Snacks

Snacks are snacks. Snacks are not meals. Think of snacks for what they are: a way to keep your blood sugar level nice and even, to prevent it from getting too low, so that you don't gorge yourself when you finally do get to sit down to eat a meal (preferably not sitting in a car).

Things happen when your blood sugar gets too low: your body starts pumping out glycogen (instead of insulin) which uses your storage spaces (fat) for the production of energy in your cells. At this point you’re probably thinking “cool!” But there’s more to it than that. Have you ever noticed that when you’re hungry, or even when you’re not really hungry, but you’re tired and you need a little boost, you are also kinda cranky and aggressive, and you can’t seem to focus your eyes, or you have the attention span of a gnat? It’s at this point that your pituitary and hypothalamus kick other glands into action, and they all work together to give us a kind of “fight of flight” mental attitude. This could have acted as a good response a thousand years ago, when a hungry man was exhausted, but he was ornery enough to hunt and kill just about anything that had the bad luck of crossing his path.

That being said I’d like to get back to the “snack is a snack” thing. If you eat the average maintenance diet of 2400 calories a day, then each of your meals should be around 800 calories. That’s not a lot of food, but keep in mind one crispy chicken club sandwich at McDonald’s is 680 calories. (I looked up a Whopper, but Burger King no longer makes it easy to look up nutritional info. If I remember right they were over 800 calories). A Snicker's bar is 280 calories. Anywho, what I’m getting at is DON’T make your snack a meal. Make it just enough to “tide you over”.

ALSO: healthy snacks take forethought. I know it’s easier to go to the snack machine and grab a bag of chips, but that’s 85¢, and the apple in your desk drawer cost you a quarter. I’ve tried to keep the fact that the items below need to be taken to work with you, so I’ve included as many as I could that don’t need refrigeration. You may also want to invest in some reusable little cups with snap on lids, you know, like Tupperware or something. This will prevent you from eating a whole bag of something by limiting your snacks to what can fit in the little cup.

Here goes:

If you’re craving salt:
Olives
Pickled asparagus out of the jar
Artichoke hearts on rye crackers
½ cup Guacamole or salsa
Any nut butter, including almond butter, cashew butter, hazelnut butter, and macadamia nut butter. Go ahead, eat it off the spoon.
Crabmeat salad (please make sure it doesn’t have sugar or MSG)
Salami, summer sausage, or similar Italian meats


If you’re craving sweets:
Grapes and Stonybrook vanilla yogurt (any fruit except bananas can be used)
5 Panda brand black licorice chews
3 “coins”/pieces of Droste’s brand dark chocolate Pastilles®
A cup of applesauce or fruit (not fruit "in syrup")

Other good stuff stuff:
Cole slaw, preferably fresh.
A big chunk of hard yellow cheese.
A hard boiled egg.
A Wasa cracker with either nut butter or hummus spread thickly on it.

The best tip of all: NUT’S a.k.a. You are what you eat. Always keep a bag of nuts in your desk drawer or locker, or even your car. It doesn’t matter what kind of nuts, don’t get caught up with how many fat grams are in those cashews. You’re only going to eat a handful anyway. Get them in the shell (so they are fresher and you eat them slower) or shelled, raw or roasted, salted or unsalted. Just PLEASE don’t get the flavored or honey roasted kind since these usually have a lot of hidden sugars, artificial garbage, and MSG on them.

Try to mix it up: have yogurt this week, almonds next week, hummus the following week, licorice the week after that… etc. I’ll try to post other snack ideas once in a while as I get inspired.