Snack

“They give you more snacks when you’re nine.”

--from Feed by Mira Grant

Now that many of my friends have children, I have noticed that there are certain things that all parents seem to carry with them at all times. A change of clothes, or at least an extra shirt, for when the one the child is wearing inevitably gets wet. A toy of some sort, be it some sort of electronic device or a stuffed animal or some other source of distraction. And always, always, always, parents carry snacks.

Children seem to be offered snacks a dozen times a day. I am usually jealous. I love food, and if someone offered me snacks all day long, I can pretty much guarantee that I would eat all of them. But the really fascinating part of this is that children often turn the snacks down. (I try to refrain from asking if I can eat the snacks they don’t want.)

I read an article once that claimed that we should all try to eat like young children. A two-year-old, claimed the article, only eats when s/he is hungry, pushes away the parts that don’t taste as good, and stops eating once s/he feels full. We should all relearn how to eat intuitively. Eat when you’re hungry, and stop when you are full. That makes sense, right?

There are parts of this philosophy that I agree with. I absolutely believe in the idea of only eating when you are hungry. While I am not much of a stress eater, I am very much a boredom eater. I’ve been working lately on not using food as a method of procrastination. I have been surprised to find out that simply asking myself if I am hungry really helps me manage my food intake.

On the other hand, I think that the dieters of the world often miss the flip side of this. Yes, you should only eat when you are hungry, but that also means that there is no reason to feel guilty about eating when you are hungry. Even if you get hungry many times each day.

When I was in middle and school, I often gave up eating between meals during Lent. Snacking felt like an indulgence that I could and should give up. And perhaps, at the time, it was. I don’t remember feeling hungry or anxiously waiting for meals to come around. I only remember having to turn down $1 candy bars or handfuls of fruit snacks that would have tasted good. I sometimes would go to school without breakfast, eat nothing until lunch, then go to the rest of my classes, play practice, and drumline rehearsal. I wouldn’t get home to eat dinner until 9 pm.

I think back on that schedule, and it seems unhealthy. Yet, I don’t remember feeling hungry all the time. So perhaps it was an okay schedule for me. I had no time to boredom eat.

Now, however, I can’t imagine eating so little in a day. I wake up in the morning, and though I usually force myself to work out before my mind realizes what I am doing to my body, I am usually hungry immediately afterward. I eat a bowl of oatmeal with peanut butter mixed in, a piece of fruit, a yogurt cup, and a cup of coffee at around 6 am. By the time I get to work at 8 am, I am so hungry that I will eat a granola bar. By 10 am, I am hungry again and will usually eat an apple. At that point, I usually make it to 11:30 am, when I eat a salad or sandwich for lunch.

So, on a typical day now, I am eating as much food before noon as I did in an entire day in high school. This really bothered me, at first. I tried to eat less for breakfast, or cut one of the morning snacks, thinking it couldn’t be right to eat so much in the morning. But when I did that, I was so hungry at work that it was affecting my concentration. My conscious brain was telling me not to eat. But eventually, I gave in to my grumbling stomach and ate the snacks.

Once I learned to embrace morning snacks, the rest of my eating schedule changed too. After my early lunch, I am usually good until I eat dinner around 5 pm. Then, I usually don’t get hungry for the rest of the day. The bedtime snack, which was a fixture of my childhood and adolescence, became the one I had to learn to skip. I would always think I wanted one, out of routine or boredom, but the fact is that I am rarely hungry then.

There are many reasons why it makes sense that my food needs changed, the most obvious being that I have become a morning runner in my adulthood. But the point I am trying to make is not in the physiology of the matter.

My point is this: Snacks are often thought of as being appropriate for children and not adults. I don’t agree with that. Snacks are important and even helpful. There are just two, equally important things to keep in mind. The one that everyone talks about is that you shouldn’t snack if you aren’t hungry. Kids turn snacks down when they don’t feel hungry for them, and adults should, in most instances, do the same.

The equally important flip side, though, is that there are plenty of occasions when adults do get hungry between meals and therefore shouldn’t feel guilty about snacking. Eating more in the morning, in the end, led me to eat much less in the afternoons and evenings. I’d be willing to bet that similar patterns would happen for others.

Snacking is not the devil. Still, it is harder than it sounds to only eat snacks when you are hungry. Like I said before, if I had someone offering me snacks a dozen times a day, I would probably eat them all. Lucky, I guess, that my mom is no longer constantly around with her parent survival kit.