By MACROS | Published on May 4, 2017
Your in-between meal nibbles can have a tremendous bearing on how hungry you feel and what your physique looks like. Here’s the snack strategies you should use to hit your goals.
1. Feed your diet
Snacks will make or break your progress. If your metabolism gets hip to your games of not feeding it often enough, it will begin to hoard fat stores as energy to protect you. Feed it often enough with the right things and it will torch through fat, but the snacks don’t have to be big. Research in Food Quality and Preference found that people felt just as satisfied with approximately one handful of snack foods as they did with two handfuls.
2. Look past packing
Marketing makes choosing the right snacks like a game of pin the tail on the donkey. Buzz words like ‘whole-grain,’ ‘all-natural’ and ‘low-carb’ have tricked us all into buying foods. Even terms such as antioxidant and gluten-free can make people believe these snacks are much healthier than they really are, found research at the University of Houston. Wise up to heavily-marketed snacks.
3. Ban the box
As a rule: avoid boxed snacks. Many preservatives can make you unable to digest essential nutrients in food. Once a ‘foreign’ substance enters the digestive system, all energy goes to breaking down and eliminating that ingredient, which often makes you miss out on the nutrients you need. A study at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab found even organic labels on boxes can make people underestimate the number of calories in their snacks by up to 40%.
4. Don’t be fooled
I used to know nothing about nutrition. The night before my first cover shoot I ate popcorn and cookies! Later, I went too far in the other direction like eating two weeks of tilapia and asparagus. Striking a happy medium involves portion sizes, but watch the labels because research at the University of Chicago found that a snack labelled as a ‘small portion’ can make you eat significantly more of it. Don’t be fooled.
5. Protein is king
Protein powder snack recipes are a great way to get to meet your macronutrients and if it’s a great recipe, you feel like you’re cheating. Try using vegan protein powder that doubles as a baking mix to make cookies, muffins, pancakes and waffles. My favourite is Clutch Bodyshop’s baking mix, which is a combination of pea, hemp and brown rice protein that cooks up to smell and taste like waffle cones. The best part of this product is that it helps curb my cravings for high-sugar and high carb snacks. bodybuilding.com is a great at posting new protein recipes to try.
6. Seek enjoyment
Recently, I encountered salt and vinegar flavoured almonds. The minute I tasted them it was like all of heaven’s angels singing Hallelujah in my mouth. This works well especially since research in Food Technology found that almonds decrease hunger without increasing bodyweight. When your taste buds encounter something that you like, they signal to the cravings department in your brain that you have been satiated. This stops a lot of those uncontrollable cravings that all of us encounter. The important thing is to find clean replacements for your guilty pleasures.
7. Timing is crucial
If you have your higher carb snacks before your workout or immediately after, you automatically set your body up to be able to use them much more efficiently. Lastly, watch your glycemic index in the snacks you choose. Slower digesting options such as nuts, seeds and grains keep you fuller for longer, while adding fiber like flax or chia meals will slow the digestion of higher protein snacks. That will also allow you to feel full for longer periods of time.
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