Portion Size Guide for Adults and Children

It’s important for us to eat a variety of foods from the four main food groups to ensure we get all the nutrients we need. However, it can be tricky to know how much is enough. That’s why we’ve created this blog, to help outline portion size guidance for adults and children and provide some helpful tips.

What influences our appetite?

It’s very normal for parents and practitioners to worry about how much children eat, as we want to make sure they get the nutrition they need to grow and develop well. However, it’s important to understand that children will eat as much as they need (which is sometimes less than we feel they need!), because they’re very good at regulating their appetite.

Their appetites will likely vary, sometimes considerably, from day- to- day and between meal-to- meal. Because of this, there are no set portion size recommendations for young children, just useful guides, which we provide below.

How to tell when children are full

As we’ve explored, children are very good at regulating their appetite, so it’s important to trust that they’re the best judge of knowing how much they need to eat. Some of the signs below suggest that children are full:

• Turning away from food and closing their mouth
• Telling you they’re full
• Becoming frustrated or upset at meal/ snack times
• Becoming bored and playing with food.

If children show these signs, allow them to stop eating, even if they haven’t eaten everything on their plate, as it’s important not to teach them to over-ride their sense of fullness.

Here are a few key tips that can help at mealtimes:

• Use child sized plates
• Avoid over filling children’s plates as this can be off- putting for them
• It’s best to offer small portions to begin with and allow second helpings if they’d like more
• Make sure that second helpings are still nutritionally balanced- meaning you include foods from each food group and not just the food group/s that children prefer
• Offering second helpings of the vegetables, salad or fruit is a good idea to ensure that children get plenty of vitamins and minerals, and not too much energy
• Gradually start to increase children’s portion sizes as they grow.

Portion Size Guide

Children

Organisations, such as Eat Better Start Better and The First Steps Nutrition Trust, have developed helpful guides providing simple ideas for the balance of different meal components that will meet the energy and nutrient needs of children aged 1-4 years. They provide simple food-based recommendations for each food group, followed by photos showing appropriate portion sizes for 1-4 year.

• Eat Better Start Better (opens in new tab)
• Good Food Choices and Portion Sizes for 1-4 year olds (opens in new tab)

Adults

The adult portion sizes that you see below have been adapted from the British Heart Foundation (opens in new tab)

Let’s take a look at the portion size guide below:

Portion Size Guide for Starchy Foods