Nutrition & Recipes
5 Healthy Snacking Habits to Maintain a Healthy Weight
Jul
Is snacking good your weight management? Like all good fitness and nutrition answers, it depends. There’s no doubt that some snacks have an adverse affect on your ability to maintain a healthy weight. But with the following healthy snacking habits in mind, you can avoid those snacks and maintain a healthy weight and lifestyle while snacking away!
Why are Healthy Snacks Important?
Snacks play a bigger role in your diet than most people realize. The fact is, we all snack. Whether we intentionally sit down with a snack we packed from home or picked up at the gas station, or we finish off the bites leftover our a child’s plate, or we sneak a couple of Peanut M&Ms when passing by. If it’s less than a meal but still food, it’s a snack.
There are two main reasons healthy snacking habits are important.
Reason #1: snacking gives you the opportunity to increase nutrient intake that might otherwise be missed, and increase satisfaction. Both factors are incredibly important in maintaining a healthy weight and lifestyle.
My clients who track macros quickly realize that hitting certain macro goals – specifically protein goals – can be really difficult if they don’t start to include high protein snacks. Other clients who don’t necessarily track macros use snacks as a way to keep them full between meals and decrease overeating throughout the day.
Reason #2: most people severely underestimate the number of calories – specifically junk calories – that they’re consuming from snacks. Snacks feel less significant both in terms of actual food weight/amount and in terms of the impact on health and fitness. It’s easy to forget that a handful of M&Ms (one that you probably forgot about immediately after finishing them), gives you little to no nutritional value, but does impact overall caloric intake.
The moral of the story is that snacking in general can be beneficial, but only when you make a conscious effort to keep it healthy. These healthy snacking habits will help you do that without limiting your options to rice crackers and beef jerky.
5 Healthy Snacking Habits to Maintain a Healthy Weight
These 5 tips will help you navigate the wide world of snacking.
Avoid Processed Foods and Choose Whole Foods When Possible
The snack foods that are most easily accessible contain processed and/or refined. Food manufacturers do this to increase shelf life, reduce the need for refrigeration and palatability. Refinement removes the nutritional benefits of most foods. Processing adds back manufactured ingredients like trans fats, sodium, preservatives, coloring and other additives. Unfortunately, this means that most snack foods are, well, crap.
To keep it healthy, avoid processed and packaged foods as often as possible. Instead, reach for whole foods, or foods that are as close to the “real thing” as possible. For example, opt for an apple with real peanut butter instead of applesauce and peanut butter cracker sandwiches.
Focus on Fiber and Protein
There are two major nutrition players when it comes to maintaining a healthy weight: fiber and protein. Fiber is filling and improves satisfaction after and between meals. It aids digestion, improves cholesterol and helps to improve your body’s insulin response – so no energy spike and subsequent crash in the near future. Protein is made up of amino acids which are the building blocks of muscle – the most metabolically active tissue in your body. That’s really important especially if you’re on a weight loss diet because it combats your body’s natural inclination to slow your metabolism when you’re in a caloric deficit.
Of course, most snack foods don’t contain a lot of protein or fiber. Instead, most snack foods – think bags of chips, crackers, pretzels, cookies – are packed with simple sugars, fats and sodium instead. Why? Because those ingredients make your brain want more. Food manufacturer’s also want you to want more, because it brings you back for another purchase.
When grabbing a snack, try to choose foods that are high in fiber and/or protein. Examples include:
- Greek yogurt, berries and nuts
- Hummus and veggie sticks
- Beef jerky and a piece of fruit
- Tuna salad and veggie sticks
Avoid Carb-Only Snacks
At the very least, try to minimize the number of carb-only snacks. I don’t mean to demonize carbohydrates here. I believe that unless there’s an underlying health issue, avoiding carbs isn’t a great idea for long-term weight loss. BUT, when it comes to snacks, carb-only options tend to be really easy to overeat. They don’t give you the same satisfaction that a more balanced snack offers. And they also tend to give you a surge of quick energy only to leave you craving another boost soon after.
The healthiest snacks contain foods from multiple food groups. Why? Because a wide range of foods gives you a wide range of nutrients and, quite frankly, textures, flavors and smells – all of which contribute to increasing fullness and contentment.
Plan Ahead
If you tend to wait until you’re having a craving, or you’re super bored at work and need something to do, then it’s possibly that the snack choice you make is going to be based more on emotion or physiological panic than it is actual hunger. And in most situations like these, healthy options are few and far between.
Planning ahead will help you avoid the inevitable crappy-snack-abyss that are vending machines, quick marts and gas stations. You can pack snacks that are salty or sweet, crunchy or smooth, and far more appealing than Nutter Butters. Alternatively if you don’t have time to pack a healthy snack but you know you’re going to be on the go, scout your route. Figure out where you are going to be and what your options are in those places.
There are healthy options to pick from on the go:
- At the gas station: hummus and crackers, hard boiled eggs, beef jerky, packets of nuts, fruit
- At Starbucks: any of the Protein Boxes, Sous Vide Egg Whites, RX Bars
- At fast food restaurants: side salad, apple slices, grilled chicken bites
Eat Mindfully
Just because it’s a snack and not a full meal doesn’t mean you should forget about healthy eating 101.
>> Powerful Healthy Eating Strategies
Any time you grab a snack, practice this quick mindfulness strategy:
- Check in with your hunger. Ask yourself if you are really hungry, or are you bored/thirsty/anxious/stressed/lonely? If you are hungry, honor you’re hungry. But do an honest check-in first.
- Eat without distractions. Step away from your desk. Put down the work. If you’re driving, pull over. Eat distraction free. Focus on the flavors and the satisfaction the snack gives you.
- Slow down. Snacks are notorious for being a fresh bag one minute, and crumbs at the bottom the next. Slow down. Enjoy your meal.
- Recognize the difference between a snack and a meal. A snack is, by definition, small. It should be enough to take the hunger edge off, but not so big that it leaves you feeling stuffed to the gills.
For More Smart Snacking Resources…
Looking for snack ideas and recipes that will help you snack mindfully?
>> Energy Boosting, Mid-Day Snacks
