Effects of snacking on the weight.

The best snack is no snack at all. Everyone wonders about French paradox: how do French eat foie gras, chocolate, cheese, bread and lots of wine and stay slim? One of the answers to the French slimness is no snacking. So if one can eat three meals a day and stay away from a snack that is great as long as you don’t starve yourself and then jump at the food and eat a huge portion. Truly if the meals are nutritious and contain proportional amounts of carbohydrates, protein and fat then the person stays full for five to six hours until the next meal. A good example for French breakfast is a butter croissant and a cup of coffee with cream, simple and satisfying with 380 calories, 23g of fat, 6grams of protein and 37 g of carbohydrate.
There are two reasons for American love-story with snacks. One is based on hormonal changes, like surge of insulin and a subsequent drop of the blood glucose. There are several other gut hormones, like leptin, GLP-1, and ghrelin that are responsible for abnormal satiety and increased appetite in overweight people. These hormones are either over activated because the snack is too sugary or the person is already overweight. The other one is of Pavlovian origin (remember the bell) – you look for a snack at a certain time, just by habit. Most snacks are packaged brightly and contain some or many of the worst ingredients (refined sugars, partially hydrogenated fats, high fructose corn syrup, food coloring, etc.) that were chemically created and introduced into our food realm sometime after 1980s. So if you wish to be like French and thin, then you need to stop eating snacks and cut down the portions of the main meals and do another thing that French do - stretch the good meal, and stop eating when you are 80 percent full and not 135 percent. And don’t forget to enjoy a glass of wine. In the summary, it’s simple and clear - eat less food, and foods that do not make you eat more food. Michael Pollan, the author of “In Defense of Food” says “Eat less food, mostly plants.” That is quite brilliant though hard to do.

However, not all snaking is bad for you; just the ones that come from vending machines, middle sections of supermarkets and movie theaters. When you eat a big dinner and then go to a movie and get buttered popcorn and a slurpee that constitutes for both - hormonal and Pavlovian disaster.
There is also some smart snacking, sometimes even necessary snacking. There are several scenarios when snacks are good for you. First, is when you haven’t eaten for 3-4 hours and now you are heading to the gym - snacking would help you to build muscle versus breaking it (letting the glycogen ooze out). Before going to the gym have a banana and milk or soy milk, or peanut butter sandwich and a big glass of water.
There are also some people who would prefer to eat multiple small meals per day. If that fits better with your daily plan then you should be able to lose weight as long as you keep a negative calorie balance. Those people are called grazers. If you’re a grazer then you should have a breakfast, lunch and dinner around 300 calories each and then 3-4 snacks about 150 calories each. You should be able to lose the weight; it’s just not the French way.
Here are some examples of healthy snacks; raw vegetables (those you can eat at any time and in large portions), whole grain crackers (about six) and low fat cheese, Baby bell cheese, handful of nuts, dark chocolate, food bars (approved by Alpha-plan), plain yogurt with berries or other fruit, popcorn with little salt and no fats (Newman’s Own), oatmeal or chocolate chip cookie that is under 150 calories, an apple or any other seasonal fruit, pocket bread with hummus and any of your favorite food as long as it’s under 150 calories.