The Grazing Trap: Are You a Serial Snacker? Here's How to Break the Loop in 3 Steps

We want to talk about this constant need to... a snack and we've been told ladies haven't we in past years and past diet plans that we've been on that this is really healthy like little and often keeps your metabolism going it can stop us from binge eating it can stop us from getting too ravenous and so now we're stuck in this sort of like rock and hard place because if you are someone who maybe you're really trying hard to lower your calorie intake but you also are that cereal snacker you love to graze all day throughout the day you're gonna find it really hard to manage your calories and keep up with that but intuitively both kind of feel like the right thing to do so we don't really know what the best scenario is so a lot of women and i hear this just in conversations that we're having they you know white knuckle all week they gear themselves up to go hard and heavy all week but by the weekend like just the wheels fall off and it's an insane amount of snacking and overeating and it's like anything that gets put in front of them i was speaking to a woman the other week and oh she said i would just fall off for the weekend and i was like well what does that look like for you because bear in mind falling off looks different for everyone for some women it's you know it's a glass of wine when they don't normally drink For other women, it's a complete binge.

And for this lady, she was like, well, I have cookies, I have crisps, I have pizza.

And honestly, she reeled off.

It was like, whoa, that's a massive rebound.

If you're doing that every weekend, forget the impact on the scales.

Obviously, the scales is going to see a little bit of an impact of that.

But I was like, your energy levels and cravings and like hunger hormone must just be going wild because we know if we consume too much sugar the following day, we feel more hungry.

And this sort of like plays into what I'm going to talk about today is that actually it can be counterproductive because the more that we eat, the more hungry we become.

So It's not necessarily willpower.

It's just a pattern that we've got ourselves into.

And I want to talk on this one, ladies, because there's a lot of talk, depending on who you listen to and who you follow on, blood sugar and wanting to keep our blood sugar regulated.

And that's a really important part of making sure we eat enough protein.

We want to avoid the refined stuff.

But actually, if you're constantly grazing throughout the day, you are keeping your insulin elevated.

So insulin comes into play when we eat.

and it distributes the food, the calories, whatever you want to call it, it's converted into glucose, and insulin decides, like, okay, this is going into the muscles.

It's a storage hormone, essentially, okay? And some of what we don't need, obviously, is stored as fat.

Now, if your insulin is elevated all day, that can directly impact your ability to shift body fat.

So whilst it can be great for keeping appetite at bay, or so we think, And it can keep us happily at maintenance.

When we talk about actually shifting body fat, like putting our body into a position where it starts to use fat for fuel, we don't want our insulin levels to be elevated all day, but they are going to be as a by-product if all we do all day is graze.

So this can really prevent fat burning, but more so than this, ladies, it just keeps you in this constant loop.

of thinking about what the next food is going to be.

And we never quite feel full.

Like we never get that satiated feeling because by the time we get to our meals, we know that we've grazed a little bit more than we said we would.

So we try to accommodate for that by eating a lighter or a healthier or a smaller meal, whatever it is, however we want to dress it up.