Snack Your Way to Health

It has long been acknowledged that snacking can be essential to maintaining or improving your metabolism. Successful snacking is very much determined by the choice of snack you make and when you choose to snack. While it may sometimes seem that your choices are limited to vending machines at work, with the right planning, you can successfully snack your way to health.
Using a hunger scale can guide you in making your snack choices. You can develop your own snacking schedule that works to keep your hunger scale at a health promoting level. As you go through your day, you should check in, listen to your body and note where you are on the hunger scale. You want to maintain a level of 5/4 throughout the day.

Hunger Scale

Satiety
10 – Stuffed to the point of feeling sick
9 – Very uncomfortably full, need to loosen your belt (9 or 10 two or more times per week = weight gain)
8 – Full (2 or more times per week = maintain)
7 – Comfortable, no longer hungry
6 – Satisfied. If you stop here, your brain will register a 7 in 20 minutes
Neutral
5/4 – Comfortable, neither hungry nor full
3 – Beginning signals of hunger
2 – Hungry, ready to eat
1 – Very hungry, unable to concentrate
Hunger
0 – Ravenous & empty

Reasons you may go over a 6 or 7

• Diet deprivation backlash
• Emotional eating – what do you not want to feel? Or what do you need?
• Lack of education – eating food that burned off too quickly; e.g. all carbohydrate
• Getting to a 0 – getting too hungry

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If you are hungry every hour, you are not eating enough or not eating the right foods for satiety.

Source: Life Enrichment Center, LLC; Lawrence, KS

How to plan for success

Keep snack size portions of healthy foods at your desk. Refrigerated items can be brought in on an individual basis. Try to keep your snacks to about 100 calories and/or keep the portion sizes small. The list below is a good start:

• Natural style peanut butter with celery or whole wheat crackers

• Nuts (almonds, walnuts)

• Fruit (apples, oranges, bananas)

• Protein bars

• Cottage cheese

• Trail mix

• Yogurt

• Slices of cheese

• Hummus with pita style chips

• Water

• 100% fruit juice

• V8 juice

• Herb or regular tea

• Popcorn (low salt)