Preparing Yummy Snacks that Won't Ruin Your Diet Efforts

Swedish Researchers found that obese women eat 20% more snacks a day than their thinner counterparts. Some of us were raised to not snack between meals, and some of us just sort of snacked all day long. Snacking is potentially a helpful thing while you diet, since eating several smaller meals per day helps your metabolism regulate weight loss. The key is deciding what to have for a snack.

Always start with a glass of water to see how much that addresses your hunger, sometimes you are actually just thirsty and the water will fill you a bit while you decide what to eat for your snack. While Diet Coke can make you bloat and retain water, to help limit your cravings for something sweet and to fill you up, diet sodas are invaluable for snacking. Diet root beers taste fairly good, and an old fashioned root beer float with a scoop of frozen yogurt or low calorie vanilla ice cream in a nice cold diet root beer does not feel like you are depriving yourself at all.

Usually when you are hungry, either everything in sight looks good or you are having a specific craving for salt or chocolate or fried or sweet items. But a large chocolate bar to address your chocolate cravings can be up to 920 calories! Instead, consider instead trying to stick with fruit whenever possible, but if you cannot get rid of your salty chocolate craving consider melting some chocolate and dipping a few salted pretzels, some sliced up fruit like apples and strawberries and some graham crackers to calm your salty sweet chocolate urges.

A good snack is a medium apple with 1 tablespoon of peanut butter - you get the sweet and crunchy plus a salty nutty taste for about 175 calories. It is good for you too since it has fiber and protein, both of which aid in weight loss.

Four whole wheat crackers have that textured crunch factor and some string cheese adds the fat and protein your body is craving for about 150 calories.

Keep soup on hand whenever possible. Progresso has several good tasting soups that are 130 calories a serving. This leaves plenty of room for some other indulgence during the day and as a snack can really keep you full.

If you are dieting, chips are your snack time enemy. Fifty corn chips are about 570 calories. Avoid corn chips and potato chips even if you have an absolute craving. If you must, do whole wheat crackers or a reasonable portion of tortilla chips and low calorie salsa. You can heat the tortilla chips and add the salsa and some grate some cheese on top for flavor and to have that warm toasty taste.

You really can not beat the ten calorie Jello snack. Make sure to make some early in the evening so you have some later when you are craving a snack.

Don't ruin your diet by not preparing in advance to snack in a low calorie manner. Get rid of tempting foods in the house and keep on hand the ingredients for snacks that you will enjoy so that you are not tempted to just grab a bag of chips when you are hungry. Do not skip a meal and make it up in snacks.