Unlearning the Grazing Habit
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“Grazing” refers to the practice of eating small, frequent snacks throughout the day, often in an unplanned and somewhat mindless fashion. (If you have a little snack bowl at your work desk that you dip into here and there without rhyme or reason, that’s grazing.) Many of us are so accustomed to grazing that it doesn’t even feel like a choice or a habit. Luckily, it’s absolutely possible to retrain your cravings without feeling deprived.
A new way to think about grazing
In the 1990s, grazing became popular because the prevailing nutritional wisdom was that it could help us avoid becoming hungry enough to overeat. Since then, as more research has been done on blood sugar and metabolic health, we now know that there were holes in the pro-grazing logic.
The first hole is more of a math problem. When you sit down to track your red foods, it’s easy to ignore all the tiny snacks you’ve had that don’t individually make up a serving. To your body, however, everything counts, and the sum of all those blink-and-you-miss-it snacks can spell the difference between weight maintenance and weight gain.
The second is that every time we eat (whether it’s a meal or a little handful of crackers), we raise our blood sugar (glucose). When that happens, our bodies respond with the hormone insulin, to “match” the amount of blood sugar. But when the amount of blood sugar outpaces the amount of insulin—which can happen when we eat a lot of fast-digesting carbs or when we’re always grazing—the excess blood glucose is stored as fat.
Think of grazing like this: imagine your metabolic system is a small business, and there are a lot of emails coming in that have to be dealt with. Does it make more sense to stop what you are doing every time an email comes in to respond to it? Wouldn’t it be better to designate a block of time every few hours or several times a day to shift into email-response mode, leaving the rest of your time and focus free for more critical projects?
If you’re grazing all day long, you’re asking your body to pivot away from its important work to address incoming correspondence, and without a break, that kind of workflow can easily lead to burnout (in this case, your blood sugar outpacing your insulin).
Tips and tactics for managing the urge to graze
To work toward reducing and eliminating grazing, the change is behavioral, and as with many things at Calibrate, it starts with awareness and intention. Here are some tactics that will help retrain your body to shift away from grazing.
- Say it out loud
If you find yourself about to eat between your planned meal and mini-meal times, say out loud “I am grazing.” Because the first step is awareness, even if you continue on with whatever you’re about to munch, the practice of naming your behavior will over time make it more difficult to do on autopilot.
- Plan your snacks and mini-meals
Think about when you tend to graze the most and build a planned and prepped snack or mini-meal into that time of day. Include protein, fiber, and healthy fat, and set an approximate time. If at, say, 1 PM you find yourself about to pick up some chips, you can remind yourself that you have turkey and cheese slices with carrot sticks ready to eat at 2 PM—a manageable time to wait.
- Designate “snack free” times
If planning snacks feels too intense, you can do the inverse and plan when you don’t snack. Pick a block or two of time during the day when your metabolic system is closed for business. To get started, you can even block your calendar as a reminder.
- When it’s done, it’s done
After every meal, mini-meal, or snack, brush your teeth, have a mint, or pop in some gum. Over time, this behavioral cue will help you remember that the eating time is done for a while. (Opt for sugar-free products like xylitol gum, and don’t worry about a single mint’s worth of sweetener.)
- Replace rewards
If you use quick bites as rewards for or punctuations between activities (“I did the laundry, now I get to have a string cheese”), consider reframing that practice (at least most of the time) with non-food experiences like music, a walk, a phone call to a friend, a few minutes spend cruising the internet, some non-sleep deep rest, or a fizzy water.
- Sometimes you’re just thirsty!
If you’re about to hit the snack section in the work kitchen, first consider when your last glass of water was. If it’s been a while, or if you’re lagging on your hydration target for the day, have a drink first, give it fifteen minutes, and see if your hunger is still there (if it is, listen to it).
- Everything goes on a plate
Grazing out of chip bags, Ziplocs, and the palm of your hand makes it easy to not realize you’re actually eating (or even, how much). Use a plate for everything—little kids’ dishes or silicone muffin cups make excellent small plates for mini-meals—and sit down, off your phone and away from your computer while you eat it, to provide yourself with a behavioral cue that you’re eating.
- Track the time
When do you feel the urge to graze? Food cravings can coincide with periods of low blood sugar, boredom, emotion, or pure habit, so noting when you have them can help you discern which it might be and address the root cause, whether it’s nutritional, behavioral, or emotional (for example, maybe you get lonely in the evening and a regular call to a friend or snuggle with your partner is what is behind your desire for chocolate almonds).
Listening to your body
Grazing is challenging to unlearn, particularly if it’s a long-standing habit. So make sure you’re checking in with your body, really listening to your internal cues, and giving yourself some time to adjust to longer periods between meals. Your body is miraculous in its capacity to adjust to new rhythms; give it—and yourself—a chance to thrive in time restricted eating.
MAKE IT YOUR GOAL
Your goal will be to cut back on daily grazing habits to reduce your body’s insulin spikes throughout the day. This doesn’t mean banning grazing. Rather, your goal is to tap into your hunger cues to minimize the habit. Key strategies can be moving snacks away from your computer and planning at least a stretch or two without grazing each day.
In addition, if the time window between the last thing you eat at night and the first thing you eat in the morning is currently less than 12 hours, your goal is to add to that time. We recommend closing the kitchen at night 1-2 hours earlier and opening it in the morning 1-2 hours later. But if less time or a more lopsided strategy is easier, do that—and remember, whatever you can achieve counts (be it hours added, or days you’ve hit the goal). None of this is all or nothing.