Our Nutrition columnist has tips on avoiding the mid-afternoon munchies.
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Question: Further to “The snacking debate” (Nutrition, August 6), I eat a healthy breakfast and lunch every day, but find I can’t resist eating junk food in the afternoon. Do you have any advice on how I can make myself eat healthier snacks?
Answer: When you consider how big our main meals are relative to snacks, it’s surprising that these smaller additions to the diet can cause so much trouble. But they do; most people have more unhealthy snacks than they would like – and more than they should, for that matter. So, how can our best healthy-eating intentions prove so ineffectual when it comes to snack time?
Main meals are typically well structured and eaten at specific times of the day, but snacking is far less so – it can happen at any time, at any place and whether you’re alone or with people, and can consist of just about any food or drink. This lack of structure makes it particularly difficult to identify the triggers for our bad snacking habits and rectify them, according to a 2010 study in Health Psychology.
A good place to start with problem snacking is, surprisingly, looking at our main meals. For starters, people who eat breakfast are less likely to snack on unhealthy foods later in the day. You say you’re already eating a healthy breakfast – but is it a substantial meal? Toast and coffee, or similar, are better than nothing, but this may not be a substantial enough start to your day.
High-protein meals typically increase feelings of fullness and reduce subsequent energy intake. Protein-rich breakfasts were found to decrease the blood levels of the ghrelin hormone, which is thought to stimulate appetite, in a 2006 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. And a protein-rich breakfast was found to reduce food cravings and prevent overeating later in the day among breakfast-skipping teenagers in a 2011 study in the International Journal of Pediatric Obesity.
Increase the protein content of your breakfast by adding low-fat yoghurt to your fruit and cereal, drinking a glass of low-fat milk, or adding baked beans or eggs to your wholegrain toast. Eggs are a cheap and useful protein source. Aim to include protein in your lunch, too. For example, try adding meat, chicken or tinned fish to your wholegrain salad sandwich, add low-fat yoghurt to your fruit, or try a milky drink to increase the protein content. Focus fully on your meal while you’re eating lunch, too. A 2011 study, in the journal Appetite, found people who focus on their lunch eat about half as many biscuits in the afternoon than people who read while eating.
If overhauling your breakfast and lunch still doesn’t turn those great intentions into healthy snacks, you may need to delve deeper into the issue. The use of mental contrasting and implementation intentions (MCII) to create clear goals and plans reduced unhealthy snacking in a group of young women by a substantial 4700kJ a week, according to a 2010 study in the European Journal of Social Psychology. For an average-size woman, that’s equivalent to cutting about half a day’s typical food intake each week.
To use the MCII techniques to change your behaviour:
1. Think of an important goal you have for behaviour change – for example, eating fewer unhealthy snacks.
2. Imagine a positive future outcome that would result from successfully changing this behaviour – for example, fitting into a favourite pair of jeans.
3. Mentally contrast this positive future with an obstacle that stands in the way – for example, snacking on chocolate when hungry in the afternoon. If necessary, keep a food diary to identify your obstacles. Record what you eat, the time, place, any concurrent activity (such as working on the computer), your eating companions and your mood (such as stressed).
4. Create an action plan that specifies exactly when, where and how a goal should be acted on – for example, if I get hungry in the afternoon, I will eat a banana. We often live on autopilot, repeating ingrained bad habits. By using mental contrasting we create a stronger commitment to our goal, and by creating an action plan to overcome any obstacles to that goal, we have a clearer path to success.
For more columns by Jennifer Bowden, click here.