Tuesday, August 30, 2011

The Best Defense Against The Snack Attack

By Paige Thompson


Pop quiz, hotshot - what is that dreaded feeling you get in between lunch and dinner that keeps your stomach rumbling? And that's a fact. But you can actually use snack attacks as a tool to help you lose weight.

Snack attacks are actually a good thing because eating frequently instead of waiting until you're extremely hungry is a good way to avoid overeating.

You also get to balance your brain chemistry and keep blood sugar levels healthy. Let snacks be your friend and not your foe, or even a guilty pleasure - it's all about eating the right snacks and planning ahead.

Here is a healthy snack tip. It's actually quite simple - focus on eating foods with negative calories and high fat burning capacity, and eating them in volume.

Remember, the key word here is negative calorie - these foods burn fat and create a deficit in calories that would force your body to draw energy from stored fat. If you want a quick sampler of negative calorie foods that help burn fat, consider the following healthy snacks:

Examples include fruits like apples, mangoes, cantaloupe, pineapple, raspberries, strawberries and watermelon, vegetables like carrots and miscellaneous foods like cod, corn, lobster and low-fat yogurt.

Because the body's metabolism slows down to a crawl late at night, you should not eat any snacks during that time. That means anything you eat just before you go to bed will turn to body fat.

If you eat vending machine snacks they contain high fat and you can forget about reducing body fat because these snacks can sabotage your weight loss quickly.

Also, beverages like smoothies, sweetened coffee drinks, soft drinks, fruit drinks, sports drinks and flavored teas contain a lot of sugar that will end up as body fat.

Instead of running to the vending machine, run to the vegetable garden instead and have some peaches, peppers or blackberries as snacks. You need two to four servings a day.

Yogurt and cheese (the low-fat variety) are recommended in helping you satisfy your calcium requirement daily. You need two to three servings per day.

Little things often translate into big things, and this certainly applies to the changes discussed above. Like a lot of things in life, your success in losing weight relies on your ability to make the right decisions.

Let this short article be a useful guide to helping you deal with hunger pangs and the desire to have a snack attack regardless of when or where you have it.




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