snacking

We are excited to share one of our fave stories from Fitness Magazine here on FitSugar!

Don't you ever wish you could take a peek in the pantry or gym of the fitness and diet pros you see on TV to see if they really practice what they preach? We do, too! That's why we asked Jillian Michaels, celebrity personal trainer, author, motivational expert, and soon-to-be mom (!), to share her top snack picks that keep her energy high on even the busiest of days.

"These snacks are quick, easy, and they all taste good. Plus they're preservative-free, contain no trans fats, MSG, high-fructose corn syrup, artificial flavors, colors, or sweeteners," Michaels says.

Hummus and veggie sticks."This is an incredibly healthy snack that's filling and tasty," she says. The protein from the chickpeas in the hummus and the fiber from the veggies will keep you satisfied.

One hard-boiled egg and one piece of fruit. This combo offers an ideal proportion of healthy fat, protein, and carbohydrates.

Barbecue or sweet potato popchips. "A serving of popchips is packed with flavor and a great savory, salty crunch," Michaels raves, and the 100-calorie bags are handy for on-the-go eating.

Read on for the rest of Michaels's healthy snack picks!

More from Fitness:

The Secret to Jillian Michaels's Amazing Arms

Makeover Mania: the Best Celebrity Body Makeovers

The Top 10 Workout DVDs of 2011

We had a chance to chat with Dr. Dean Ornish, founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute, over the weekend at the Sundance Film Festival. He's a featured health expert in the new documentary, Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare, which examines the current state of our health care system and provides hopeful solutions based on lifestyle and dietary changes. A big proponent of chronic disease prevention through healthy habits, Dr. Ornish offered up some sound advice and simple changes we can all make to improve our health — chocolate included!

FitSugar: What do you think is the most simple, overlooked thing people can do for their health?
Dr. Ornish: Love more. What you eat, how you respond to stress, how much you exercise, whether or not you smoke, how much love and support you have. But of all those, probably the love and support. Study after study has shown that people who are lonely and depressed are 10 times for likely to die or get sick. You're more likely to smoke and abuse yourself if you're lonely and depressed. It's not enough to just work at a behavioral level and give people information; you have to work at a deeper level.

FS: Everyone has days where they don't want to exercise, how do you motivate yourself on those days?
DO: If I really don't want to, I don't, and then I'll do more the next day. What matters is your overall way of eating and living. So if you don't do something one day, do a little more the next. If I don't have time to meditate for an hour, I'll do it for a minute. It's not all or nothing at any age, and it's really up to you.

FS: People like to stick with their daily habits; how do you get individuals to change their behavior towards healthier choices?
DO: It's about helping people connect the dots between what they do and how they feel, and giving them the tools. Fear is not a sustainable motivator. You can scare people into changing for a few weeks, but not for very long. When you make changes, most people find that they feel so much better so quickly, it reframes the reason for changing from fear of dying to joy of living, and that's what makes it sustainable. Also, to realize that it's not all or nothing. Instead of saying this is good food and this is bad food, and don't ever eat meat, be a vegetarian — I never tell people that. I used to a long time ago and then I realized I was actually not only not helping people, but making it worse. It turns people off because even more than being healthy, people want to be free, so when you tell people what to do they stop listening. If you eat meat five times a day, eat it three times a day or have a meatless Monday and see how you feel. If you don't exercise one day, do a little more the next. Then you start to feel better and then it comes out of your own experience, not because some doctor or some book told you.

To find out Dr. Ornish's surprising favorite indulgence and his take on snacking just read more.

The end of the day, at dinner and beyond, is a good time to assess your day to be mindful about your healthy goals. And while it's not the time to beat yourself up if you weren't able to get to the gym or you snuck more than a few pieces of candy during the day, you can end the day on a high note by making sure you hit a few more healthy to-dos. So before your head hits the pillow, here are a few ways to sneak in a little more healthy habits into your day, before it ends.

Fill up on your daily nutrients: If you've spent all day eating vitamin-empty foods, don't continue that track when it's dinner time. Make dinner the time of day when you fill in the holes in your diet before it's bedtime. Fill up on nutrient-dense superfoods (try getting some of these in-season superfoods from your local grocery store), and always ensure that you have these healthy pantry staples stocked up so a fast, healthy dinner is only minutes away. Find your recommended daily intake of vitamins and minerals here.

Stop the snacking train: You may think that a day of mindless snacking may be a time to chock it up to a waste of a day, but you can still make the most of even the most gluttonous of days. A recent study found that people who snacked in the morning were less likely to lose weight than those who didn't snack, because those who ended up snacking were doing so even when they weren't hungry. Mindless snacking can happen any time of the day, so if you're relaxing in front of the TV and suddenly have a jonesing for some chips, gauge if you're really hungry before you head to the kitchen.

More ways to salvage a not-so-healthy day after the break.

The next time you reach for that midmorning snack after breakfast, think about it: are you really hungry? If the answer is no, that unneeded morning snack may be the reason why you're not losing weight, according to a new study.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, followed 123 overweight women on weight-loss plans and found that the women who ate a snack between breakfast and lunch lost seven percent of their body weight over a year, while those who didn't snack in the morning lost more — 11 percent of their body weight during the same time period.

The women who snacked in the morning, between 10:30 and 11:30 a.m., ended up snacking more frequently throughout the entire day. Researchers think that the morning snackers lost less weight because they were eating unneeded calories: reaching for a snack during the short time between breakfast and lunch could be motivated less by hunger and more by mindless eating and could be a sign of less healthy eating habits overall, they said.

Not all morning snacking is bad, especially if you are an early riser, since the amount of hours between your breakfast and lunch — or the fact that you had a light breakfast — may necessitate it. And snacking, in general, is a great tool for weight loss (read three healthy reasons to snack here). But the study shows how mindless eating and other bad eating habits can affect your bottom line when trying to lose weight. Here's a reminder: think before you reach for that handful of pretzels tomorrow morning!

Snacking is often seen as the opposite of healthy, but in fact, it can be a powerful tool in helping you stay on track. Whether you want to lose weight or just maintain, here are three reasons why you should snack, and how to do it healthfully.

• Prevent overeating: Waiting until you're ravenous to eat is a recipe for disaster. Suddenly, everything starts looking good, and you don't want to wait to prep a healthier option. By eating a low-calorie snack that fills you up, it's easier to say no to overindulging, and not only that, snacking helps keep your metabolism revved up as well!
• Ensure you're getting your nutrients: It can be hard to meet all your nutritional needs in just three meals a day. If you snack healthy with fresh foods, you'll be able to fill in any nutritional gaps you have from just eating meals. By making produce a priority when it's time to snack, you'll be well on your way to hitting that five-servings-a-day goal.
• Keep your energy up: Snacking on the right combination of protein and complex carbs can beat an afternoon slump and help get you through the day. Snacking regulates your blood sugar to combat a drop in energy, which can be the difference between skipping an evening workout or powering through one before dinner. If you normally experience the afternoon slump, here are some healthy energy-boosting snack ideas.

Of course, the downside of snacking is that you risk eating way more calories than you need, often because you don't realize how many calories are really in that handful of chips. Need a snacking makeover? Read on for how to make snacking work for you.

Although eating slower may help you eat less, it may not positively affect to your snacking habits — another potentially weight-gaining habit. A new study found that, the amount of food and drink being equal, spreading out a meal over time and eating the same meal in 30 minutes has no bearing on whether or not a person chooses to snack after a meal. So, picture a slow, four-course meal at a restaurant and the same food consumed in a 30-minute time span for comparison's sake.

These results shouldn't be confused with previous knowledge though, it's still true that it takes the body 20 minutes to register satiety, which means that eating quickly could lead you to overeat — or at least eat more than your body needs. But what the study did discover is that even though people said they felt fuller after a longer meal, they didn't actually behave that way when presented with more food.

Snack cravings or not, eating slowly has other advantages, too. Fast eaters are also at risk for acid reflux and indigestion (so check out some tips for slowing down if you're an unintentional fast eater). The moral of the study: the volume and caloric makeup of the food you eat will determine how full you feel, regardless of how fast you eat it; watch your portions and choose healthy snacks when you do eat between meals.

This is your year to get healthy and fit, and FitSugar is here to help. We've created weekly challenges for our Get Fit For 2011 giveaway that will help you stay on track.

This week's challenge: Share your favorite healthy snack in the Get Fit For 2011 community group. Include a stellar photo of your dish, and we might just post it on FitSugar!

By meeting this challenge, you will be automatically entered for a chance to win our weekly prize — a $100 Nike gift card and our grand prize! At the end of the three-month challenge, we will pick a grand prize winner at random from all of the weekly challenge entries. Remember, the more you participate, the more chances you have to win the grand prize: a Get Fit Boot Camp in Los Angeles that includes a round-trip flight to Los Angeles, a four-night stay at the W Hollywood, a personal training session with celebrity trainer Jeanette Jenkins, a nutrition consultation with C & J Nutrition, and four workout sessions with our very own FitSugar editors that will be featured on PopSugar LivingTV.

If you're ready to join the fun and feel the community support, log in and head directly to Get Fit For 2011. Need a little help making a blog post? Here are tips on posting in our group.

You have until 11:59 p.m. PST on Sunday, Feb. 27, to complete your second challenge. Ready. Set. Snack attack!

The following post was written by C&J Nutrition, a duo of registered dietitians based in NYC and LA, to help you get a handle on this week's Get Fit For 2011 giveaway snacking challenge.

We are big fans of snacking. Why do we love snacks? Our top 3 reasons are . . .

1. Knowing we'll be having a snack in between one meal and the next makes it easier to stop eating a meal when we're "satisfied" versus "full."
2. Snacking keeps us from arriving at meal time ravenous — helping to avoid "grab the first thing I see and eat a lot of it" situations.
3. Snacks help us fit in nutrients we may not otherwise get enough of in our meals. Low on calcium-rich foods in meals? Try yogurt as a snack. Not fitting many veggies into meals? Pair some crudites with hummus. Short on fruit? Dip apple slices into peanut butter.

We're regular snackers and suggest AT LEAST one snack per day to all of our clients. We recommend pairing two of the three main nutrients (carbohydrates, fat, protein) together into a snack. Other than this general premise, we get pretty creative with our snacks and hope you take some of our ideas and give them your own awesome spin.

• Apple slices with peanut buttery dip
• Baby carrots and grape tomatoes with hummus: Pair 1/2 cup grape tomatoes with 1/2 cup baby carrots and 1/4 cup Tribe Origins hummus. (Tribe doesn't use any artificial preservatives!)

Keep on reading for more snack ideas!

I'm always up for a good snack, especially if it's a healthy one that tastes delicious. While I'm all for portion-controlling my snack time, I'm not so good at going the even healthier route and making my own snacks, unless it's a simple one like sliced fruit or a bowl of popcorn. That's OK though, because now, like everything, if I want an easy and low-calorie snack recipe, there's an app for that.

The idea of the iPhone Shake a Snack app (free until Dec. 12 on the App Store) is simple: shake it for a random healthy recipe involving just three ingredients. The app looks like a slot machine and the pictures of each food are cute so it's a fun diversion for a few minutes.

If you just want to get down to business, however, you can deselect ingredients you don't like, choose from savory or sweet options, and save your favorites for quick access. You can also switch from cute picture mode to a text list of ingredients and lock down an ingredient if you know you want to use it. The recipes also list the calories in each ingredient.

I love how simple the app's premise and recipes are, and it's a fun way to try combinations you may not come up with on your own, like walnut, mustard, and swiss cheese rolls (136 calories) or a sweet mix of pretzels, peanut butter, and honey (267 calories). And, since it's conveniently on your phone, it's always handy for when that package of cookies is calling your name!

I'm in the midst of a snacking revelation. Instead of eating Ben & Jerry's ice cream straight from the container, I've been putting it in a bowl. Total game changer. I know that you're probably thinking, "Big deal, Fit. Most people eat out of bowls!" But when it comes to snacks, a lot of people do eat straight from the container. I see it every day: the mister eating chips from a bag, or friends munching on crackers directly from the box.

Think about it; when you grab snacks from a box or bag, it's a bit like mindless eating. There's no sense of how much or how little you're eating. Also, there's no clear end in sight. Putting snacks on a plate helps you practice portion control and allows you to engage with your food more. The more you engage, the more likely you'll be to make healthier eating choices. So the next time you're snacking, put it on a plate. Chips, cookies, popcorn, whatever! If you see what you're eating, you're more likely to be accountable about your diet.