No word evokes more horror, confusion, and downright despair in the context of food than “Calorie”. For starters, a calorie is not the same as a Calorie. Yes, you read that right. In a long list of terrible naming choices that scientists have made in their history, using a smaller case version of the word to denote a 1000th of Calorie (upper case) is likely at the top of the list. Nowadays, Europeans use kcal (kilocalories) while Americans use Calories.

And if semantic confusion wasn’t enough, literally all calorie counts on products are inaccurate by at least 2030%. And to make things worse, calorie counts for Indian food are notoriously hard because of how we prepare our food.

So I’ve collaborated with Raj (from the @thequad.in) to demystify calories and give you a simple, visual heuristic to approximately figure out how much you are eating. Accuracy is not the goal (because accuracy is pretty much impossible) but consistency and ease of use are. Can you look at your meal plate and get a rough sense of how much you are eating so that you can make sensible choices about how to reduce or increase it based on what your goals are.

If we have missed out on any dishes you’d want to be measured, leave a comment and we will update the caption