In this episode, I explain snacking as a habit that I often see gets in the way of weight loss 

A snacking habit is often the solution to a very calorie restricted approach to weight loss where we feel hungry all the time. We hold on to snacking as our savior from feeling super restricted and hungry all the time.

When you change from restrictive calorie counting to intuitive eating; what changes is that you are now eating to a neutral place where you are are no longer creating overt chronic hunger, and you are responding appropriately to hunger by eating. So, the snacking habit is often no longer needed.

There is no place in which eating when you aren’t hungry fits within intuitive eating.

Snacking as a verb can quickly become a crutch that supports limited thinking about how you can’t handle hunger, or hunger is a problem, or how you ‘need’ a crutch of snacks to ‘make it through’ to the next meal. These stories can feel limiting, foster distrust between your body and your actions, and make weight loss feel harder and take longer than it has to.

Coach Homework:

Think about the relationship that you DO want with snacking both as a noun and a verb. 
1. Does the habit of snacking make sense for you given how you are eating?
2. If you want to keep certain snack foods as part of what you choose to eat, how do you plan to incorporate them specifically? You can plan for some portion of your meal to be snack foods, and/or you can plan for an entire meal that consists of  snack foods.
3. Look at your data, how many ‘snacks’ are you eating in a week’s time? How many of those were eaten without physical hunger present?
4. Do you think removing snacking as a verb could help you in your weight results?  If yes, what is the easiest action you could take to reduce snacking when not hungry?

Just remember that any food eaten without physical hunger present is a form of overeating; and overeating will always be in the way of weight loss or weight maintenance.

What do you think? Visit me @thriveinmidlife on Instagram on the episode 35 post and comment with your ah-ha's, takeaways, homework, and/or questions from this episode, and let’s keep the conversation going.

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Audio engineering by Young Cub Audio.