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Hey everyone, Mikki here. You are tuning into another Mini Mikkipedia Monday and today I want to address the habit of snacking. And I say habit because for a lot of people this is generally what it is. So snacking, which if you were to define it, is any food or beverage

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I'm thinking much more about smoothies and milky drinks and soft drinks which have calories. So these things would all be considered a snack. Now there was a time, many many years ago, decades ago, where snacking even wasn't a thing. We would have our breakfast, lunch and dinner and that is where we would get our calories.

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and food production all encouraged this new habit of snacking. However, it wasn't just our change in our lifestyle or situation. Also in the 1950s, food companies and manufacturers really got on board. So there was this change in our food production as well. And with the rise of television and advertising, companies began marketing snacks as convenient,

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This helped to further normalize the idea of snacking between meals. It is an increasingly common practice in the Western world, and I certainly see it all of the time, and it makes people that really don't need those additional calories. According to a report by a market research firm Mintel, 94% of Americans, which is where a lot of our data come from, snack at least once a day.

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50% snacking two to three times per day. And in terms of sort of population statistics, it can be difficult to compare the percentage of people who ate snacks in the 1950s, for example, because we don't really have data, compared to today. However, we can look at trends in food consumption over time. And according to the data from the USDA, the average American consumed

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around 15% of total calories, and by 2010 the average American was consuming 2,536 calories per day with snacks accounting for over 24% of total calories. So that's a real shift not only in energy intake, but in the number of calories that are coming from outside of meal time. And I probably don't need to tell you why this is a concern.

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particularly with the types of snacks that people are eating, which are contributing to those increase in calories. Because for one, we certainly know more active than what we were back in the 1950s. And if anything, I think we could probably categorically say that our overall energy expenditure has reduced. Now, obviously I'm not talking about structured activity, or maybe I'm not talking about you and what you do in your lifestyle,

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population perspective, we are way less active than what we used to be. And yet, we are taking in more calories outside of meal times from food choices, which are much more likely to be higher carbohydrate, to be easy to overeat, so hyper palatable, to be manufactured in a way that is able to satisfy a craving at the time, but also could

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in general and increasing the cravings for those types of food. And you know, snacking is not only a sort of much more common and accepted practice. You can snack wherever you go, like, and if you think about just the proliferation of where you can buy food from, it's not just the supermarket and the dairy or the corner store anymore. You can go into like Zara and Glacins and bookstores.

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purchase food and this never used to be the case. So snacks are not only way more convenient, they are way more accessible as well. What I will preface this by saying is that if you have really high energy requirements, if you have demanding jobs in terms of what you do on a day-to-day basis, so if you're in, you know, you work on your feet, you either clean or you're a laborer or

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you can do is actually grab food as you are sort of going. Like, I want to be clear that I'm not suggesting that absolutely no one should snack, but the statistics are showing us that so many more people are snacking and taking in way more calories than they need. And this is a really good area to target. And certainly the people that I work with, one of the, in my fat loss sort of programs and in my one-on-ones, one of that sort of

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drill down on is in snacking. And people often snack not because they need it, but just because it is what they do. And when they list their day's eating behaviors, morning and afternoon tea often feature as accepted sort of meal times when it's not necessary from a dietary energy perspective for them to have these added meals. Particularly if you are, like a lot of us, sitting in front of a computer, not really expending a lot of energy.

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One, out of hunger. I mean this is one of the most obvious reasons people snack is because they're hungry and need to fuel their bodies between meals. Now the reason they need that snack is often in my clinical experience because they haven't eaten enough calories in the previous meal or they haven't balanced those calories out so you don't have a good amount of protein and or fat

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requirements to actually sustain you for four or five hours. So often it's an under eating at that earlier meal that then leads to a snack later on. And it might not be that most recent meal that wasn't big enough. Often we blame lunch for what breakfast did or didn't do. And breakfast is such a key meal to help stabilize blood sugar,

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really set you up well for the day. And if you don't, if you're just having your toast and your wheat bix or your oats with nothing else sort of added to help buffer that blood sugar response to these foods, then you may well be able to get through to lunch, but most people start falling down in the afternoon. So it's not just the most recent meal that

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previous meal and that's something known as that second meal effect when we're thinking about it from a research perspective and looking at literature around protein intakes and things like that. So another sort of reason why people snack is pure convenience, you know, like snacks can be eaten on the go, grab that muesli bar at work when you're just sort of standing around chatting to your mates or you're going into the staff room for a coffee and there's just like biscuits or whatever sitting there.

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TV and I actually would put this, I've said convenience but that's actually a real habitual thing like we often sort of stack one behavior with another so sit down watch Netflix, have a bowl of ice cream, go to the movies, always get the popcorn and again I'm not saying that these are necessarily bad however if you are struggling to lose weight in your snacking then these are areas which are so handy and so good for you to be able to explore.

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cravings is another reason why people snack. They have a specific craving for a certain type of food, which might be, you know, it might have a craving for something salty or sweet, or it could be due to a psychological need such as a desire for comfort or stress relief. So I say cravings, but there's an emotional element to that too. The fourth reason, which I sort of covered already in

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Let's meet for drinks and a snack pre-dinner. Sitting around the office and it's someone's birthday so you have birthday cake even though you're not that hungry. You just go to a work meeting and there's always food there and it's normal for people just to eat when you're there and you feel a little bit awkward about not doing it. You don't want to draw attention to yourself. Emotional eating is a super big reason why people snack and so instead of actually dealing

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themselves and their coping mechanism is to go to the cupboard and grab something to eat, grab something out of their drawer. I can't tell you the number of times I've talked to people who have nuts in their drawer which they're like, oh but nuts are really healthy and then they over consume them and have like several handfuls of nuts which is several hundreds of calories that they don't necessarily need because they are dealing with a sort of problem at work, it's a problem

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or they're distracting themselves from a task they don't want to do, or they're trying to do anything other than their work and the task at hand. And that's where snacking can sort of come into it from an emotional perspective. But of course, you know, arguments with people we love, frustration at a certain situation, you know, feeling sad. I mean, these are reasons why some people snack. Of course, you know, we, I mean, we talk about stress eating a lot, but of course there are

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will cannot eat when they're stressed as well so you know we have to acknowledge that. And an energy boost and this really ties into that hunger you know if you're eating your main meals and they're not geared towards sort of a protein lever you're not really sort of pulling that then your blood sugars are going to drop and then they're going to that's going to create this sort of signal in your

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So you get these sort of signs and all of these are sort of related because for the energy perspective you get signs and you get the cravings to get in some food to help re-stabilize that blood sugar. And people who snack multiple times throughout the day, often what it is, is that they're just trying to not fall off that glucose cliff is how I sort of put it.

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this massive trough at the start of the day and they spend their day trying to rescue that blood sugar response. So when people are looking for an energy boost, I mean obviously a snack is a really obvious thing to help sort of rescue that, but also if you're tired and you are you know feel like you need something to sort of boost you up, obviously eating is a way to do that.

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First, there is a problem with constant eating. Our bodies weren't designed to be having food at an hourly, two hourly or three hourly intervals. Our digestive system, and this is particularly for people who have digestive issues, if you are putting in food all of the time, then you're never giving your gut the opportunity to digest and absorb the nutrients that are already in there.

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And so it's constantly in the state of work trying to work through what you're sort of putting in. So certainly things like bloating, gas, digestive discomfort, these can all really feature when you're eating it multiple times throughout the day. And that's just not what our body is designed to do. Now our bodies work on a circadian rhythm and there are just certain times where the body

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have or deal with the nutrients that sort of go in and these hormones run on this sort of diurnal sort of rhythm a lot of them. And then there's, you know, the times where the body just likes to fast and let other repair and other enzymatic processes sort of up regulate that are unable to do so when we're constantly putting food in our pie hole, if you like. Do you like that pie hole?

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constant influx of calories, if you like, can lead to increased inflammation as well. And this is in part due to that hormone response that occurs. So we don't get that opportunity to sort of go through periods of fasting and feasting. And I'm not suggesting we need to do any prolonged sort of fasting, but if you can't go sort of four or five hours without eating, four hours particularly,

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need to do in that previous meal or the meals beforehand that helps you sort of smooth out the transition from lots of snacks to no snacking. And of course I mentioned the impact of snacking on digestion and how you know it can interfere with that digestive process. So if you are someone that struggles with bloating, gas, irritable bowel, any kind of sort of inflammatory bowel disorder,

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talk to a lot of people who do seem to be in chronic pain or bloating and they think it's normal, then having periods of time where you're not eating at all is really going to help address some of these issues. And of course, I've sort of alluded to it before or straight out mentioned it, that constant influx of food means that your body is constantly having to dispose of the nutrients

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loves a muesli bar or even like a piece of fruit or things which are sort of quote unquote healthy. I mean, let's face it, muesli bars are not healthy, but this is what the general sort of like public health message is. Oh, they're so healthy. Well, they're not. But anyway, and but every time you have these types of foods, your blood sugar is going to rise and then your insulin is having to rise and be released in response to that blood sugar rise.

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storage hormone and it's going to take what you've just eaten and the breakdown products of that and deliver those nutrients to where they're required. And if you're snacking and then you are just at your desk doing your little, you know, doing work rather than out on a construction site sort of building a house, then those nutrients will be stored for later use.

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fatty acids get delivered to your fat cells and or glucose gets converted into triglycerides and get pushed out into your bloodstream causing an increase in biomarkers that then lead to an increase in overall health risk with regards to cardiovascular disease and a whole host of things. In addition to that, that constant sort of elevated blood sugar over time, even if your body is sort of dealing with it, that changes that whole

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response and over time your pancreas can't keep up with the demands that you're placing it under. And this is where over time our average blood sugar levels begin to rise. So you get an elevation in HbA1c if you were to look at it on a blood test but you also get you get predisposed to an

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And that is one of the chronic diseases which is most prevalent today in society. And finally, the last reason I've already talked about this, but I just want to reiterate, snacking leads to overeating because people eat way more calories than they need. In part because the types of foods they eat have been created and designed to make you do just that.

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to create something which is called a bliss point. And that bliss point is where they get the exact amount of sugar, salt, starch, and fat that make you wanna keep eating it and encourage you to continue to consume far beyond the calories that you need. And let's face it, like with two thirds of us either overweight or obese, according to population statistics, with chronic disease on the rise,

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with non-alcoholic or metabolic associated fatty liver disease, which used to be called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease on the rise. Like these are all conditions of overconsumption. So the more that we can sort of pull these things out of our diet and stick to those three meals a day, I just think the better most people are going to be in terms of their overall health, because that is going to reduce overall calories that are consumed and those people that,

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that need to lose excess body fat, those people that don't will be able to maintain a healthy body weight and body composition for them. Now for what it's worth, I think that the people who are less at risk of over consuming calories are the people that track their calories. They've got their finger on the pulse of the caloric requirements and they're able to make decisions around what and when they eat.

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And they're able to manipulate that way better because they know what's going in. And this is the problem with snacking is that we either forget that we do it when we're sort of reporting back either to ourselves or our nutritionists or whatever in terms of what we've actually consumed, or we cannot regulate our hunger. And so we continue to consume, you know, the same calories at a meal later on, not thinking about what we've had previously.

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and account for their calories, they're able to make the adjustments where they need to. So some sort of practical tips from me to sort of figure out for you to decide whether snacking is an issue for you is one, well, if you do snack, think about why you snack. Are you eating enough calories in that previous meal? Is it a habit? Is it an emotional sort of coping strategy?

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or is it like some sort of socialization? Like are you just snacking because everyone else is eating? And probably one of the best things you can do actually is keep a food diary. You don't necessarily have to track your macros but just be aware of what is going in can then help you make better decisions either around the meals that you're eating or around the types of snacks that you're consuming. And I will also say that people who are active and who might do F45, might do

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for something or just in the gym lifting heavy marathon runners triathletes all of that I mean you guys we need additional food but what I do also know is that there are you know the vast majority of the population aren't isn't doing the type of training that requires them the additional snacks so I think it's you know like there are there are different populations for which

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of what you're doing. Two, bump your protein up at your meals. Make sure you're having a minimum of 30 grams of protein, if not up to 50 grams of protein in a meal, to help offset the hunger that occurs during meals, or sorry, in between meals that then might lead you down that snacking sort of path. Three, get rid of those nuts from your desk at work, because you probably don't need 400

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just because they're healthy. So do make some practical changes, tangible changes to your environment that then takes snacking sort of away as an option for you. Four, if you usually snack, expect to be hungry. Because your body, much as it runs on a circadian rhythm, that rhythm actually does change according to those environmental inputs. So if you're used to eating at say 10 and two

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tea and you truly don't need those sort of eating opportunities, then you are probably going to be pretty hungry regardless of changes you make to meals like with the protein. So what I would say is just expect to be hungry because your body's anticipating food and you may just have to wait it out. Have a glass of water, have a cup of tea, go for a walk. After about 15 to 20 minutes you will

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What I will just clarify is of course that amount of protein just so you know Two eggs and half a cup of egg whites. That's 30 grams of protein a Protein smoothie with like three scoops such as the new says protein powder 30 grams of protein 100 and about 30 grams cooked chicken. That's 40 grams of protein One cup of cottage cheese. You can totally blend out those lumps It doesn't have to be lumpy if you don't like it

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26 grams of protein. So this is one of the beautiful things actually about macro tracking is actually you just get such a handle on what's in food and you can just make better food decisions. So I would actually encourage anyone who's interested in sort of figuring this stuff out to jump in a little bit and give that a bash. And finally, my last tip is oftentimes we eat because we're thirsty, you know, we just, but we forget that that's actually what's going on.

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So before you have a snack, why not have a drink and see if you need it? And people often also ask me, they're like, well, Mickey, I'm so used to snacking. What can I snack on? What about veggie sticks? They've got very low calorie. And whilst I agree with that, like veggies are super low calorie, they're not really going to make a dent to your caloric budget. That doesn't sort of take away from the

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hurrying. So if you are snacking on carrots because you're super stressed, you're still snacking. You're still not really dealing with the issue at hand. And carrots are just not always going to be available. So part of the idea of breaking that habit of snacking is exactly that because sometimes if you don't address the problem, like the big problem, like the habit of it, it means that you, for right now you might have healthy things available or something

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not always going to be the case. So you just want to be in the best position possible to make good food decisions and about when and where you sort of eat. Anyway so those are my thoughts on snacking. For most people probably don't need to look at your main meals, do some tracking around your food be it a macro tracking using Easy Diet Diary, Chronometer, Carbon, something like that or even just write it down and break that snacking habit.

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team. Thanks for listening. See you later.