pegkerr | Man, I'm HUNGRY

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Man, I'm HUNGRY

What do you keep to snack on at the office? Healthy snacks, I mean?

I have chocolate rice cakes, which I spread with a thin layer of peanut butter. Or packets of oatmeal. Or popcorn. Or a banana sprinkled with cinnamon. (Sometimes, I will take a single square of Hershey's dark chocolate and crumble it up and sprinkle the crumbs over a cut up banana and then heat that in the microwave for a minute).

I have on occasion brought in a bag of small fresh yams, and I will microwave one of those.

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Baby carrots in a slight bath of fat-free Italian dressing. It's the best.

Oatmeal. Warm, filling, many flavored, and cheap!

Ugh, I have a serious problem with this...mainly because people in my office always generously bake cookies or bring snacks. Plus there is a bowl of jelly belly jelly beans on my desk for people who come in, etc. They like to stare me down.

okay, but on the helpful side, when I'm being good I do the celery thing. Celery with peanut butter, celery with lowfat cream cheese, or celery just sprinkled with the always delicious Tony Cachere's seasoning. Morgan and I trying to be low carb right now so those are good options. Or nuts but the calories get really high there really fast. String cheese? Soy nuts? Sometimes I try to stave off the boredom with Diet Coke or coffee. Mainly at work I eat out of boredom or craving than actual hunger, so if you have suggestions for THAT, I'd be happy to hear them. I have tons of schoolwork but somehow end up on LJ instead....

I don't know if these count as "healthy," but: pretzel goldfish, canned fruit, granola bars, and trail mix get me through the day.

Unsalted cashews (for which my wife thinks I'm a bit of freak). I also bring, as a treat, little snack packs of fabulous Greek yogurt that have honey in a separate compartment that can be folded over to add the honey to the yogurt. It certainly keeps me going when I have it around 3 pm.

I also bring a multi-part lunch and eat a section of it when I first get hungry, then wait until I'm hungry again to eat the next section of it. It spaces the food out over the day nicely. But then I rarely leave my desk to have lunch.

ohhh, thanks for the ideas everyone.

I keep granola bars in my desk...but they aren't particularly healthy ones.

We're having pie today. I don't suppose that counts, eh?

I keep carrots on hand or other fresh fruit/veggies (grape tomatoes if they're on sale, grapes a lot, I've gone for celery before but I usually have to doctor it somehow to really enjoy it and then I feel like I'm not being as 'good'). But baby carrots in their nicely packaged resealable 2 lb bags (hey, I get a lot of them) are the easiest. I also try to keep 1L bottles of water on hand. I need to drink more water and filling my belly with that instead of food staves off the hunger pangs a bit longer while I watch the clock until my lunch break.

Ed takes fruit to work. Apples, orange, pears, and bananas. He usually takes two pieces with him every day.

Back when I worked in an office, I remember taking in yogurt and string cheese; I occasionally made microwave popcorn, though the portions on those bags are about 10 times what I want as a snack. When I was pregnant and had morning sickness, I really liked chilled canned fruit for some reason, so I ate a lot of that.

My snack on the go these days is crunchy granola bars. (Nature Valley is the brand name I buy -- hardly anyone else makes crunchy granola bars anymore, and the chewy ones aren't nearly as good for you.) The girls like them, too, so they're a good snack to bring along when the girls might get hungry (which is to say, anytime I'm leaving the house with them).

The most satisfying small snack I know of is about a dozen smoked almonds.

Let's see...pulling open the drawer, I see lowfat chewey granola bars, lite butter popcorn, a couple of boxen of those Nabisco 100 calorie snack packs (Cheese Nips and graham crackers), Pop Tarts (to be used sparingly) and one solitary cup of applesauce that's been in there forever (I'm not as fond of applesauce as I was as a child).

The candy is in the top drawer, though, and that gets used even more sparingly than the Pop Tarts. Mostly.

Slice up an apple and dip the slices in PB. Or Nutella, if it's a chocolate day. I'm not in an office, but this is my go-to snack, and one I often pack if I'm going off to work at a "branch office."

I remember street vendors selling steamed yams on the streets of Beijing. Just the thing for a cold day.

B

I smuggled a Heath bar into your purse a couple nights ago. If you haven't found it yet, there's a little (non-healthy) yummy comfort food type snack. Someone recommended them to you on your LJ and I thought I'd sneak one in for you to find. Enjoy! I love you.

Rob

I was keeping dried fruit in my desk, but that was partly to mix into the cafeteria's oatmeal (I like dried cherries and blueberries, they only had raisins and cranberries). Also, sometimes, pistachios (out of the shell).

Clementines, when they're in season, generally brought in each day.

Just how healthy are we talking? I don't find fruit or vegetables to be filling enough (well, an entire pack of grape tomatoes would be filling, but I think that that much tomato can be hard to digest). I don't currently have any snacks at my desk (and succumb to the snack vending machine instead), but things I have considered include nuts, granola bars, graham crackers, Triscuit, and beef jerky. I haven't ever bought it myself, but there is also tofu jerky, but I worry that there's too much sugar (and maybe sodium) in the seasoning of tofu jerky.

Nuts (usually unsalted cashews), or fresh fruit.

Cereal bars and granola bars :D And whole apples are pretty awesome :D

Cashews (unsalted) and almonds, protein bars, and cherry tomatoes and/or baby carrots to have with hummus or cottage cheese, also yogurt and mozzarella cheese sticks (part-skim).

Um, but not all at once.

This may not translate because we eat such different diets, but when I'm really, really hungry, I need something with a decent amount of protein. So individual cups of yoghurt (it can be low-fat if you're worried about fat, and I prefer either making it savory with scallions and cucumbers and some Indian spices, or just putting a spoonful of fruit spread in, rather than getting the type with fruit added); those little cans of salmon or, if you space them out to avoid mercury, tuna; baked tofu or tempeh; nuts. Also, and this is dependent on ripeness, just eating an avocado out of its rind with a spoon, maybe with a little salt and pepper and maybe not, is lovely. They haven't got that much protein, but the fat is satisfying.

P.

I eat low-fat yogurt, and if I need a calorie or carb kick, I add some rolled oats that I keep at the office just for that purpose.

And I stay away from the office kitchen, where there are frequently lunch leftovers, not to mention the candy machine, to tempt me.

I always figure that just about anything I buy to take to the office is going to be an improvement over chocolate and chips from the machine. So ... when I buy work-snack-groceries, I buy some of the following: cans of pop and lemonade, instant cup of noodles (I really like the Campbell's hot and sour soup kind), Pepperidge Farm goldfish crackers, Arrowroot crackers (good for dipping in coffee), Pop-Tarts, a kind of cookies that comes in cellophane packs of 2 (Dad's oatmeal, but I know they aren't available in the USA), cashews, pistachios, raisins, dried apricots, pudding cups, and sometimes packaged fruit-leather. I don't actually like granola bars or peanut butter, so I don't get either of those. My list is all things that I can abandon in my desk and go on vacation - no refrigeration or timely use required.

Goldfish. Pepperidge Farm Goldfish. They're baked, so they're relatively low-cal, and one server is like 55 pieces. I figured it out once upon a time, and they were like 3 Weight Watchers Points for one serving.

Pretzels, specifically Snyders of Hanover hard sourdough pretzels. Whether they're healthy or not depends on how worried you are about refined foods, but at least they're healthier than many of the alternatives. The entire ingredients list consists of unbleached wheat flour, water, salt, yeast, and soda. No preservatives, no coloring, no hydrogenated oils, nothing I can't pronounce.

I work from home, but my main afternoon snacks are quite portable: fruit leather and almonds.

I don't tend to leave a lot at work because I will eat it if I'm at my desk, but having a lab job means I'm always moving around anyway. But what I normally bring for snacks are:

baby carrots
celery
small portion of cottage cheese
whole wheat low fat salt-free crackers
pretzels
small container fat free yogurt
individual packets of oatmeal
Total cereal which I eat dry or with milk
pumpkin seeds (in shell)
Twizzlers

And... I know most people frown on it, but the Slimfast snacks satisfy both the chocolate craving, the sweet craving and the hunger cravings. I tend to eat more in snacks than in actual meals throughout the day (now I'm at the point where I can't handle big meals).

I like the yam idea -- with some butter for ballast, and some spices, that would be wonderful!

String cheese in the fridge under your name (brown sack, of course,) is good, and also raw nuts. Count out fifteen almonds, or fifteen pecan halves, and put them in one of those tiny ZipLoc snack bags. Or, if you need ceremony to slow yourself down and really savor things -- take 30 pistachios in shell and shuck the little suckers at your desk. W says the act of having to extract them slows him down so his stomach knows he's had enough. Then he has a sugar free hard candy to finish up.

I think that eating As The Activity -- don't read, don't keep working, concentrate on the food, its taste and your pleasure in it -- helps a lot. We make a real ceremony out of our chocolate dipped strawberries at night. Helps slow any tendencies to look for more munchie stuff!

Trail mix. Mixed nuts.

Kellogg's Strawberry bars, South Beach oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips, Rice Krispies Treats. All 100 calories or under. The banana thing sounds really good.

I'm fond of trail mix. Or bags of mini carrots

At my home ffice, I keep a big quart pot of Brown Cow nonfat plain yoghurt (or Butterworks Farm lowfat vanilla -- it generally depends on what's on sale that week, but those are my two faves) and a box of Kashi. Go Lean! Crunch is my secret favourite, but the 7-Grain Honey Puffs are lower-cal so I am trying to convince myself they taste just as good. =)

Every day for breakfast I grab a coffee cup, spoon some plain yoghurt in and mix in some of the Kashi. It's tangy, sweet, fairly filling and high in both the protein and carbs I need to keep me going. I also do this fairly frequently as a late-midday snack.

The advantage of the big pot of yoghurt and the big box of cereal, over individual-sized servings of either, is that I can portion myself out small portions rather than feeling compelled to finish the 8 oz in front of me. I have big trouble with that, and this has helped a lot.

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