Healthy Snacks and Appetizers

Appraising Your Success
The end of the week is a good time to review the past week of your SWEET Life and count up your accomplishments. Your goal is 5-6 times per week for each aspect of the SWEET Life: Sleep, Water, Eating, Exercise, and Tranquility. If you didn’t achieve some of your goals for the week, then next week, focus on those areas more and think about how to fulfill them more consistently.
How do you feel at the end of this week? Are you better rested? Do you feel relaxed? Are you more energetic? Do you feel generally healthier? Continue with the SWEET Life and you’ll experience all of these feelings!

Topic of the week -- Healthy Snacks and Appetizers

Eating snacks between meals is a great way to prevent yourself from feeling starving and overeating at your next meal. Snacks need to be quick and easy to eat without any preparation, and I like to eat snacks that are 100-200 calories. That’s enough to tide me over until the next meal, but not enough to count as a meal.
Here are some suggestions:
· Whole grain crackers
· Low fat cheese
· Whole grain pretzels dipped in low fat cottage cheese
· Veggies dipped in hummus
· Fruit
· A handful of nuts
· A handful of raisins or other dried fruit
· Low fat yogurt, but read the ingredients because some have a lot of sugar
· Turkey & cheese roll-ups (just a slice of each rolled up together)
· A hard-boiled egg
Energy bars are a great snack if you buy nutritionally balanced ones. There are a lot out there, and many are close to eating either a candy bar or dry toast. Read the labels carefully, looking for a balance of carbs, protein and fat. Ones with healthy ingredients (as opposed to lots of chemicals) are a good idea as well. I suggest ones with about 200 calories, which you could break in half if you only wanted to eat 100 calories. They are non-perishable and individually wrapped, which makes them very easy to tote around with you.

When you are out & about, it is hard to find healthy snacks, which is why it’s a good idea to carry some with you. I generally wouldn’t consider anything at a café to be healthy, unless they sell a piece of fruit.

Do you have any other snack suggestions? I’d love to hear them.

Have a SWEET week!

Suzanne