Blue Diamond Smokehouse Almonds are my go-to snack. There are, however, those occasions where I like a mid-afternoon cold beer with seriously-aged cheddar (i.e., over 5 years) and smoked sausage. .
I once did that same snack but mid-morning. No beer or diuretics of any kind after 13:59 hours for me.
If I go to bed hungry, I will walk in my sleep and usually make a peanut butter sandwich, carry it back to bed and begin eating it. At some point, I awaken and am shocked to find I have a mouthful of food in it and begin chewing vigorously to swallow it before I choke to death. I thought I had dreamed I did this, and it is downright dangerous, so I make certain to eat a small snack at bedtime.
Our kids loaded us up with all kinds of candy, cookies, nuts, etc. for Christmas, most of it homemade. I'm trying to stay out of all the cellophane bags and that big box of chocolate covered cherries. It's a challenge I gotta tell ya.
I'm trying to shed this gut I've put on. This time of year would usually find me at Walmart buying up all the 50% Off Peanut Brittle (last year I got there as they were in the process of marking it down...I bought all they had.) I'd melt Ghiardelli dark chocolate in the double boiler, double-coat the peanut brittle in it, let it set, then freeze it. Damn.
This reminds me... I was loading a recipe into the "recipe builder" on a website called MyFitnessPal where I track my daily meals. (I enter in the ingredients and amounts, etc. and it spits out the nutrition info for a recipe.) I was thinking "this would be right up John Brunner's alley." You could spend countless winter days tracking your calories, carbs, sodium, etc. and have your custom recipes to pick from when completing the daily food diary. It's free to use the tracking tools on MFP, plus there's a forum. I don't have any interest in the forum because it's populated with all the "experts" on nutrition and weight loss who want to discuss their "macros" and other boring minutia. It helps me when I want to get on track and drop a couple of pounds, and it's easy. Just a thought.
I've used MyFitnessPal before, just for calories. It is (cool). A little time-consuming. I'm faster with pencil and paper because I round up. A wilted potato has a lot more calories per ounce than a fresh one. The administrator on the weight loss/fitness forum I belonged to used it all the time. He weighed every ounce of food he ate, and tracked carbs, fat, protein, potassium, sodium, and whatever else it had.
I might check it out. Honestly, my problem is lack of exercise. There have been 2 other times in my life I've put this weight on...both of them when going through sedentary periods. When I hit the gym after work, it only took a month or two to get my metabolism back where it needed to be and drop the weight. Now I'm not working, there is no gym nearby, and I'm not "out of the house already." So I'm at the in-between phase: I can barely see my keyboard under my gut, but my gut is not yet big enough to prop it up on. Can you recommend voice recognition software?
I'm a believer in "CICO"... calories in, calories out. You can either cut back on food or increase your activity. Hmmm. I guess it's poor form to discuss dieting in the Snacks thread. (I just had some fruitcake and coffee.)
When I was in my mid 20s, I was horribly skinny. I doubled my caloric intake (meaning I ate 6 full meals a day.) After a couple of months, I lost 5#. I went to my doctor who said everything was OK, and offered to put me on drugs to slow my metabolism. As long as I did not have a medical reason for what was going on, I declined. Then I started getting tons of cardio-exercise: rode my bike to & from work (Vienna to Rosslyn), played racquetball a couple of times a week, on Saturdays I would do bike rides with a club (rode from Vienna to Arlington to commence the ride and would then bike back to Vienna.) It didn't take long for me to start gaining weight. It was not so much muscle mass as it was the high C.V. exercise that regulated my metabolism. I have always been able to eat what I want, and as much as I want (cholesterol levels notwithstanding), even when drinking a 12 pak a day. I guess I should be grateful for having had that state of being for most of my life. I've been spoiled.
My husband is lanky; he ran track in high school and college and still wears the same size clothing he wore back then. So annoying. He eats one meal a day and has for as long as I have known him. I've kind of adopted that; we very seldom eat breakfast or lunch but eat dinner early. This adds to my night-time snacking but it works for us.