Note: This post is the third of a four-part series, and it includes Amazon links to different foods and food-related products that have helped me lose weight. Ordering from these links helps to support this page.

Emotional Eating

A few years and nearly 200 pounds ago, I was turned down for a job that I really wanted. I was one of the top three candidates, and I was excited about the job. But then I got the rejection call. They gave the job to someone else.

In my anguish, I went to the window of a donut chain, ordered two-dozen hot, fresh chocolate glazed donuts, ate every single one of them in an hour, and then washed them all down with a chilled Code Red Mountain Dew.

That’s what snacktime used to look like for me. A gallery of empty calories and saturated fats. I guzzled Code Red Mountain Dews like they were the fountain of youth. My daily Mountain Dew habit this time last year had me drinking more than 700 grams of sugar per day.

That’s over a pound of sugar a day in soft drinks alone.

Add to that two or three chocolate bars, a couple of fast food corn dogs for the road after work, and a large milkshake whenever I felt like it, and that will give you some sense of how I almost ate myself to death.

Is it really any wonder that my blood sugar was in the 320s the first time I checked it?

Feeling Good All The Time?

When I was at my most dangerous weight, my snacking was reckless. It was fueled completely by emotion. I ate between meals because it made me feel happy. It gave me something to look forward to.

And it was worse on days that I felt sad or anxious or depressed. Even now, 180 pounds down, the days when I overdo it are usually days when I feel down about something.

Emotional eating is real, and it can be just as dangerous as emotional drinking or emotional spending. And overcoming it has been one of the hardest parts of cleaning up my diet.

When I was diagnosed with diabetes and realized that the only option was to lose weight, snack time became very difficult for me. I had wrapped snack time in a mummy-like cocoon of emotion for many years, and it was not easy to unravel.

Fortunately, my sweet wife had the solution.

The Unlikely Secret Weapon

Snacks can actually be very good for you. Eating a healthy snack after breakfast and another before dinner can help boost your metabolism.

My golden mean is 15-20 carbs per snack. To reach this goal, my wife began packing two snacks in my lunch box, and I continue the practice today.

One is a serving of pork rinds, and the other is a bag of Skinny Pop popcorn.

That’s right, you read that correctly. Pork rinds have been an instrumental food in my weight loss success.

For me, they are an excellent snack food in moderation because they have no carbohydrates and no sugars.

Don’t get me wrong; pork rinds are by no means a health food. They are still deep-fried and high in cholesterol and fat.

If you ate nothing but pork rinds all day for every meal, I’m not sure you would lose weight at all, not to mention the adverse effects that an excessive amount of pork rinds could have on your cardiovascular health.

But for me, a single serving of pork rinds per day has become a staple in controlling those mid-afternoon cravings without raising my blood sugar.

Popcorn: The Original Snack Food

My second daily snack food is a bag of Skinny Pop popcorn.

I have always loved popcorn. But, for most of my life, I overindulged with popcorn just as much as I did everything else.

For many years, the evening snack I looked forward to the most was a giant punchbowl-sized bowl of steaming hot popcorn, popped fresh in my kitchen and heavily salted.

At the movies, I used to buy a gallon-sized bucket that could be refilled with popcorn for a year for a discounted price.

My love affair with popcorn runs deep. So naturally, I was pleased to learn that I didn’t have to give it up completely after I turned my diet around.

One .65-ounce bag of Skinny Pop has 100 calories and, most importantly for me, only 9 grams of carbohydrates and 0 added sugars. It is popped in sunflower oil instead of corn oil. Like pork rinds, the key is moderation. If I were to eat that gallon bucket full of Skinny Pop as a snack, the health benefits would probably be entirely lost.

Reading the Labels

To achieve success with weight loss, I had to define snack time. Grazing constantly between meals negates all of the benefits that a healthy snack can add to your diet.

Telling myself that I will eat this particular thing at this particular time and that that will be the end of snack time also helped me to better discern when I was actually hungry and when I just felt like eating. Knowing the difference between those two sensations has made a major impact on my diet.

I also had to define what I was eating. It took me a long time to realize that the nutritional information labels were there to help me.

If I had paid attention to those labels the day that I sad-ate two dozen chocolate donuts in less than an hour, I would have known that I was putting 1,296 grams of carbs and sugars and 5,760 calories into my body at one time–after having already eaten two full meals with one more to go before bedtime.

That kind of eating isn’t just foolish. It’s dangerous. Thankfully my eyes were opened in time to turn those bad habits around.

Up Next…

What’s for dinner? In my next post, we’ll wrap up my Menu For Success series by looking at the last meal of the day. I’ll explain how I fired up the grill for dinner and cooked up some weight loss success.