My wife swears by having snacks. She typically has some nuts in the afternoons to hold her over between lunch and dinner. As for me, I have adopted a no snack policy unless I’m really, really hungry. This is a hold-over from my early dieting days when I believed that the hungry feeling was a good thing, and that if my body was hungry, I was “Burning fat.” Of course, this is false, and is actually bad for us. Intermittent fasting is one thing: starving between meals is another.
What ends up happening when I get too hungry between meals is that when I do finally get a chance to eat, I tend to eat more than I otherwise would have. It takes longer for me to get that full stomach feeling, so I eat until that feeling comes and by then, I find I’ve eaten too much. Then comes the pain of having eaten too much food. My stomach doesn’t quite hold as much as it used to.
Does that mean I will stick to this no-snack policy? I don’t think so. I’m going to likely start bringing some nuts with me to have between lunch and dinner to try to reduce the hungry feeling I get. So far, I’ve increased the volume of the food I eat at lunch which has helped me stay sated until at least 4:30-5:00 p.m., and I can typically deal with an hour of slight hunger. It’s not uncomfortable, and when I run in the afternoons, I prefer to run on an empty stomach. Besides, if I am hungry when I start a run, that feeling quickly goes away as my heart rate goes up.
What about you. Do you snack in the afternoons? Late morning before lunch?
It’s simple, really. You can keep making plans and putting off starting your healthy lifestyle to “One day,” or you can make today “Day One.” Day One can even be planning menus and taking action toward getting healthy. It doesn’t mean you have to make your next meal Paleo, Whole30, or Keto. Day One can be going for a walk after work. It can be emptying your pantry of food items with sugar, carbs, beans, and dairy. It can be putting together a grocery list or even going to the store and buying groceries for your new healthy lifestyle. It can be avoiding sugar starting now.
The other weekend, I put up shelves in our master closet for Sherry’s shoes. I had to measure, cut shelves, and then mount them in the closet. This required a lot of going back and forth, bending down, holding up a drill, and a lot of minor physical activity. When I was almost done, Sherry noted that I wasn’t sweating, out of breath, or needing to take breaks from holding the drill up. I hadn’t realized it, but this was the first time in as long as I could remember that I was able to do basic maintenance or construction without feeling like I was going to die afterward. What changed?
Paleo Marine 