Snack With Abandon

To be healthy, you need to be honest, especially with yourself.

By this we mean: if you crave dinner and dessert at the Cheesecake Factory, you can’t just transform yourself overnight into the kind of person who eats dehydrated kale chips as a snack, a dinner of steamed broccoli and unseasoned chicken breast, and, as a sweet treat, some weird paleo-chocolate-mousse-thing made from avocado that sorta tastes like if Jell-o Pudding put out a “compost & cocoa” flavor. It’s just not going to work. You might have some luck for a week, but after that, you’re gonna lose it.

Because eating isn’t just about delivering nutrition to your body. It’s about joy.

That being said, you also need to be honest about that part: how much net joy does what you eat really bring you?

It feels like we’ve gotten better in recent years in terms of not shaming snackers. Did you eat a whole package of Oreos? Well, you shouldn’t feel bad about it. As in, you shouldn’t beat yourself over it, because everyone has lapses in judgment, and anyone who tells you they don’t is lying to you or to themselves.

You will, however, feel bad. Not emotionally. But physically. Positive thinking can cure a lot. It can’t, unfortunately, mitigate the discomfort of a body forced to digest a bunch of stuff that it really isn’t prepared to handle.

In other words, the momentary joy you feel while eating junk food does not compare to the bodily despair you suffer after.

Luckily, this is not the unsolvable equation it often feels like it is. Because while our present age has brought with it a plethora of obnoxious bullshit, one positive sign of the times is that food manufacturers have gotten better at making healthy snacks that don’t taste vaguely like grass wearing a candy bar Halloween costume.

Take these Rule Breaker bites, for example. They’re plant-based, vegan, gluten-free, and contain none of the top 11 allergens (so you can send them to school with your kids), and there are only 100 calories per serving (which is three of them). And yet, they taste like an actual treat.

In other words, they allow you to have a sweet tooth without having a sweet old tummy ache every time you choose to indulge it.

So get some, and enjoy a little guilt-free guilty-pleasure snacking.