.
- Carrying a lot of fat mass? Base the number on a target bodyweight rather than current, or you'll end up with a figure you can't eat.
For an 80 kg lifter that's about 130 g a day. Split across four eating occasions, roughly 30–40 g each — which is convenient, because that's about the dose that maximally stimulates muscle protein synthesis in a single sitting for most people.
The hand system
Your palm scales with your body, which makes it a surprisingly decent measuring device. One palm-sized portion — the length, width, and thickness of your palm, fingers excluded — of a lean protein source is about 25–30 g of protein.
| Food | Everyday portion | ≈ Protein |
|---|---|---|
| Chicken breast | 1 palm | 30 g |
| Salmon or beef | 1 palm | 25 g |
| Greek yoghurt | 1 cupped hand (~170 g) | 17 g |
| Cottage cheese | 1 cupped hand | 19 g |
| Eggs | 3 large | 19 g |
| Lentils, cooked | 1 cupped hand | 9 g |
| Tofu, firm | 1 palm | 17 g |
| Whey powder | 1 scoop | 24 g |
So the 80 kg lifter needing ~130 g gets there with: yoghurt at breakfast (17), a palm of chicken at lunch (30), a shake in the afternoon (24), two palms of beef at dinner (50), and whatever incidental protein comes with bread, rice, and vegetables — which is genuinely 15–25 g a day and routinely forgotten. That's four decisions, none of which require a scale.
Borrow a scale for two days — not to log forever, but to see what 150 g of chicken and one cupped hand of yoghurt actually look like on your plate. After that your eye is trained and the scale goes back in the drawer.
Timing matters less than you were told
The "anabolic window" turned out to be a barn door. Total daily intake dominates; distribution across three to five meals is a modest second-order effect. If protein right after training makes it easier to hit your number, great — that's a logistics win, not a metabolic one.
The one distribution rule worth keeping: don't back-load everything into dinner. Most people eat 10 g at breakfast, 20 at lunch, and 80 at night, and the fix is simply to move some of dinner's protein to breakfast.
Plant-based adjustments
Two things change. Plant proteins are generally lower in leucine and less digestible, so aim for the upper end — around 1.8–2.0 g/kg — and lean on the denser sources: tofu, tempeh, seitan, lentils, and soy or pea isolate. Variety across the day covers the amino acid gaps without any meal-by-meal "combining" ritual.
The failure mode
Nobody misses their target because they got the yoghurt portion wrong by 4 g. They miss because lunch was a sandwich, dinner was pasta, and neither had a protein source at the centre of it. Build each meal around the palm first and the rest of the plate second. That single habit is worth more than any amount of precision downstream.
General information only — not nutrition advice for any particular person, and worth a conversation with your doctor if you have kidney disease or another condition that affects protein intake.