How to Stop Snacking

According to a 2015 report from Mintel entitled “Snacking Motivations and Attitudes US 2015”, nearly all Americans (94 percent) snack at least once a day. Dig a bit more on the Internet and you will find out that most people eat snacks to satisfy hunger between meals, or because they want to treat themselves - or because they are bored.

“The most common snacking behavior among U.S. consumers is to eat three meals per day with a few snacks in between meals." Only 6 percent of U.S. consumers never eat snacks.

At Stepbac we think snacking is one of the major causes of overweight. Humans don't need snacks to survive.

We don't need snacks for anything. Snacks really are the cigarettes of the food industry.  Unnecessary, ultra-processed and sweetened to make people addicted to sugar, and to trick people into eating when they are not hungry. Snacks, in our opinion, should be regulated at the very least and many should be banned. Here's why. 

What is a snack?

The definition of the world snack according to renowned dictionary Merriam Webster is “a light meal: food eaten between regular meals”

So a snack is a meals, albeit a small one. The word snack seems to ba a convenient word for the food industry because mostly when one says “snack” it doesn’t feel like ons is “eating a meal” – we're just “having a snack.”

Even though the definition of snacking is to "eat a light meal," we don't use those words and it just doesn’t feel like there is any eating or meals involved in “having a snack” or "snacking" which seems to make it “ok” to snack between meals. We're not eating between meals - we're just having a little snack.

That might explain why so many people snack a few times every day. And, if you start to suspect that these non-eating non-meal “snacks” are in any way linked to eating between meals and gaining weight, then the food industry has an answer to that too; you can switch to “healthy snacks”. You know... like when the smokers switch from smoking regular cigarettes to menthol cigarettes. Much healthier right?

Except menthol cigarettes are now banned in the European Union because they are still cigarettes and still bad for you. Healthy snacks aare still snacks and still unnecessary. -s and we think most, if not all, snacks should be banned too.

Snacking is one of the leading causes of overeating and overweight. No-one needs snacks to power their body or to survive. The word snacks dates back to the 17th century, but the modern snack products and habits are an invention of the food business. 

Most modern snacks are hgh on empty calories and sugar and are a fantastic weapon in the food industry's arsenal because they help keeping  people topped up with sugar which enables sugar to keep fakestarting our natural human hunger cycle going.

So snacks make us gain weight and they make us overeat. Terrible for us and fantastic for food companies who want to sell as much as possible. 

As we explain in our book Stepbac from Overeating, sugar creates fake feelings of hunger. It itricks you into eating/snacking when you don’t have to. No-one needs or want to snack if they are in control of their natural hunger cycle. 

Think about this. Half of people who snack say it's because they are hungry. How can you be hungry mid-mroning of you had breakfast. How can you been hungry for a snack a couple of hours after you had lunch.

You're not genuinely hungry.  You think you’re hungry because you feel hungry. But your body didn't make you feel that way; the sugar in the food did. That's what sugar does best. It has no nutritional value at all. All sugar does is hijack your hatural hunger cycle so that it fakestarts more often. Sugar hits the eat button, when you’re not hungry to trick you into eating/snacking when you don’t have to.

No-one needs or want to snack if they are in control of their natural hunger cycle. So snacks and sugar should be banned and controlled. We don’t need any of them. We don’t need healthy snacks either. If you learn how to let your body handle your hunger, then you don’t need to eat between meals, which is what snacking is.

And by the way, there should be a campaign to remove the word “snack” from our daily language.  Call it what it is. Eating a meal between meals. That's fine if you missed a meal or only had a small regular meal. But if you are eating properly and in control of eating habits, then you should not feel hungry inbetween meals and should not have any urge to snack.

#feelbetter #controlhealth #stepbacmethod

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