For Diet Success, Follow These 10 Tips on Snacking

Try eating one of these healthy options to satisfy your appetite: (clockwise from left) cheese, pistachios, cucumbers and crackers. — From left: Getty Images, Gallery Stock (2), Corbis

En español | We're a nation of nibblers.

Around 97 percent of American adults snack between meals. Once upon a time, we got our calories from three square meals a day, but now almost one-quarter of them come from snacks. And the average calorie count and size of those snacks have grown over the years. That's enough to sabotage any attempt to lose weight — or keep it off.

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Yet there are ways to snack well and whittle waistlines. Here's what the experts advise.

1. Snack throughout the day. People who lose weight and keep it off don't skip meals or wait until they're ravenously hungry before they eat, says Lawrence Cheskin, M.D., director of the Johns Hopkins Weight Management Center in Baltimore. "If you spread your calories throughout the day, your blood sugar won't fall and you won't feel hungry," he says. "When you eat 100 calories here and 100 calories there, you'll do a better job of not thinking that you're starving yourself."

2. Timing matters. A new study in the December Journal of the American Dietetic Association found that women who snack between breakfast and lunch lose less weight than those who don't. Many people eat out of habit, rather than to satisfy real hunger. And these mid-morning snackers might be among that group, says the senior author of the study, Anne McTiernan, M.D., director of the Prevention Center at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle. Mid-morning snackers also reach for more snacks during the day than the women who are more successful at losing weight.

But calories are calories, says Robert Eckel, M.D., of the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. "If you want a mid-morning snack, decide what calories you'll give up later in the day."

3. Go nuts. Most people who are dieting believe they should stay far away from nuts. But nuts "are one of the healthiest snacks around. They're not digested quickly, so they help you feel full longer," says Donald Hensrud, M.D., a preventive medicine specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "In fact, some studies show that overall calories don't go up by much if you add nuts to a diet, because people seem to eat fewer calories from other sources." Don't overdo it, though, Hensrud urges. "All you need is a small handful to tide you over until your next meal."

4. Plan ahead. "Before you turn in for the night, cut up some carrot, celery and cucumber sticks, pack them in a snack-size plastic bag and refrigerate," recommends Barbara Rolls, a professor of nutritional sciences at Pennsylvania State University. Take the bag with you when you go out the next morning, and you'll have a snack ready when hunger strikes.

5. Prepack your portions. Don't be in a rush to store big bargain-size boxes of snacks in the cupboard as soon as you get home from shopping. "Instead, count out 100 calories' worth of crackers or pretzels, and store each serving in a small plastic bag," says Rena Wing, a Brown University professor of psychiatry and director of the Weight Control and Diabetes Clinic at Miriam Hospital in Providence, R.I. Toss the empty box into the recycling bin. When you feel a snack attack coming on, grab a single serving. Voila! Automatic portion control.

Next: Avoid mindless eating to keep the pounds off. >>