Tips, Hints, Clues...we all need them!

My eating schedule during the week is what someone might call "out of the ordinary".

• I eat breakfast before school around 7am. 

• Three hours later, my lunch starts, at 10:00!  So I eat a light lunch (trying to be healthy, you know!) 
• By the time I'm done with students, it is 1:00 (another 3 hours) and I am craving food! It could be an apple, yogurt, pretzels, anything really, and if I don't have something prepared, the chocolate on my desk that we're selling for Spanish Club is dangerously tempting!
• Then it's planning time, meetings and I'm home around 3:30 or 4 (again, 3 hours!) and I'm ready for dinner!
• THIS is my first dangerous time of the day...when I get home I'm ready to kick back and it's very tempting to grab something to eat!
• Dinner is ready between 5-6:30 depending on the day, and I am READY!  
• Eight o'clock-ish is another time I have to fight through...if I can brush my teeth and mouthwash, I'm alright.  Or make some air-popped popcorn!

SO, the whole point of this little blog is to show one way I'm preparing to cope.  Taking something completely out of my diet is out of the question...I do not have that kind of will power.  Plain and simple!

I do think that eating every 3 hours IS a smart thing to do IF you're smart about it!  It's not the same as eating a full fledged meal every three hours, just something to keep the metabolism up to par.  (Apple, granola bar, banana, 100-cal pack, etc.)

To help my home-cravings since the kitchen is all too easy to get to, we've done a few things.
1)  There isn't a lot of snack foods in our house right now.  And it's WONDERFUL (at least wonderfully helpful...it can be wonderfully frustrating as well).
2)  The snack food that we DO have, I have gotten one step ahead of... 
PORTION CONTROL.  The side of the box tells you how much to eat, but I always eat more if the box/bag is open in front of me!

SO, I grabbed the boxes of Special K Cracker Chips (highly recommended!!), Triscuits, Vanilla wafers and Kellogg's Krave cereal that were in the cabinet and my boxes of snack baggies.

Would you know that these make 100 calories...?!

• 25 Cracker Chips
• 5 regular calorie Vanilla Wafers
• 5 regular calorie Triscuits
• 2/3 cup Krave cereal

So now I have 100 calorie packs!

The other plus side, food simply doesn't look as appetizing in a baggie as it does in the beautifully decorated box!

RIGHT?!