What Is the Difference Between a Meal and a Snack?

            In the past we used to think that the difference between a meal and a snack was really about size. But the difference between a meal and a snack is that a meal is planned and addressed in a sort of regular, repeatable kind of way, and a snack is all the eating that's not during a meal.

So how many meals do people need?

It varies according to your age mostly. Babies need lots of meals because they have small stomachs. So we say that babies and children need a lot of snacks. That's because people want to start blurring what the meaning of snack is. What babies have is more frequent meals, and over time they're able to increase that interval so they need less frequent meals.

As you become an adult you need less frequent meals, and then you can get by very easily on one meal a day. But that causes some people to be food-preoccupied and hungry. So adults generally need one, two, or three meals a day. There's only a few circumstances where you would need more than three meals a day, even though in today's society we think that we need three meals AND three snacks a day!

These snacks quickly spiral out of control and upset your hormonal balance. The reality is that no adult needs a snack! You may think, "Will I feel restricted if I can't eat snacks?". But that is the same as what a small child thinks! They usually come in and say, "I want to eat now, I'm starving." In the past we used to say, "It's not time to eat right now." And the child would have to wait for the next meal.

Today, these kids can not only come in and have you give them something, they can come in and put something in the microwave themselves. You have all these parents lurking around going, "Look my two year-old can get their own snacks." They open the door, drawer, and pull out something. It's all prepared, and this is again marketed to us as something that is desirable, but it is making us increasingly fat and unhealthy.

Children should never be allowed to make food decisions. Parents make the decisions about the food. They put the food on the table at meal time. The way that children learn is to pick and choose what they want and to learn how to have an appropriate social conversation. So when people say, "My child won't eat that," they're usually just not giving them enough opportunities or they're treating them with snacks and more pleasurable, palatable food, in-between meals, so they're simply not hungry enough when it comes to meal time to desire that. So they're not going to eat it.

Snacks are unnatural. There is no such thing as a healthy snack. Babies perhaps need snacks because they have small stomachs and are unable to eat a large portion of food. If you are still in the mode of eating snacks then you are a premature eater and you need to learn to eat like an adult. You need to learn to eat meals.

Dr. Theresa Nesbitt M.D is the creator of the program Evolutionary Eating. As a former physician, Dr. Nesbitt encountered thousands of individuals who were having trouble with weight loss. When Dr. Nesbitt realized that traditional techniques such as diet and exercise did not help these people, she created the Evolutionary Eating program. You can learn more about this program and how it can also help you too by visiting the following link Evolutionary Eating.

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