Everyday Systems

I was sitting in the sauna last evening and reading a copy of The New Atkins for a New You when on page 67 I came across the following (paraphrase): "(it is suggested) That you eat 3 meals a day...with 1-2 snacks...however, if you are not feeling hungry, and have energy there is no need to snack..."

There was a time when indiscriminant snacking was good to go in Atkins as long as the snacks were low carb.

There does seem to be an overall paradigm shift in some of "these" diet plans.

*Disclaimer: This is not an attempt to promote low carb dieting. This is a post to demosntrate the apparent changing attitudes in appraoches to eating.

I think more and more people, especially diet gurus, are realizing how easy it is to jam so much food into the day with a lifestyle of unlimited snacking. Even if that is healthy snacking (healthy food is still food, still has calories, and can still make you fat).

And when you are spreading it out over the course of the day, it just doesn't seem like you've eaten "that much". As such, even if you don't eliminate snacking entirely, but limit the number of snacks to a set number of "mini-meals", I think there is a huge advantage. Sure, it is still completely possible to go way overboard - but I think it is a least a bit harder psychologically to look at all that food at once and still eat all of it.

I have met people who are dieting - and what they seem to concentrate on the most is their snacks! They discuss them a lot and plan them carefully. They make sure that they are never without "healthy snacks" and spend a lot of the day consuming said snacks. Sometimes it seems as if snacking (healthy snacking they point out!) becomes the point of the diet. Lots of almonds, baby carrots (always dipped in something or other), apples with peanut butter, the inevitable snack bars etc.

I know that when I don't snack, I don't change my other meals - they are the same amount. So if I don't snack I eat less. Every day that really adds up after a while. It would not seem to be that hard to understand. However one dieter I know assured me that by not snacking I was slowing down my metabolism, sending it into "starvation mode". This seemed unlikely to me - my body thinks it is starving when I eat three meals a day?

librarylady wrote:This seemed unlikely to me - my body thinks it is starving when I eat three meals a day?

It seems pretty unlikely to me, too!

You could write a book just on diet mythology. Starvation mode is one of those myths. There is a grain of truth in it - on *severely* restricted calorie intake (like, 800 calories a day), sustained over a period of some days, people do tend to become lethargic, which in itself means that their metabolism falls. But on a more typical dieter's regime of, say, 1500 calories, any effect is very small. And 1500 calories a day, for most people, is nowhere near "starving".

I think people really want to believe in "starvation mode" - then they can keep snacking (and feel sort of virtuous about it!)

The biggest issue for me in snacking was the burden of having the right foods available. I never felt good about having a bag of chips as a snack or just an apple. I just don't worry about it. If I really have to, I can get to a cup of coffee.

At lunch I was perusing the Google groups and it lead me to a link at 3 Fat Ckicks on a Diet forum, where someone had posted the link to No S. I was amused (again) by the seeming need to have snacks (healthy though) and the vehemency shown toward No S because of the No Snack rule. "Snacking is good it boosts your metabolism!"

I think Reinhard is 100% right-on in his no-snacking concept,
but No Snacks is the No S that is most difficult for me to implement.

I started snacking yesterday, without realizing it, and the whole day got shot to poo, there is more truth to "once you pop you can't stop" than we really know.

This is great news. I'm delighted to be "ripped off" if it actually helps people (and I didn't exactly invent the concept of three meals).

Reinhard

Sienna wrote:I think more and more people, especially diet gurus, are realizing how easy it is to jam so much food into the day with a lifestyle of unlimited snacking. Even if that is healthy snacking (healthy food is still food, still has calories, and can still make you fat).

That is one of the premises of Fat Head. Tom Naughton is discussing Super Size Me and makes the statement: If a person ate 5000 calories of any food (even healthy) he/she would get fat. Which seems obvious, but I think some people think they will eat 5000 calories of fast food and get fat, eat 5000 calories of watermelon and not get fat.

BrightAngel wrote: Over 43.......Good Point!
Although, of course it would be very difficult
to eat 5000 calories of watermelon...

There are many "real" unproccessed foods that
can quickly and easily add up to 5000 calories.

Oh yea, 5000 calories of watermelon would be stretching it, but hyperbole goes a long way.

Over43 wrote:
Oh yea, 5000 calories of watermelon would be stretching it, but hyperbole goes a long way.

But while 5000 calories of watermelon might be hard to get (a quick online search suggested 37 calories for 10 melon balls, so you'd need to eat over 1300 melon balls!), 5000 calories of something like mixed nuts would be pretty easy - and I know a TON of people who grab "just a handful" of mixed nuts as a "healthy" afternoon snack. And a few who also grab a handful as a midmorning snack.

A 1/2 cup of mixed nuts is about 440 calories. A double cheeseburger from McDs is 440 calories. If I'm going to consume 440 calories, I'd rather have the burger. And I'd never call a double cheeseburger "a snack".