How Snacking Sustains a Healthy Lifestyle

This year is the birth of many fitness styles. From High-Intensity Interval Training or HIIT to German volume training, from personal workouts to group workouts, the choices are overwhelming. Technology is even catching up with wearable technology. While the millennials are on the right track when it comes to their health, their predecessors are having a hard time. Millennials are gung ho about physical fitness, how can their predecessors catch up?

Many turn to exercise to keep fit and lose weight, but most will not think about what they eat, instead, they eat what they want in the hopes of “burning” what they ate through rigorous exercise. While that may prove to be helpful and impactful, sustaining it is another matter. In a survey by Statistic Brain, there are 67% of people who have gym memberships but never use them.

Snacks, Good or Bad?

Snacking might seem harmless but is it really? The answer here is that it works both ways and that it depends on the kind of food you eat. You might have stifled the urge for more carbs during dinner, snacks such as a donut, cake, Cheetos are dangerously not the good ones. Studies show that those who are usual snackers gain the most significant weight and are 70% most likely to become obese. However, experts agree that the type of snacks matter. Snacks that are composed of nuts, fruits, and 100% fruit juice are categorized as better diet quality; while snacks that are composed of sweets and sugar-sweetened beverages are referred to as poor diet quality.

Snacking can be an ally. In fact, it proves to curtail cravings or the urge to binge eat. Pick up a fruit or two as your post-workout snacks to ensure that your exercise efforts are not in vain. In other instances, snacking is but another part of office culture, and it is at these times that you are tempted to nibble on something. When you do, there are healthy options that are as enticing as the cake at the coffee shop, that you can munch on.

Keeping at it

To sustain a healthy lifestyle isn’t just about religious exercising. When you change your perspective about what health is, then you are ready to sustain a healthy lifestyle without having to look at it as a chore and the statement “no pain, no gain” should be a thing of the past.

A whopping 50% of Americans on a survey by market intelligence agency Mintel, say they snack as a way of rewarding themselves. In the same survey, 28% agree that taste is more important than its health content. Other reasons are for stress relieving or weight loss.

Snacks today do not taste like sawdust or bland anymore. In fact, fresh produce, especially when organic are much more flavorful and will sustain your sweets cravings, in a healthier way. The next action item today is a matter of changing your perspective on what your body needs to be healthy and keep at it for the rest of your life.

Eating is often stifled or overindulged, but one would not think to identify which ones work best with our body. Snacking, considered as the 4th meal has a significant effect on our body. Depending on how it plays in your eating habits, whether as nibbles or as a 4th meal, these affect your body in one way or the other. How snacks affect you is your choice.

Happy Eating!