A fourth way to adopt a healthier diet is to make your own homemade snacks. Why? Because we practically live on snacks! Ok, maybe it’s not quite that bad. But statistics do show that adults are now getting nearly one-quarter of their daily calories from snack foods. I’m labeling a “snack” as anything we eat in-between meals along with the treats at the end of meals.
Our snacking habits have definitely increased over the decades. Global News writes that “In the late 1970s, about 40% of American adults said they didn’t have any snacks during the day. By 2007, that figure was just 10%”. And along with that, our weight keeps increasing too! Hmmm…could there be a connection?
Because so many of our calories are coming from snack foods it’s a great place to start cleaning up your diet. But to get motivated to do that, you first need to educate yourself on what’s in the snacks you’re already buying. And that starts with reading labels.
Once you start reading labels, you realize how many extra ingredients go into snacks bought from the stores. Many of them are unrecognizable and not things our bodies require or should have for that matter. But if you make your own you can avoid all those strange ingredients!
So the biggest benefit of making your own homemade snacks is that you control what you put in your body. Which is how it should be!
Benefits of making snacks at home
After both of my grandmothers and then my mother died of cancer, I got really motivated to get some of the “junk” out of my diet. I was doing a lot of research and wanted to eat more natural foods. And I thought an easy place to start was to make my own snacks because I knew how motivated I was to eat them!
Over the years, I’ve learned that making homemade snacks has several benefits.
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- You get to control the ingredients
- You can swap out less healthy ingredients for better options
- You decide on portion sizes
- You’ll appreciate them more and (maybe) eat less because you took the time to make them!
Once I started reading labels on the food I bought I was shocked by the sheer number of ingredients listed on them. A manufactured cookie isn’t made up of just flour, sugar, eggs, oil, and a few other common ingredients (see example below). But they can be! If you make your own.
So the first step toward educating yourself on making better food choices is to read labels. If you haven’t yet started this habit then that’s your first challenge. Get curious about what’s in your food!
Related article: Tips for a healthier diet. #1 – Read food labels.
Control your ingredients and make swaps
I believe that we should all have control over what we put in our bodies, what we put on our bodies, and what we do with our bodies. That’s the ultimate freedom, isn’t it? So if you want to control what you put into your body, then the simplest items are an easy place to start.
I wasn’t much of a cook years ago but I did like to bake. And let’s not kid ourselves, most people enjoy baking as a hobby because they love eating the end product! Well, when you make your own you have total control over what goes into your creation.
You should also know that food manufacturers DO NOT have our best interests in mind when it comes to our health! But you wouldn’t know this by all the health claims they make on their packages.
They like to use certain keywords like “natural”, “heart-healthy” or “cholesterol-lowering” to get you to try their products. Unfortunately, most of those claims are fairly meaningless because they’re not regulated by anyone. They can pretty much say what they want as long as there may be some slight kernel of truth to it.
The main goal of food manufacturers is to create the best tasting foods possible to get us hooked so we keep buying them! And to get the best tasting foods, they add a lot of sugar, salt, fat, and other unnatural things, in order to win us over.
For more detailed information on the food industry, I recommend Michael Pollan’s book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” or Eric Schlosser’s book “Fast Food Nation”.
When you make your own homemade treats, you can choose better recipes or swap out ingredients that are less healthy for ones you prefer. For example, I almost always cut the sugar content of my cookies or treats by 1/4 or 1/2 of what the recipe calls for. I can also choose to use whole wheat flour instead of bleached white, or a flax egg instead of a real egg. You get what I mean.
The more you educate yourself, the more you’ll understand what other ingredients can work in place of something else.
Compare ingredients and choose less
Let’s review the ingredient list of a Chips Ahoy cookie since this is a popular cookie that we’ve probably all eaten at some point.
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- Unbleached, enriched flour (?)
- semi-sweet chocolate chips
- sugar
- canola and palm oil (?)
- high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), in addition to sugar!
- salt
- leavening (baking soda)
- artificial flavor (?)
- caramel color (?)
- natural flavor (?)
- whey (?)
“Unbleached, enriched flour” sounds like it must be pretty healthy, doesn’t it? Not so much. It means that most of the natural nutrients in it have been removed, but at least it hasn’t been bleached to make it whiter! Read this article if you’d like to understand that description a little better.
According to studies, canola and palm oils are both highly processed and can have some negative effects on our health including arterial calcification. Canola oil increases inflammation (which is bad!) and palm oil is carcinogenic (cancer-causing). They also negatively affect brain health. Did you know you can use applesauce instead of oil in baking?
I’m also questioning why any cookie needs caramel coloring or artificial flavoring. My homemade cookies are brown. And aren’t the ingredients themselves what give the cookies their flavor? I don’t know why whey is an ingredient. I’m pretty sure my grandmother didn’t add whey to her cookies. And what is “natural flavor”. Shouldn’t they naturally have that?
Besides all that, real sugar apparently isn’t enough, we also need HFCS added in to make these taste even better! And I’ve always thought my cookies taste great without it!
A better choice
Now let’s compare those ingredients to one of my favorite peanut butter cookies that you can find on Homemade Hoopla.
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- 1 cup sugar
- 1 cup peanut butter
- 1 large egg
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
What a difference between the two lists! In this cookie recipe, I know what all the ingredients are. It also doesn’t have any of those extra ingredients that I don’t think are necessary. Is this cookie “healthy”? NO! But it’s a much better choice! Since I know I’m going to eat sweets anyway I want the ingredient list to be as simple as possible.
This is just one of the benefits you get when you make your own treats. You get to decide what you want in them and what you don’t.
More info for those of you that are really serious!
If you’d like to read more about the difference between flour types, then click here. If you want to know more about palm oil, click here. And, if you’re interested in the purpose of artificial colors and flavors, click here. It’s all entirely too much info for this article, but still so interesting to read about!
Control your portions and calories
When I make homemade treats I get to choose how to portion them out. That way I know it’s really just a “treat” and not a small meal! I realize the Chips Ahoy cookies are pretty small and if you eat just one then you’re doing very well! But how many people eat just one? Be sure to do a calorie count before you dig into those processed snacks!
Pre-made treats from bakeries or grocery stores are often served in larger portions. They also tend to have more ingredients with more calories, fat, and sugar, because they want you hooked! While eating at Panera one time, I checked the calorie count of a delicious-looking cookie. I was shocked to see that it was 390 calories!
Do you know how much effort it takes to work off an extra 390 calories? I do! I would have to do aerobics for over an hour (see this chart) to burn off that one cookie! And that’s more effort than I’m willing to put in! It’s not worth it for a few minutes of sugary pleasure.
Checking calories is a great tool to use for weight loss and healthier eating! At home, I use a 1 Tbsp scoop for all of my cookies and protein balls. That way, they’re all the same and I know I’m not overindulging when I eat one.
The other problem with treats from restaurants and stores is that we start to think this is how big they should be! It changes our perspective. Suddenly, we think one little cookie is too small for an adult. We want a HUGE cookie that looks like it will fill us up! I prefer to retain my idea of a healthy portion.
These days when I go out to eat I usually skip dessert. I would rather save on the calories and eat something that I’ve made myself when I get home (if I even need it)! My peanut butter cookie example from above is only 98 calories when using a 1 Tbsp scoop. I feel much better about that and my waistline thanks me!
Related article: Can you lose weight with exercise alone?
Homemade treats are just better!
Remember the homemade cookies or bars your mom made for you when you were a kid? Now compare those to the flat little store-bought cookies in the bags. There is no comparison! Homemade snacks taste better and make you feel special because someone put effort into making them and sharing them with you.
I’m sure you’ve all been to a school event, work meeting, or party where someone brought store-bought cookies to share. Nobody eats those! They all choose the homemade ones…because they’re so much better! Even the treats that aren’t sweet generally taste better homemade.
Plus, if you put the effort into making your own treats, then you may want them to last a little longer. Otherwise, you’ll be spending a lot of time slaving away in the kitchen! I don’t mind spending some time in the kitchen, but I have plenty of other important things to do!
My mother very smartly limited our daily cookie intake when we were young. And that little habit stuck with us for life! Now when I make cookies they get put in the freezer so they’re out of sight which means they also last longer. This is another great tool for weight control. Making treats harder to grab and eat spontaneously will help keep them out of your mouth!
Be mindful
If you want to eat healthier then you need to be aware of what you’re eating, how much, how often, and why you’re eating what you are. Keep them out of sight so you only eat them when you’re hungry or when it’s a planned part of a meal.
Planning your mealtimes and snacks is important so you’re not just eating because you’re bored or because the food is there!
It’s also smart to bring your own snacks when you’re traveling or away from home. That way you’ve got something in case you get hungry rather than buying on impulse at a convenience store!
Related article: How mindfulness can help with weight loss and health.
My final thoughts
I’m using cookies (sweets) as my snack example, but salty snacks are really no different. The same rules apply, start by reading labels and make the best choice when you buy. Then see if you can make your own version with better ingredients.
We all want our snacks to be tasty treats, but they don’t have to be filled with unnatural, unhealthy ingredients in order to satisfy our cravings. Do a little research on the ingredients in the processed foods you buy so you know what you’re getting. Then you can look for better options whenever possible.
And it is possible to find better options from the stores these days! My favorite all-natural snacks are Larabars and RXBARS. These are my go-to’s when we’re out unexpectedly without homemade snacks prepared (it happens!).
But even better, if make your own homemade snacks you can start getting away from being a slave to the food industry. Experiment on how you can cut down or swap out for slightly better ingredients. You’ll end up finding that you like your homemade treats more. You’ll also get used to less sugar, salt and fat once you’ve trained your taste buds!
Change is always hardest in the beginning, but it gets easier with time. Find a few great new snack recipes so you’ve got a good base. Then you can keep looking to expand your options! Eventually, you’ll have a stack of recipes as your go-to treats that you can feel good about eating!