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Exciting Weight Loss Snack Ideas

Do your snacks stop you from losing weight?

People snack on the worst foods! I think it is the main time that a weight loss program gets compromised.

Have you ever been at work and felt peckish and just ducked down to the local store for a soda or a packet or chips or something else to hold you down until lunch time? Then at lunch you eat something else unhealthy to top it off? I’m sure we have all done this or something similar to this before.

Here are some snack ideas that you should think about adopting if you want to stay on track with your weight loss.

Snacks to avoid

Some of the main snacks to avoid during the day are:

1. Highly processed foods
These are the worst of the whole list because they contain so many of the bad things that you want to avoid. They are not only going to cause you to gain weight, they are going to make you unhealthy.

The main things to watch out for are foods that have been made with a lot of salt and sugar in them. Things like cookies, chips, candy bars and so on. These are bad for you all round.

2. Fast foods
Although many people do not realize it even the fast foods that are marketed as “healthy” can be bad for you and your waistline. Salt is always added by the bucket load to improve the taste and long life of the food and preservatives are added like they are going out of fashion.

What’s more, many of the fast foods that are marketed as being healthy are full of salt and preservatives. Check out some of the nutritional information on the Subway website.

3. Sodas and Flavored Milk
Replacing a whole meal or a nutritious snack with a drink is a bad idea. It is these type of empty calorie snacks that lead us into trouble.

When you eat a meal you want to get as much nutritional benefit out of it as possible. If you fill up on a food that has little to no vitamins, minerals, proteins, etc. but lots of sugar and preservatives then you are setting yourself up for a bad result.

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Healthy weight loss snacks to add

If you are a bit stuck for ideas when it comes to weight loss snacks then try some of these:

1. Peanut butter on celery
An old one but one of my favorites. Get some naturally made peanut butter from your local central market and whack it on a massive long celery stick.

I love the central markets in my city. They are so full of life and vibrancy and almost everything you can buy there is healthy. Different types of naturally made cereals, honeys, the best fruit and veg, huge free range eggs, etc. The best thing is it is really cheap!

Peanut butter is high in protein and some good fats that you need. However, the stuff off the shelf at the supermarket is probably not worth bothering with.

2. Salad with mustard and lemon
Pre make some salad stuff like lettuce, carrot, cucumber, cherry tomatos, etc. and keep it in a container. Then, pack some natural mustard and lemons (that you also bought at the market!) and when it is snack time whack the sauce on the salad and enjoy it.

People think salads always have to be boring but this is so wrong. There are so many amazing Asian ingredients available now and adding them into a normal salad can really spice it up. Jamie’s Oliver is the most popular chef in the world. He brings some craziness to the cooking scene and I love him. In his books you can find some really amazing salad recipes that take 5 minutes to make and taste amazing. If there is anything unhealthy in the recipe just skip it or replace it with something similar that is healthy.

Some of my favorite salads from his books are:

- red wine vinegar and cherry tomato pasta salad
- fig salad
- thai beef salad with chilli and lime
- fetta and mozarella salad with so much stuff in it I can’t remember!

3. Vegetable soup
I bought a really slick little thermos the other day at a fancy store that was closing down. It is winter over here in Australia and I am getting into my vegetable soups like never before. We make up a big pot of vegetable soup with as much lentils and beans and colored veggies as we can fit in and keep it for snacks during the week. Heat it up before work and it’ll stay piping hot until snack time.

Good for fiber, energy, natural protein, vitamins, minerals… the list is endless!

Conclusion
The best thing Jamie Oliver teaches people about cooking is that sometimes you have to throw away the recipe and go out on your own with your own ideas and creativity to make an amazing meal. In the same way I think sometimes we need to challenge the ideas of what is a normal “snack” or “meal” and create something exciting and healthy and fun.

I’d love to see some comments with some ideas….

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