I’ve noticed a trend in the experience of my clients as they lose weight permanently. Many of them experience fewer cravings, faster weight loss and are more in touch with their hunger and their bodies when they do not snack.
What? Doesn’t that go against common diet advice?
Yes, it does.
But my own permanent weight loss of close to 90 lbs. was accomplished by breaking just about every rule touted by “diet world.” I don’t put much stock in “rules”, especially when so little of the weight loss from those rules results in long-term change.
But a new study published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association supports my suspicions. One hundred twenty-three women were studied and there was a difference in the amount of weight the snackers and non-snackers lost in a one-year period. Snackers lost 7% of their weight; non-snackers lost 11%. The subjects were on a healthy, controlled diet and the snacks consisted of a reasonable portion (100-150 calories) of healthy food.
Clearly, non-snacking eating styles were of more benefit to the study participants.
Snacking has become a way of life for our culture, although it was once considered gauche, rude, and offensive. I remember my mother saying that snackers in the 1950s were ostracized since they were crude, or lacking in manners.
How did the snacking eating style get started? Snacking in the diet game started for two types of people: (1) those with erratic blood sugar who needed a period of steady food intake to rebalance blood sugar reactions in the body; and (2) folks with severe negative reaction to hunger – people who react to hunger with true fight/flight panic. They wind up making bad choices when hungry because they aren’t dealing with WHY they experience fight/flight and solving that underlying problem. Now, we may all experience this reaction from time-to-time, but it’s much more heightened in some of us.
Food manufacturers jumped on board, and snack foods now represent a large percentage of sales. Furthermore, specialized diet snack foods, bars, drinks and shakes, though their effect is completely unproven and they may be utterly useless, continue to climb in sales.
Here’s where it skyrocketed, with advertising pushing the snack idea, especially for kids and dieters.
In fact, one of the major ways we’ve become snack pushers is with our children. I’m amazed that we program kids today to believe they cannot attend a soccer practice, after-school event, or even get through two classes at school without a snack. Kids in most schools eat almost constantly today, and move very little, and yet we wonder why the childhood obesity rate continues to rise.
In the profit scenario, however, kids at the best target because they are the future revenue stream.
I experienced the fight/flight reaction and erratic blood sugar at various times in my dieting history, but these conditions never continued unabated. When I did the underlying work to discover what was driving my negative use of food, the fight/flight fear of not having food faded. The erratic blood sugar evened out as I became more fit.
Bottom Line to Success: You’ve got to find what works for you, and your body. It doesn’t matter what some celebrity does (or says she does in return for money) or your best friend swears by. If it doesn’t help you, throw it out the window.
It’s important to remember that our bodies are constantly changing and adjusting and healing. Just because a method of eating worked for you in the beginning of a weight loss journey does not mean it will always work for you.
We need to be flexible and resilient, adapting as the body’s needs change.
If you snack simply because you have heard it’s the best approach, and not for blood sugar issues, you might try omitting snacks to see if it affects your hunger levels.
I have a friend who believes the only allowable snack is a piece of fruit. If she is hungry, she will have it, but she will not eat it (or anything) if she is not hungry. Her belief is based on pretty sound science – she is a scientist – that suggests the body needs a break from eating long enough for the body to digest and assimilate the nutrients from food.
This new study suggests it also helps balance blood sugar to have that rest period between feedings, because it allows the body to repeatedly rebalance the blood sugar, sort of like putting the pancreatic system into training.
