Archive for April, 2009

To choose healthy snack foods, think about variety, balance and moderation. Each day you’ll want some dairy foods, a little bit of carbs, protein, omega oils, raw foods, fruits and vegetables. Try to choose food snacks that are between 100 to 200 calories and aim for 4-5 mini-wheels every couple of hours or so.

This will help prevent those out-of-control cravings and will ensure your body doesn’t store an “emergency fund” of fat as a reserve. To get you through the rest of the day, you need the right snack food to keep you motivated and eating healthy.

healthy snack foods
Healthy foods don’t always have to taste like Styrofoam. For a snack, bagels and bran muffins taste pretty darn good! A 200-calorie bagel will give you 11% of your daily recommended iron, which is particularly good for women who don’t always retain iron so well.

Additionally, you’ll get solid doses of B vitamins, like niacin, riboflavin and thiamin. You may be tempted to load on the cream cheese, but there are delicious flavored skim ricottas that come in blueberry and strawberry that might be a healthier choice. A bran muffin delivers three grams of fiber and 1.8 mg of iron (10% of your daily value).

Sometimes you’re super hungry and a snack food like granola bars or apples just won’t do. Lunch healthy diet snacks, like Mexican-style beans and tuna fish will fill you right up and give you the energy you need to make it through the day. Another great vegetable is the carrot, which will satisfy your vitamin A needs for the whole day.

healthy weight
A good way to eat them may be to mash them up or heat them into a creamy dip or wrap them up into a burrito. Bean soup or teriyaki bean dishes are other delicious alternatives. Three ounces of tuna canned in water is a great way to get B12 (32% of the daily dose) and a great serving of protein.

Of course choosing the right snack food like raw foods alone won’t help you with your weight loss goals. You’ll also need to drink a glass of water each time you snack to help regulate your body and help you to feel satisfied. Exercising 3-5 times each week is also essential in keeping the body machine working optimally.

Lastly, try to vary the textures and tastes for your snack food choices to keep your senses intrigued.

Portable healthy snacks are the latest trend in the snacking industry. Wrapped stringed cheese, Go-Gurt (portable yogurt), individually packaged vegetable portions with low-fat dip and 100-calorie potato chips or cookies are helping us to eat healthy, even when we feel we have no time to do so.

To maintain a healthy weight and reduce our risk for heart disease or cancer, we have to be more mindful of eating a balanced diet packed with nutrients and controlling our calorie count. Grab-and-go fruit snacks can prevent us from skipping breakfast, while raw foods, like carrots or broccoli spears, prevent us from eating that second helping at dinner. Forget the dreaded food coma; small meals are where it’s at!

healthy snack foods
Do you rarely have time for a pleasant sit-down breakfast? Luckily, there are a number of morning-friendly, healthy food snacks to wake up your metabolism and provide you with the nutrients you need to get a fresh start.

For a quick solution, try half a peanut butter sandwich on whole-wheat bread, low-sugar whole-grain granola bars (with at least 3 grams of fiber), 4-6 ounces of low-fat yogurt, some high-fiber cereal with dried fruit or a bowl of instant oatmeal with sliced peaches, if you’ve got five minutes.

Throughout the day, nothing kills our motivation like a heavy 30-minute lunch. Instead, healthy snacks can keep us pumped throughout the day. Dietician-recommended options include a handful of unsalted or lightly salted dry-roasted nuts, a single serving pack of unsweetened applesauce with raw foods, a small apple with two tablespoons of peanut butter or one ounce of low-fat cheese, half a string cheese with a few pieces of fruit or whole grain crackers or pretzels with low-fat cheese.

Raw foods, like vegetables, can be jazzed up with nacho cheese, low-fat ranch or no-fat veggie dip. Lunch snacks manufacturers have been making portable individual packets of carrots, celery, apple slices, nuts, low-fat cheese and other goodies to promote eating healthy.

healthy weight
“Look for snacks that contain protein with healthy carbohydrates and fats, and eat your snacks slowly so they fill you up,” advises Baylor nutrition Professor Suzy Weems, PhD. There are many healthy snacks to choose from, so it can be easy to lose track of how our healthy diet is stacking up throughout the day.

A free community website, www.sparkspeople.com, allows users to enter the food they’ve eaten during the day into a database, which tallies up protein, calories, fat and other statistics to help keep track of weight loss goals.