Unhealthy snacking
tburgardt
Posts: 62 Member
I have 4 kids. 2 of them go to school. During the while they are gone I find myself snacking on their snacks for school lunches. I know it's from boredom. I try to stay busy but I also have a 3yo and a 2month old at home. I also live in Wisconsin where it is currently below 0° outside so I don't really want to take the little ones out if I don't have to. But anyway what are some good low calorie snacks. Or even tips on how not to snack throughout the day.
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Replies
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I found that when my protein is good (usually about 60-80g) I don't have the urge to snack. Apples will also usually do it if I need a snack, fruits and veg are usually pretty low cal. But maybe adjusting your breakfast and lunch to something that keeps you satisfied longer might help curb the snacking.7
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change everyone to healthy snacks (fruit, veg, baked chips instead of regular, etc) and you remove the temptation.
or, make room in your calories for the snacks you want.
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Are you doing something active while snacking, like grazing while you do housework? If more sedentary, one of the standard suggestions is a distracting hobby, especially one that requires clean hands (sketching, needlework, learning to play a musical instrument, etc.), or creates dirty ones (carpentry, painting, etc.). Is there a project at home you could do? Reorganizing closets, cleaning cupboards, rearranging/redecorating a room, etc.?
I know that any of that's difficult with two little ones, but give it a thought: Even some new activity with the little ones could be a qualifier. (I don't have kids so it's hard to be specific, but maybe a new game, or "mommy and me" exercise videos that would pull in the older one, or something?)
Part of the challenge is to replace old habits with new ones. It's harder to "just stop" doing something; it's easier to do something else in its place, usually.
If the snacking feels needful, it is worth considering whether you're over-restricting (too low a calorie goal out of a desire to be thinner NOW
), and if so, whether slower loss might be more doable. Or, as suggested above, think about rearranging your calories (timing, macronutrients or specific foods) to either feel more satisfied, or allow for a bit of snacking. Weight loss is all about calories, so even though well-rounded nutrition is really important, it's OK to fit in some less nutrient-dense foods, in a thoughtful way.
Some people find that something like hot tea (regular or herbal) can be a good snack substitute. It's easy to buy veggies like celery/carrots/cucumber and cut those up, or buy precut. Cherry tomatoes are also good. If you need a dip, there are some commercial low-cal ones, or mix some herbs in some plain nonfat yogurt.
Best wishes!7 -
I drink mio in my water, and stay out of the pantry. All day snacking lead to binges for me. So I just have to mentally stop. If I snack I'm a fan of celery with ranch and buffalo sauce.1
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callsitlikeiseeit wrote: »change everyone to healthy snacks (fruit, veg, baked chips instead of regular, etc) and you remove the temptation.
or, make room in your calories for the snacks you want.
And how would you go about changing an 8, 5, and 3 year olds to healthy snacks? They are already very picky about what they eat. Also it's rare that they get a ton of junk food. I usually get them animal crackers, cheese crackers, string cheese, and every few weeks I'll buy them the frosted animal crackers.8 -
This isn't for everyone, but I find it works better for me not to snack, period. I enjoy being able to use all of my cals at meals, and to eat more mindfully, and snacking (which I used to do at work, there's snacks or other food always available and it's a good excuse for a break) was something I did more because it was there and a habit than because I really enjoyed what I ate.
I just decided that I wanted to eat only at my three main meals. At first (but for less than a week), I'd feel a strong desire to eat between meals sometimes, and I'd let myself have raw veg (carrots, celery, radishes, whatever) or journal a bit about it and why I thought I wanted to eat (since I have a habit of mindless eating for boredom, to stifle feelings, to procrastinate, stuff like that). When I'm in the habit of not snacking, I can usually channel any thoughts about food into planning for upcoming meals and not into wanting to eat right then, and I think about eating between meals much less.7 -
I’ve been drinking a lot of hot tea to fill my tummy when I’m munchy but if after drinking a cup or 2 and I’m still hungry I’ll eat a little snack to tide me over. Blackberries are awesome, low calorie. Baby carrots with hummus, raspberries, Tuna packets, jerky, cantaloupe.2
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callsitlikeiseeit wrote: »change everyone to healthy snacks (fruit, veg, baked chips instead of regular, etc) and you remove the temptation.
or, make room in your calories for the snacks you want.
And how would you go about changing an 8, 5, and 3 year olds to healthy snacks? They are already very picky about what they eat. Also it's rare that they get a ton of junk food. I usually get them animal crackers, cheese crackers, string cheese, and every few weeks I'll buy them the frosted animal crackers.
i have a 20 year old and 12 year old and theyve grown up eating fruits and veggies as snacks. my son (the 12 year old) will choose strawberries or grapes or watermelon over chips or crackers any day.2 -
I have 4 kids. 2 of them go to school. During the while they are gone I find myself snacking on their snacks for school lunches. I know it's from boredom. I try to stay busy but I also have a 3yo and a 2month old at home. I also live in Wisconsin where it is currently below 0° outside so I don't really want to take the little ones out if I don't have to. But anyway what are some good low calorie snacks. Or even tips on how not to snack throughout the day.
Burgardt, I too was more of a snacker volume consumer than a proper meal serving eater, managing < 250 calories a pop, to sustain me throughout my active hours.
If you can muster it, protein-loaded snacks are more filling and depending on your eating plan, pick out your favourite 3 and snack-prep them, as you do for your children. For me personally, egg/chicken variations, garbanzo and mixed nuts worked well for me.
From Monday - Thursday, my sister and I as our Community Monitor-Mums, supervise Swotting/Prep-time Study, Homework & Assignment for elementary to high school students. The snack of choice, we prepare for the children always is some form of protein-loaded meat dense chili with fresh flour tortillas. What I love about it is, if I'm at all famished, it wouldn't hurt me, if I'd helped myself to a bowl serving, depending on my energy expenditure.
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I am not going to recommend that you do keto because that is a major change to you. However, there is something I discovered before I started doing keto that might work for you. I bought, on a lark, a jar of RapidFire Keto Creamer. A single serving of that is 90 calories of mostly fat. My daughter, who likes to cook treats, had some leftover heavy cream from some dessert recipe she'd made. I am loathe to discard calories, so I resolved to have one cup of coffee each day with 15 g heavy cream for 50 calories.
The interesting thing I discovered was that by having a couple of fatty cups of coffee in the morning I did not get hungry for "breakfast" foods. I have been devoted to breakfast for 5+ decades. This is not a trivial thing.
You might be able to leverage fatty coffee into happily ignoring the kids' snacks.9 -
It doesn't sound like these are unhealthy snacks at least not by my definition although I don't label much as unhealthy tbh. There is nothing wrong with snacking unless there is a negative consequence. Are you having a hard time staying within your calorie goal or are you having less satisfying main meals because of having less calories left?
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Low cal snacks for you could start with raw veggies and a low cal dip, moderate amount of fruit and plain yogurt, hard boiled eggs, small preportioned packs of nuts. You can Google "snacks under 100 cals" and get quite a list.0
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Super nanny gathers all of the snacks in a big bin and puts it up on a top shelf. The children get to pick one *one* snack set out for the morning break.
She is also a big fan of scheduled activities. Treasure hunt and hide and seek come to mind.1 -
Discover what specifically is triggering your snacking habit. Not general trigger like "boredom" but specific trigger like "see string cheese in fridge". Do what you can to avoid the triggers like putting all the tempting snacks into a no-no drawer of the fridge then never open it except to prepare lunches or restock. One of my big snack triggers is food tv, so I just quit watching it and snack problem solved. If you can't avoid a snack habit trigger then force yourself to respond differently, like 40 lunges before a tiny snack, then 45 before the next small snack and so on.
We can learn to be masters of our habits, if we don't then we are slaves to them
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callsitlikeiseeit wrote: »change everyone to healthy snacks (fruit, veg, baked chips instead of regular, etc) and you remove the temptation.
or, make room in your calories for the snacks you want.
And how would you go about changing an 8, 5, and 3 year olds to healthy snacks? They are already very picky about what they eat. Also it's rare that they get a ton of junk food. I usually get them animal crackers, cheese crackers, string cheese, and every few weeks I'll buy them the frosted animal crackers.
By being the best parent you know how to be and teaching them all you can about nutrition's consequences. The will believe you because you love them enough to change8 -
Try getting healthier options for just yourself. I know it is hard, but willpower, man. it helps me when I have healthier options available which I enjoy, that way it isn't as hard to pick it instead of the unhealthy things.0
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Buy snacks for yourself that you enjoy and can fit into your calorie goal for the day. One of my 18-month old's daily snacks is teddy grahams. I also enjoy them and will sometimes buy them for myself, but it is really easy for me to eat more than a serving. I find that I am less likely to snack on his teddy grahams when I have other snacks for myself that I really enjoy. I also try to mostly give him the same snacks that my husband and I eat ourselves (mandarins, oranges, raspberries, apple sauce, cheese, yogurt, crackers, etc.). That is both for helping him build the eating habits we want him to have and to help me with exactly the situation you are describing.2
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callsitlikeiseeit wrote: »change everyone to healthy snacks (fruit, veg, baked chips instead of regular, etc) and you remove the temptation.
or, make room in your calories for the snacks you want.
And how would you go about changing an 8, 5, and 3 year olds to healthy snacks? They are already very picky about what they eat. Also it's rare that they get a ton of junk food. I usually get them animal crackers, cheese crackers, string cheese, and every few weeks I'll buy them the frosted animal crackers.
I'm a sahm who also home-schools my 3 kids so I'm around food all day in my house (the 4 of us eat all of our meals at home for the most part). I've organized my kitchen so that I have a cupboard of my foodstuff and my kids have their own cupboard with their foodstuff. I only go into their cupboard to restock it on grocery day, otherwise it's out of sight and out of mind.
How old are your school kids? Can they pack their own lunches or at least pick out their snacks and put them in their lunch boxes? When my kids went to a brick n' mortar school they were packing their lunches at 1st grade, with a bit of help from me.
Also, I don't label foods 'good', 'bad', 'junk' etc. I have specific weight and nutrition goals and eat the foods that help me accomplish these. I also incorporate snacks that fit in with these goals (I'm currently doing the DASH protocol and have things like nuts, wheat crackers, green smoothie ingredients etc). My kids don't have the same goals as I do, therefore their snacking options are different.
And then looking at your list-things like crackers, cheese etc are actually pretty decent options, so if these are the kinds of snacks you enjoy, why not just work them into your calorie targets? Things like animal crackers and fishy crackers are lower calorie options and you get quite a bit in a serving size.
eta: as a sidenote-I'm on the other side of the big lake from you and the weather we're having is nuts! We're breaking all sorts of snowfall/temperature records this week, yuck!3 -
callsitlikeiseeit wrote: »change everyone to healthy snacks (fruit, veg, baked chips instead of regular, etc) and you remove the temptation.
or, make room in your calories for the snacks you want.
And how would you go about changing an 8, 5, and 3 year olds to healthy snacks? They are already very picky about what they eat. Also it's rare that they get a ton of junk food. I usually get them animal crackers, cheese crackers, string cheese, and every few weeks I'll buy them the frosted animal crackers.
I'm a sahm who also home-schools my 3 kids so I'm around food all day in my house (the 4 of us eat all of our meals at home for the most part). I've organized my kitchen so that I have a cupboard of my foodstuff and my kids have their own cupboard with their foodstuff. I only go into their cupboard to restock it on grocery day, otherwise it's out of sight and out of mind.
How old are your school kids? Can they pack their own lunches or at least pick out their snacks and put them in their lunch boxes? When my kids went to a brick n' mortar school they were packing their lunches at 1st grade, with a bit of help from me.
Also, I don't label foods 'good', 'bad', 'junk' etc. I have specific weight and nutrition goals and eat the foods that help me accomplish these. I also incorporate snacks that fit in with these goals (I'm currently doing the DASH protocol and have things like nuts, wheat crackers, green smoothie ingredients etc). My kids don't have the same goals as I do, therefore their snacking options are different.
And then looking at your list-things like crackers, cheese etc are actually pretty decent options, so if these are the kinds of snacks you enjoy, why not just work them into your calorie targets? Things like animal crackers and fishy crackers are lower calorie options and you get quite a bit in a serving size.
eta: as a sidenote-I'm on the other side of the big lake from you and the weather we're having is nuts! We're breaking all sorts of snowfall/temperature records this week, yuck!
I'm in Chicago (so same weather system), and same. Also, the weather is supposed to be so cold starting tomorrow night that United sent me a message warning that my flight on Wednesday (business travel) is going to be a possible problem and offering to let me change for free!
Of course, earlier in the year I was saying we weren't really getting winter, just icy rain.1 -
I don't know how people do it when they're home all day. I'm on yet another snow day at home and just ate 3 pieces of pizza, half a sald, some chicken and banana oatmeal chocolate chip bars0
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I’ve found once I start it’s hard to stop. I’m trying to have “breakfast” closer to lunch time... and lunch more in the middle of the afternoon. I always have a satisfying dinner and have a cup of coffee after with a fiber one brownie. I’m not eating heavily for breakfast and lunch, and I sip on an ice coffee from lunch time on. I need a schedule and I always sit down and eat so it feels like a true meal. Good luck!0
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I don't know how people do it when they're home all day. I'm on yet another snow day at home and just ate 3 pieces of pizza, half a sald, some chicken and banana oatmeal chocolate chip bars
How I get through the day at home was 2/7 of the problem when I started. 5/7 of the problem was getting through the day at work with free candy and snacks. You just have to learn your solution.0 -
Hmmm, I don't keep pizza and chocolate chip bars in the house. My desk is literally one foot from the frig and pantry and I still lost 150 lbs.I don't know how people do it when they're home all day. I'm on yet another snow day at home and just ate 3 pieces of pizza, half a sald, some chicken and banana oatmeal chocolate chip bars
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Hmmm, I don't keep pizza and chocolate chip bars in the house. My desk is literally one foot from the frig and pantry and I still lost 150 lbs.I don't know how people do it when they're home all day. I'm on yet another snow day at home and just ate 3 pieces of pizza, half a sald, some chicken and banana oatmeal chocolate chip bars
i work from home and dont have an issue. 120 pounds down and going ...1 -
I found that a lot of kids' snacks left a gross aftertaste in my mouth. And even though they taste good on my tongue, they don't when the food is swallowed and it becomes not worth it. So I don't eat them even though I like them.
I've done a few tricks to manage the snacking. One is to buy snacks you just aren't going to eat. Don't like pretzels? Buy pretzels for the kids. Keep the other food in your pantry as ingredients or foods that take work to be eaten (i.e. have to be baked, cooked, added to another mix). If you must keep the tempting snacks, tell yourself, "this isn't my food." Treat it like a roommate situation - that food belongs to someone else and I can't take it.
I had to come to terms with my snacking as well. It was the main thing holding me back. It helped that I moved away from a job where chips and cookies were available 24/7. But I still got hungry at 3 pm. So I kept low-cal snacks around like berries, string cheese, boiled egg, low-sugar yogurt, oranges, cucumbers. Sometimes tea or coffee works too.
I also had to accept that sometimes I was going to have the salty, greasy chips because that's just what I wanted, darnit. So I put an acceptable portion in my hand, weighed it, and ate it. And told myself NO when I wanted more. That I was actually satisfied in my tummy; it was just my tongue playing tricks on me.3 -
I have no idea if this will help, but when I was living in Alaska with two little kids about the same ages as yours, I decided that I needed structure to my days or I was going to go bonkers. Each day had a specific theme.
M: Library Day (there was something like a 30 book limit, so we took a huge bag, and at home, there was a designated basket where the books "lived" so that they didn't get misplaced
T: Craft Day (whatever- maybe something with an end product like tye-dye in summer, maybe just gluing things on paper or cardboard to make a collage)
W: Cooking Club (learning to bake bread with yeast, or fast and easy muffins, or actually prepping dinner so that it went faster in the afternoon)
Th: our local play group got together (we met at a McD's in winter while the kids played)
F: Coffee & Cocoa (my one and only treat-local coffee house where I got a cup of regular coffee, the kiddo got cocoa, we took coloring books for her, and I read the paper)
Without this, I would just sort of wander through my days at home. Once there was structure, I had to fit other things in around these mornings (laundry, picking up, vacuuming, whatever). It eliminated the non-hunger signals. Now, I just replace the snacks that I'll eat mindlessly while adding in hundreds of extra calories with things that will fill me up, or are OK to eat mindlessly (baby carrots).
Good luck!
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I don't know how people do it when they're home all day. I'm on yet another snow day at home and just ate 3 pieces of pizza, half a sald, some chicken and banana oatmeal chocolate chip bars
I work from home. When I get sufficient protein, regular exercise, and good sleep, I have no urge to snack.
@tburgardt - what's your goal weight and how many grams of protein are you eating per day?0 -
i had to just stop eating some things across the board. like no more chips... because portioning out a single serving is too hard. i like to measure half a serving of pretzels with two tablespoons humus... but it does disappear rather quickly! for my hands that want to snack, i get a mug and sip on hot water. constantly1
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My best tip is pre-logging before you put anything in your mouth. I'd log what I planned to eat for my meals (adjusting before eating as the food was weighed), knowing what was left over was for snacks. Once I started doing this I could decide if the calories fit and whether they are worth it.2
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Not a big help here but just wanted to say I’m in the same boat!2
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