Weight Loss: Choosing the Right Healthy Snacks for Easy Fat Reduction by Controlling Portion Sizes and Avoiding Overeating

Eat Fat-Free Snacks
How to Choose Healthy Snacks

To lose weight, snack. The reason is exactly the same as why your mother wouldn't let you snack when you were a child: "Snacks ruin your appetite."

Snacks help you avoid overeating at meals, which is a good thing. Every time you overeat, your body turns into a fat-storing machine. Snacks also provide fuel for your body, keeping it burning calories. Without snacks, your stomach will be empty, and it will instruct your metabolic system to slow down calorie burning.

But snacking is also risky. If your snacks are creamy, high-fat foods like sausages and hamburgers, it will be difficult to lose weight. The key to snacking and losing weight is choosing the right snacks. Eating healthy snacks that are rich in nutrients and fiber, but low in fat and calories, helps with weight loss because you won't feel hungry.

A New Concept in Snacks

“There’s a subtle notion that snacking is always bad,” says Graybowuski. “I think women think that because of the snacking they used to eat.” People often choose sweet or savory snacks, but actually, there are healthy snacks too. You can eat fruit, drink soup, eat leftovers, or have baked potato chips; snacks themselves are healthy, it just depends on what you eat.

It’s usually the taste of a snack, rather than its health benefits or weight-loss effects, that influences people’s snack choices, says Audrey Cross, Clinical Associate Professor of Human Nutrition at Columbia University in New York.

How we perceive taste is a product of our eating habits from childhood. Most of us love foods that we find comforting. "We might sometimes feel annoyed, depressed, or angry, or sometimes we feel we deserve a reward, and then we eat something that makes us feel better," says Marcia Levine-Perchett, a food craving specialist at the Monell Chemical Center in Philadelphia. This often means eating high-fat snacks like French fries and ice cream.

"Fortunately, we can find many low-fat, low-sugar, and low-sodium cookies, cakes, and ice creams," says Cross. "Choosing these snacks in moderation can suppress our cravings without affecting our body's absorption of nutrients."

Simplify your palate. Many women have learned to re-cultivate their taste buds, thus losing interest in fatty, sugary snacks, Cross says. Does that mean we can learn to appreciate the color and texture of a green bell pepper like we would a lollipop? Cross says, "Of course, but for most of us, it's not easy. It takes time, and you might occasionally give up, but you can do it." Here's how to get started.

Women's Consultation
Why do my low-fat cookies make me gain weight?

When you see "Fat-Free" in big letters on the packaging, you assume it's also "Calorie-Free." It's relatively easy to distinguish between fat-free and fatty foods in your diet, but not so easy with snacks.

Low fat doesn't mean low calories. In many cases, those delicious, fat-free treats contain just as many calories as regular foods. When manufacturers extract fat from chocolate chip cookies, they have to add something back, usually a lot of sugar, to compensate for the calories extracted from the fat.

Excess sugar makes your fat-free cookies taste great. Since fat-free foods allow you to eat as much as you want, the end result is that you absorb a lot of calories. This "fat-free" claim leads some women to believe that eating fat-free snacks will help them lose weight. The problem is that consuming more calories than you burn, whether from high-fat or fat-free foods, will lead to weight gain and obesity. That's all there is to the benefits of fat-free.

The best way to deal with fat-free snacks is to carefully check their ingredient list and read the nutrition label meticulously, especially the calorie content of each ingredient. The "fat-free" claim isn't a lie, but with a little attention, you can decide in advance how much to eat. Remember, too much of a good thing can be bad. Especially if you have good teeth, eating too many fat-free snacks will not only fail to help you lose weight but may even make you gain more weight.

Consider Nutrition
Incorporate snacks into your daily nutritional goals. "Think of snacks as treats between meals, not as a treat or reward," says Witton.

"Treat snacks as an extension of your main meals," she suggests. For example, if you plan to have soup, salad, and fruit for lunch, don't eat the fruit first; save it as a snack. Similarly, save dessert, bread, or breakfast juice and muffins for snacks (this also lays the groundwork for the "smaller, more frequent meals" approach described on page 92).

Don't strive for perfection. Denying yourself usually doesn't work, says Margo Danger, associate professor of internal medicine at the Center for Human Nutrition Research at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. One thing is certain: snacking can reduce food intake. Also, don't assume that every snack you eat has to be nutritious. "Some snacks are just for fun," she says; only a well-rounded diet provides substantial nutrition.

A plan to resist temptation. Cross says to bring snacks to work. This way, while others are buying snacks at the food stand, you can take some dried fruit from the table or non-fat yogurt from the pantry.