The easiest way to judge a plate is a quick split: about half vegetables or fruit, a quarter protein, a quarter grains or starch. It's rough, not a scale, but it catches the two most common misses — too much starch, not enough vegetables.
Protein doesn't have to be meat every time
Eggs, fish, legumes and nuts all count, and rotating between them keeps the shopping list cheaper than meat every night. A handful of nuts or a few dates alongside a legume-based meal fills the same "something to chew on" slot a side of meat does, at a fraction of the cost.
Fill the vegetable half first
Plate the vegetables before anything else goes on, so the half-plate target actually gets hit instead of being an afterthought squeezed into whatever space is left. Frozen vegetables work exactly as well as fresh for this and don't go off in the fridge before you get to them.
Grains: pick one, not a pile
Rice, bread and pasta on the same plate is how the starch quarter turns into half the plate without anyone noticing. Pick one starch per meal and let the vegetables and protein fill the rest.
The sweet finish, sized right
If a meal wants something sweet at the end, two or three dates cover it without needing a dessert course. They're dense enough that a small handful is genuinely enough, which is the whole point of "sized right" rather than "cut out."
Stocking a kitchen that runs on this
None of this holds up if the pantry doesn't support it. Buying dates, nuts and legumes wholesale rather than in small packs keeps the cost down enough that the balanced version of a meal isn't the expensive one — which is usually the real reason it doesn't stick.