The Truth about Evening Snacks

Snacking is a great opportunity to take in nutrients you may have missed during meals. A healthful and nutritious evening snack packed with antioxidants and phytonutrients can maximise your health and well-being to a great extent. Snacking in the evening is an effective way to fit extra nutrients into your diet and can prevent you from overeating during dinner time.

Well, as we all are aware of the fact that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, the evening snack is equally important. Yet, evenings become a time of the snack devil – it tempts us with samosas, kachoris, greasy chowmein. This unhealthy snack-devil hides inside namkeen shops and lurks on delivery apps, seducing you every evening with a tasty-but-nutritiously-horrible munch, therefore it is important to choose healthy snacking options.

The Importance of Evening Snacks

Healthy evening snacking is a smart choice and an extremely part of one’s diet. Eating small regular meals helps fight off extreme fatigue one faces as the day ends, avoid hunger pangs during the evening which eventually will push one to pick unhealthy choices for dinner and land up eating more junk food than planned.

Having meals after a good time gap is important to maintain weight and overall health. All the meals are vital and hence no meal can surpass the vitality of another meal. Perhaps it is important to have evening snacks at a fixed time and also, make sure that the snacking time is 3-4 hours before dinner.

Having evening snacks helps with the following:

• It keeps blood sugar level maintained
• It reduces the gap between Lunch & Dinner
• It aids in sustaining the energy till dinner time
• Helps control acidity, bloating and other digestive problems
• Keeps up with the energy for the 2nd half of the day
• It helps in controlling the portion size of lunch
• It keeps BMR high
• It uplifts the creativity, focus and concentration
• Helps up in keeping with mental sanity at the end of your work
• Combats with essential nutrients if exercise is in the evening

One should not snack right before a meal, and only eat a snack if you are truly hungry. Also, snacking out of boredom or for other emotional reasons isn’t healthy and can lead to overeating and weight gain.

What you can snack on:

The best options you can snack on in a healthy way are- boiled sprouts chaat, roasted kale chips salad, open egg sandwich, yoghurt with mixed fruits, cottage cheese, roasted black grams or foxnuts, or cucumber sticks with hummus and some beverages like coconut water, banana lassi or mint buttermilk.

Over to you:

In general, the truth about evening snacking helps improve overall health, fights weight gain, boosts brain health, regulates mood, curbs cravings and gives you the energy you need to keep going till the end of the day.