How to Snack Healthier

Great Snack Ideas for When You’re at Your Desk or on the Go

Sep 9, 2009

Experts recommend spreading daily calories into 5-6 meals and snacks per day. But what constitutes a healthy snack, and how much should you really be snacking?

No matter how active you are, it’s always a good idea to keep food handy in order to refuel every 3 hours or so. Food is about more than just your weight and health; it’s also about maintaining your energy level throughout the day so that you can meet the demands of daily life and function better at all that you do, whether it’s focusing on complex mental tasks or getting through a grueling workout.

That being said, it’s often difficult to know what kinds of snack foods are ideal for increasing energy levels and optimizing metabolic function. Also, when’s the best time to snack, and how many calories should a snack contain?

The Health Benefits of Eating Every 3 Hours

A common reason many weight-loss experts recommend eating every 3 hours is that it’s a strategy for outsmarting starvation mode, an evolutionary adaptation through which your body preserves its fat stores if it interprets that calories aren’t forthcoming anytime soon. However, an equal number of experts dismiss starvation-mode theory as incorrectly applied to the average person’s eating habits. Though the jury is out, it’s no coincidence that many people who are overweight report eating only 1-2 meals per day.

A related benefit of eating every 3 hours is you’ll encourage metabolic output---that is, optimum calorie burn. Think of your metabolism like a campfire. If you don’t regularly add fuel to the fire, it’ll go out. But if you add small amounts of wood at regular intervals, you’ll keep it burning at its biggest and brightest. Simply put: your body does its best calorie-burning work (at rest) when it’s busy digesting food, so eating more frequently keeps your metabolism active.

Similarly, you’ll keep your energy level up while eating this way. When you eat a meal, particularly one high in simple carbohydrates (sugar), you’ll feel a rush of energy right afterward known as a blood sugar spike. This happens when the digested sugars are absorbed into the bloodstream as glucose, where they can be used for immediate energy (say, if you work out).

If you don’t use these sugars for energy---for instance, if you return to sitting at your desk after lunch---insulin will remove them from the bloodstream and store them for later use (as body fat), resulting in a dip in energy known as a blood sugar crash. You can avoid this crash by 1) putting your body back to work digesting food within a few hours and 2) eating the right combination of nutrients.

Some Foods are Better than Others

Clearly, you can’t eat cheeseburgers at every meal and expect to lose weight. You have to balance not only a mix of healthy nutrients but a mix of meals and snacks. As far as regulating blood sugar, consuming lean protein, unsaturated fats, and complex carbohydrates at each meal is the best strategy. You’ll be eating fewer refined carbohydrates, which lead to the blood sugar spike, and eating more satisfying and satiating fats and protein, which will decrease your cravings for more simple carbs.

Furthermore, you’ll have to decide the best way to distribute your daily calories, which may be affected by your schedule as well as your personal preferences. Some people choose to eat equal-sized small meals five times a day---good if you work an irregular schedule or are often on the move---but because many will sit down for lunch and dinner, if not breakfast, it’s necessary to plan for healthful snacks to fill the time between meals.

Easy Snack Foods to Take To-Go

Again, eating carbs alone won’t cut it, so if you consider a bag of pretzels or a piece of fruit to be a snack, you’ll want to keep in mind that they’ll only cause you to crave more carbs within a few hours. Snacking smart means giving your body just enough of what it needs to get through to the next meal (typically 200 or fewer calories, maybe more if you’ll be working out) while getting calories from carbohydrate, fat, and protein. Here a just a few examples of easy and nutritious snack foods:

The copyright of the article How to Snack Healthier in Balancing Meals is owned by Shelby Miller. Permission to republish How to Snack Healthier in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.