Household serving
A household serving is a portion expressed in the units people really use — a roti, a katori, a cup, a tablespoon — rather than in grams, so a meal can be logged without weighing anything.
Nobody weighs dal at the table. Household servings exist because the alternative — converting every item into grams at every meal — is the reason most people stop logging within a fortnight.
What they cost in accuracy
Less than you would think, and less than the error already present in the database. A katori varies; so does a restaurant portion, so does the oil in a curry, and so does the label on a packet. Adding one more approximate step to a chain of approximations changes the total error very little.
What they buy in adherence
A meal logged in three seconds gets logged. A meal that requires a scale, a conversion and a search gets logged on Monday and skipped by Thursday. A slightly noisier number you actually record beats a precise one you do not.
How to make yours consistent
Once, weigh the things you eat most often in the vessels you use: your katori of dal, your roti, your usual spoon of oil, your cup of rice. Write the grams down. From then on you can log in bowls and spoons while the numbers behind them stay honest. Calibration takes twenty minutes and lasts for years.
Sources
- 1.Indian Food Composition Tables 2017 — ICMR–National Institute of Nutrition
- 2.FoodData Central — USDA Agricultural Research Service
Related reading
- How to track calories without a food scale
A calibration method that turns your own bowls, spoons and rotis into reliable units, so you can log a meal in seconds without weighing anything at the table.
- Hand portion sizes: the method that needs no tools
Palm, fist, cupped hand and thumb, with the approximate grams and calories behind each, and an honest account of where hand portions work and where they fail.
- How to count calories in home-cooked food
Home cooking has no barcode and no single right answer. The pot method, the oil problem, household servings, and reusable numbers for the food you eat.
- Why two apps give the same roti different calories
Different databases, source types, raw versus cooked states and user-submitted entries. Why calorie apps disagree, and which number you should actually use.