Snacking and Intermittent Fasting
“Do you eat snacks?”
“How do you deal with hunger?”
“Don’t you ever have a psychological need to eat?”
These are among the questions I get when people about the Intermittent Fasting regimen I’ve been using, and which has helped me to lose 58 lbs. in the last number of months.
Here are the answers . . .
Snacking
With the exceptions noted below, I don’t snack.
The basic principle of using Intermittent Fasting for weight loss is that you don’t eat for significant periods of time.
This causes your blood sugar to go down, which causes your insulin to go down, which causes your body to start burning fat.
It follows that one of the things you don’t want to do while fasting is snacking.
This goes against the “grazing” strategy that has been promoted in many diet circles in recent years—whereby, in addition to eating three meals a day, you also eat multiple snacks.
In theory, this is to keep you from eating too much at mealtime because you’re not as hungry, but my experience—and that of many others—is that it hinders rather than helps weight loss.
If you snack and take in a significant number of calories, it causes your blood sugar to spike, which causes your body to release insulin, which causes you to store fat rather than burn it.
By not snacking as part of an Intermittent Fasting regimen, you let your body stop burning food and start burning what’s stored in your fat cells.
This can still leave us with the issues of hunger and a psychological need to eat, however.
Curbing Hunger
As I’ve written before, I’ve been amazed at how little hunger I’ve experienced with Intermittent Fasting.
It seems that hunger is primarily a matter of habit: When you’re body is used to getting food, that’s when it turns on the hunger signal.
When you break out of your ordinary habits, it only takes the body 2-3 days to adjust to the new routine and stop turning on hunger when you don’t want it.
Most of the time. There can be exceptions.
So what do you do then?
A classic piece of advice is to drink non-caloric liquids.
This advice has been around for a long time—so long that it’s reflected in the Catholic Church’s religious discipline of fasting: Drinking water to relieve hunger does not break a religious fast.
Water isn’t the only non-caloric liquid, though. If you’re not doing a fast as part of your religious requirements, there are other options, such as coffee and tea, both of which can have additional health benefits.
(It is, of course, important that you don’t add lots of milk or sugar to them, or you’ll get the insulin spike you’re trying to avoid.)
Diet colas also are typically calorie-free, though there questions about how good they are for you—particularly if they contain artificial sweeteners like Aspartame. (Fortunately, there are now diet sodas that are sweetened with the natural sweetener stevia.)
Whatever non-caloric beverage you choose, it can fill up your stomach, making you feel like you’ve eaten something, and thus help to relieve hunger.
What About Low-Cal Liquids?
Many advocates of Intermittent Fasting (including Dr. Jason Fung) have also recommended bone broth, which isn’t no-calorie but which is low-calorie.
It allegedly has nutrients which can be very good for you, though this isn’t clear to me.
What is clear is that it doesn’t have a large number of calories and so won’t produce a large insulin spike. It thus shouldn’t interfere significantly with weight loss.
On the same reasoning, I’ve also seen Intermittent Fasting proponents give an okay to drinking (unsweetened) almond milk, which is also quite low-cal.
Used in moderation, these low-calorie fluids likely won’t interfere materially with weight loss, though your own experience is the best judge of that.
Curbing the Psychological Need to Eat
I do sometimes have a psychological need to eat—just the desire to bite and chew, particularly something crunchy—when it isn’t time for me to eat, and when I’m not hungry.
Sometimes just doing a self-check and realizing I’m not hungry is enough to let me put the desire aside.
Sometimes drinking a no- or low-calorie liquid is enough (particularly if it’s a hot or warm beverage; I don’t personally have a taste for coffee, but hot green tea or hot bone broth can be satisfying).
But I’ve also been experimenting with another idea.
Safe Snacking?
When I first started researching Intermittent Fasting, I was surprised to find some advocates saying that they’d allow themselves very small snacks.
One gentleman, who was a fitness trainer, allowed himself an occasional snack of up to 35 calories.
After I discovered the recommendations of low-cal liquids like bone broth and almond milk, that got me thinking: A serving of bone broth (depending on what kind you get) can be around 40 calories. And 12 oz. of unsweetened almond milk is about the same (45 calories).
So if those are acceptable, so should some solid foods in the same calorie range.
Now, I wouldn’t recommend sweets in that range. A tablespoon of table sugar has 48 calories, but—being sugar—it will spike your insulin more than just about anything else.
But what about foods that naturally have a good bit of fiber to blunt the effect of whatever calories they have?
Fiber
You could, of course, eat pure dietary fiber—which is indigestible and so has no calories.
Thus you could take fiber capsules or powder—along with enough liquid to prevent it from blocking you up.
That might satisfy hunger, but it wouldn’t really help with the psychological need to bite and chew.
You could make crackers out of fiber (add water to fiber powder, roll out, bake or let dry), though I haven’t found a good source of pre-made fiber crackers.
However, there are foods which are both low-calorie and high-fiber . . .
Veggies
Certain vegetables would work on the above strategy.
For example, an 8 oz. can of green beans contains two servings of 20 calories each, for a total of 40 calories. (I prefer the French-style cut of green beans, but you may prefer ones cut the ordinary way.)
Fresh green beans are also an option, and they have crunch if you don’t cook them. A cup of 1/2 inch pieces of green beans has only 31 calories.
Celery also works. An 8 inch, medium stalk of celery has only 6 calories! It has a nice crunch, though not much flavor (and it has those strings).
Another vegetable—which I like even better for these purposes—is bell pepper.
A medium bell pepper has a total of 24 calories, and so a few slices of one would fit well within the range we’re talking about.
It not only crunches, it also has a bit of taste and even spice, while lacking the strings that celery has.
Bell pepper has become my preferred low-cal veggie for snacking (when I snack, which isn’t often).
And I can offer you one more twist . . .
Spices and Sauces?
Vegetables can be a little boring by themselves, so is there anything we can do to spice them up?
Sure! Add spices! One can add spices, such as salt, NoSalt/Nu-Salt (potassium chloride), chili powder, or whatever you like, as long as it doesn’t have notable calories.
And that Mexican Tajin (lime-chili-salt) spice is really tasty!
You could also add no- or low-calorie sauces, such as lemon juice or vinegar. In fact, those might help with weight loss (particularly the vinegar, which has the effect of blunting any carbs in the vegetables; apple cider vinegar has become popular for this reason in weight loss circles).
There’s also a company named Walden Farms which produces a line of low-calorie sauces.
They advertise their produces as having 0 calories, but it’s really 3-4 calories per 2 tablespoon serving (under U.S. labeling laws, you get to round any number of calories per serving under 5 down to 0).
One of my favorites is eating red bell pepper slices (or any bell pepper slices) with Walden Farm’s chocolate dip. The slightly-spicy and sweet combination is really good.
You can also find Walden Farms in typical supermarkets in the diet section.
Practical Help
The overall key to all of these solutions is keeping the absolute number of calories small.
However, avoiding refined carbohydrates—such as sugar and flour—and adding fiber are also important.
Always check the nutrition of whatever you’re planning to consume to make sure it’s low enough in calories (things like butter, cheese, and nuts—which are healthful in themselves, are high in calories and thus don’t make good snacks while Intermittent Fasting).
Also, everyone’s body is different, and different people will be able to handle different amounts of low-calorie snacks of the type described here. Your own experimentation and experience will be your best guide.
The good news is that between no-calorie and low-calorie liquids and solids, there are practical helps—both for dealing with hunger and the psychological need to eat when doing Intermittent Fasting.
