Courtesy of Clark’s Nutrition

What are your favorite snacks? Do you snack to stay healthy or are snacks becoming extra calories that ruin dinner and make structured eating implausible? According to scientists, the most consumed snacks are chips, chocolate, and cheese with fruit coming in a distant fifth. Snacks are comfort foods that help us to deal with stress and provide a respite from the monotony of our days and continuous pursuit of balanced meals. Yet they can also sabotage our fitness goals and create a cycle of dependency on foods that have too much sodium, sugar, and unhealthy fats.
Snacking is a tool just like all other tools, it can lead to controlling calories and help with weight loss and maintenance, or it can become an exercise in calorie overindulgence and wreak havoc on fitness goals. An hour in the gym can be overwhelmed by two minute of gorging on calorie-laden snack foods. The healthiest version of snacks should contain fruits, veggies, and nuts, and occasionally real fruit drinks. The ubiquity of juicing establishments can also be very beneficial in ensuring we get enough fruits and veggies in our diets. While it is better to eat an apple than juice an apple, it is certainly better to juice an apple than consume any other man-made snack. This goes for all fruits and veggies! Juicing bypasses chewing which may be a boon to individuals that cannot chew crunchy foods. For those that can transport fruits and vegetable and have no issue chewing, chew away! This mastication process, wherein we chew and macerate foods to enable them to pass through our digestive system, helps with providing satiety and joy in consuming foods.
While there is no perfect design for weight loss on an individual level, there are some guidelines that may be beneficial (and backed by science) in helping to meet and exceed fitness goals. If an individual is overweight, eating three to five solid meals may contribute to the thermic effect of food (the heat produced from burning calories) and assist in the reduction of bodyweight. For individuals that are at a lower bodyweight and want to put on mass, larger & less frequent meals, two to three may be more beneficial to achieve those goals, with one or two high-calorie snacks added in. While the above recommendation may be beneficial, it must always be remembered that food choice comes first, and then meal frequency can be manipulated.
It seems whether an individual eats three times a day or 10, the overall amount of food must remain the same if the goal is weight loss or weight gain. In other words, the foods (and total calories) we put in or bodies are more important than the frequency or arrangement. Do not worry about food combining or frantically scrambling to fit in a certain “macro” set; rather, ensure that the meals contain a variety of colorful foods, mostly plants, and that the meals do not cause you to become sluggish or too tired to perform the day’s activities.
What we eat is more important than how frequently we eat, and the way we go about eating healthy foods is very individualistic and subject to great variance. Clark’s Nutrition and Natural Foods Market is the perfect one-stop-snack shop. Every department has a multitude of choices to ensure snacking becomes a partner to your fitness, health, and longevity goals.