Weighing In - On Snacks
Posted by Alicia Leeds on Tue, Jul 13, 2010 @ 05:14 PM
Snacking has to be one of the biggest challenges I face with my clients as we make long term changes for weight loss and better health management.
Snacking is good. Snack foods, on the other hand, are not so good. In fact, although I usually resist the urge to call foods good or bad, snack foods as we know them in America 2010 are really pretty BAD.
Most snack foods bear little relation to what our ancestors gathered, planted and hunted to sustain themselves with. In fact, the new biodegradable packaging has about the same nutritional profile as the snacks they contain - with a lot less salt and fat.
Which also gives new meaning to the phrase "eat the whole bag!"
Snacking is good in so far as staying full throughout the day helps us avoid the many pitfalls of living in our obesogenic environment. And healthy choices abound! Potato wedges, sweet potato rings, clementines, grapes, cherry tomatoes, blueberries, carrot sticks, strawberries, cherries, chopped cucumbers, peppers, peaches, plums, pears and bananas...the list of available healthy snacks is delightful! Reinvent your snacking and you will be well on you way to better weight and health management.
And if you think the kids need snack foods let me ask you this - if it's a battle for you to re-learn snacking - why would you set your kids up to have to face the same battle?
Trash the snacks. Avoid the vending machine and the soda aisle. A typical bag of chips is 2.5 servings at 150 calories per serving. That's 375 calories. Just ten of those equal more than a pound. A bag of chips each workday for a year is almost thirty pounds!
There's a lot of talk out there about who is to blame for the obesity epidemic. I say - let's stop pointing fingers and start working on solutions instead. Cut, chop, cook and fill the fruit bowl. Learn to love ziplocks. Grab a snack and join me!