I suppose many of you have heard that snacking is what makes you fat. Well, quite the contrary, although I suppose it depends what you are snacking on! For me, having frequent, smaller meals is vital to staying ‘on track’ and within my calorie range. The worst thing that can happen is waiting too long between each meal so that you become ravenous by the time either lunch or dinner comes around. What will happen?  Most guaranteed, you will overeat and eat anything in front of you. Plus feel guilty afterwards. None of those things need to happen. By consuming a healthy snack between lunch and dinner (and if I’m good, I can have a small little snack after dinner, maybe even dessert!), I prevent my blood sugar from going too low which can lead to tiredness, loss of energy and irritability just to name a few. Snacking also helps keep my metabolism going as the body doesn’t need to hold on to every single piece of morsel I feed it because it gets afraid it won’t get fed in sufficient time. If you watch the habits of “naturally skinny people” – they are not afraid to eat, and you see them eating often, but smaller meals.

Snacking doesn’t mean you can eat large amounts each time of whatever you want or have at hand – rather it should be a controlled portion of healthy, nutrient dense and balanced foods such as a low fat yogurt with some sliced fruit or berries with a tbsp of nuts, celery sticks with a tablespoon of almond butter, a cup of cottage cheese with blueberries, or my latest favorite – I add 1 tbsp of cocoa powder and lots of either stevia or erythritol to my cup of cottage cheese, and I sometimes also add a tbsp of chopped walnuts. It is heaven in a cup and feels really “naughty” when in fact it is only around 200 calories! I like to pick some fat either in the form of almond butter or peanut butter or some protein (yogurt) because it fills me up quicker and helps me stay satisfied until dinner.

I’ve posted a photo of one of my favorite afternoon snacks; the best yogurt ever, Siggis, from Iceland with sliced pears. I like the vanilla flavored one as it goes really well with pears. Siggis is a wonderful thick yogurt (even thicker than Greek) and doesn’t have any artificial sweeteners such as aspartame and produced without the use of recombinant bovine growth hormone. It is all a natural made from milk from grass fed cows. A 6 oz container is 120 calories (non fat version) and has 16 g o protein. I’ve seen Siggis at health food stores in addition to larger nice supermarkets. Yummy!