How to count if you don't eat all of the food on your plate ... ?

Hey everyone,

I was just wondering what others might do in this scenario - I portion out all of my food, say 500 calories for a meal, but then I end up with a bit of food leftover, sometimes more.... so how would I count my calories in that situation? I would just count it as 500 but sometimes there seems to be a lot leftover, so how do you count this? Thanks :)

If you weigh your food beforehand you should be able to put what is left back on the scale and just subtract it from your original number to figure out how many calories you ate.

Serve up a little less and then eat all of it?  

If it's something you'll eat tomorrow you can just leave the calorie total as it is and then regard it as a 'freebie' the next day because you've already accounted for it (your weekly average is still the same obviously). 

Or, if you're not going to eat it I just guesstimate and subtract.  If you've been counting for a while you should be good at estimating!

Thanks everyone, I thought about the scale method but find it to be a bit of a hassle to have to weigh my food twice, so I guess I'll just stick with singing_girl's method and estimate :)

I was kind of worried of using gijane's approach because I don't want to force myself to eat everything on my plate if I'm not hungry, and even serving less of course my hunger will vary from day to day :) Thanks everyone !