Snack Attack: How to stop sabotaging your effort
Over the last 12 years of working with athletes on their lifestyle and nutrition, a big stumbling block is snacking or mindless eating. From a practical standpoint, snacking makes it nearly impossible to keep track of your daily intake. It is what will throw your perceived 2,000 calories per day up to 3,000+ in a day without you even feeling the difference.
And the urge to snack is such a defeating feeling for those who are intentionally trying to change their diet or their body composition.
“It’s not your fault…It’s not your fault….”
Good Will Hunting is a movie that may be out of the public consciousness for most. But it was written by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and it stars the two of them alongside Robin Williams.
It’s a great watch.
Williams plays a therapist and in one (powerful) scene, he moves Matt Damon (and me) to tears by simply saying, over and over again, in a slow, unobtrusive tone, “it’s not your fault…it’s not your fault…”
I think about that a lot.
And when it comes to snacking (and many many others things in your life that you then blame yourself for), it’s not your fault.
- Snacking is conditioned. We are programmed by commercials to believe snacking is a thing. We have entire aisles of our grocery stores labeled as snack food aisles. So how on earth would we not think snacking is normal?
- Snacking is useful. We need to eat. We need calories for energy whether for workouts or just life.
- Snacking is comfort. I don’t know if you know this, but life is chaos and it will bury you. Snacking absolutely becomes a moment of comfort for so many of us. We grab a snack so we can feel like we did something on our terms. Something that gives us even the tiniest hit of dopamine.
Now, let’s be way too serious for a second. When I began to come to terms with being an alcoholic, I at some point finally understood (it was not right away), that it was not my fault that I had the relationship with alcohol that I did, but now that I was aware of that, it was my responsibility to operate moving forward.
I do not get to play the victim, but shaming myself also serves no purpose.
So how do you move forward now that you know you are not just mentally weak with no will power? How do you set yourself up to succeed against the urge to snack?
It really is simple:
1) Practical: Eat intentionally. We get the strongest hunger pangs when we do not eat. Well, you should never be hungry. It should rarely get to that point.
When you are eating based on your goals, there is far less opportunity to snack. You are eating early and often when you are trying to lose weight or gain muscle. And you are excited to eat certain foods that you know will get you to where you want to be. Finally, you know there is more food coming because you know when your next meal is going to be.
All of this lowers the urge to snack from a practical sense. If you are on track to hit your daily grams of protein, you are really unlikely to find yourself starving at any one point in your day.
2) Psychological: Snacking is not for comfort. I know, stepping on some potential toes with that one. Comfort should be derived from the confidence that you are on the path you chose.
The tv commercial will tell you that nobody should say your handful of M&Ms is not allowed. It’s your life. Live it. But the commercial doesn’t care about you. And the commercial doesn’t explain why one handful will more likely be 3 or 4 across your day.
And also, an important note, changing your body composition does not mean you have to remove the soul from food. Too often the argument against eating well is that you deserve flavor. But again delicious flavor is very different than flavors cooked up in a lab and used in highly processed snack foods.
Alcohol is an easier example here because the consequences are within hours of the enjoyment. You don’t sleep well, you lose at least half your net today to a hang over, and you eat like crap. But hey, those two hours of good vibes on a Tuesday were worth it.
The food version of a hangover is weight gained or body fat maintained while you are otherwise working hard to change it. Short term “pleasure” rarely leads to big (positive) results.
Instead, find comfort in the journey you are on. Look around you and be proud that you are not accepting mediocrity like those around you. That you are choosing to be better for yourself. Be excited about the results you are seeing and the destination you are going to get to.
The number one thing you can do to lower the amount of snacking you do is to have a plan you are following. Without a plan your mind has no reason to not push you toward snacking.
And if you would like help creating a plan that fits your starting point, your goals, and your life, we would love to help you! Send me an email below.
Let me know if you have any questions!
-Ben