Just because you are watching your weight doesn’t mean that you’re going to be eating a snack here and there and, in fact, eating smaller meals or healthy snacks in between meals can actually help boost your metabolism.
Even if you’re not on any type of diet plan but still want to drop a few pounds you can do this easily by changing the types of snacks that you eat. Let’s say you have a snack in between breakfast and lunch, another one in between lunch and dinner and another one later at night – that’s three snacks today. Now let’s say that you choose for the snacks a bag of chips, a candy bar, or cookies. Each one of these snacks is probably 250 to 350 calories. Now, if you replace the snacks with healthier snacks of around 100 calories you’ll be able to lose weight even if you do not change any of the other things that you eat! Switching to healthier snacks is not only better for your waistline, it’s better for your overall health too. Now instead of eating 800 or 900 calories worth of snacks today you’re only eating 300 or 400 calories worth, which is a savings of around 500 calories a day which can really add up. Given that there’s about 3500 calories in a pound if you really did shave off 500 calories a day you could be losing a pound a week!
So the next time you reach for a snack, think about being good to your hips and your health by choosing one of the healthy, low calorie snacks: Apple slices with peanut butter are a great healthy snack as long as you choose all natural peanut butter that doesn’t have additives and especially sugar added. Go easy on the peanut butter, as it is fatty (healthy fat, but using too much can really pack on the calories). I like to cut the Apple open to slices and spread a thin layer of peanut butter in between two slices like a sandwich. Fresh fruit is a great healthy snack and can help curb those sugar cravings. Fruits have sugar too, but the body can metabolize them easier than the processed sugar, high fructose corn syrup in other nasty elements in process snack foods.
Some great healthy choices for fruits include blueberries, pomegranate seeds, strawberries, and cantaloupe. If you’re a chip lover then you might want to think about switching to soy chips which will help curb your cravings for crunchy foods and will also add some protein into your diet which can help you feel full longer. Yogurt can be a great healthy snack if you choose the right kind, and in fact, recent studies show that eating low-fat dairy products can help you to lose even more weight. You need to choose yogurt that has no sugar added and not the kind that has the blobs of fruit that you stir up as this will be loaded with sugar.
The best pick is organic yogurt that has live cultures which can give your digestive system some of that good bacteria that it needs to work properly. Just because you are trying to lose weight doesn’t mean that you should avoid snacks altogether, in fact eating more smaller meals during the day will help you feel full longer and less deprived as well as keep your metabolism revved up for more weight loss.
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