I’ve been eating morning and afternoon snacks for years. Snacks help prevent blood sugar drops in between meals preventing a drop in energy. They also help get a little more nutrition into your diet, provided the snacks are healthy. They also help prevent overeating at meal times.
The key to snacking is to eat them a few hours after meals and to make sure they include healthy fats, protein and fiber. Also, make sure portion size is small. A sugar filled candy bar and bag of chips will only make you feel worse and will not provide any nutritional benefit.
One thing to note, is many health experts are now disagreeing with snacking. They say that it’s better to let your gut rest in between meals. If you get hungry, your body will switch to burning fat instead.
Some healthy snack ideas to get started with are:
- handful of nuts
- smoothie with protein powder, spinaach, berries and almond or coconut milk
- an apple with some sort of butter like peanut, almond, sunflower or pumpkin seed
- string cheese and a small piece of fruit
- a homemade granola bar or breakfast cookie provided you can tolerate grains and it uses a low glycemic sweetener like honey, maple syrup or coconut sugar
- nice cream that uses a banana as a base
- avocado toast with a side of cheese
- smashed berries on bread with peanut, almond, sunflower or pumpkin seed butter
- homemade hot chocolate
Don’t snack after dinner. It’s best to stop eating a few hours before bedtime to increase the fasting time between dinner and breakfast. Ideally, stop eating at least 12 hours before you will be eating breakfast. Eating too much too close to bedtime can also disrupt your sleep.
Challenge:
If you don’t currently eat a snack and feel hungry or tired a few hours after eating a meal, take a day or two and try a snack from the list above. If you do eat snacks, re-examine what you eat and make sure it’s not something that is full of sugar and chemicals. Make sure it is a small portion size and includes healthy fats, protein and fiber and is low sugar.
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Snack Recipe Books
References
https://foodandnutrition.org/july-august-2015/science-says-snacking/
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/snacking/