Snack Attack

Every Sunday afternoon I take my 6 year old son to dance, a sport which he absolutely loves for the high-flying acrobatics that the men get to do. Well, not so much at his age, but they are starting into some of the fun stuff and he gets to watch the older boys do it. This kid is a natural artist and we want to encourage that in every way we can. A couple of weeks ago now he asked me completely out of the blue if we could take some snacks to dance with us, which I thought rather odd since we had not done that sort of thing in a very long time - since he was maybe 2 or 3. When the boys were young we used to fret about going anywhere without having a supply of snacks on hand for them - I guess this is probably common with all new parents. Better to have a happy child than a whiny child. But it has been years since have done this and it struck me as odd that he'd ask for it out-of-the-blue.

I managed to shoe him out the door without the snacks, but then when we arrived at dance I finally clued in as to where this request really came from - every single kid at dance had a constant supply of snacks being shoveled into them by their parents. It was literally non-stop eating, and got me to thinking a lot about this.

Even just a few weeks ago it never really struck me what was really wrong with this mentality of constant snacking. I knew that we used to do it a number of years ago but we stopped doing it almost completely. Then that day when I was sitting for an hour at dance waiting for my son's class to finish, watching child after child shovel (admittedly largely healthy) snacks into them, it struck me - why the heck does a child need to be constantly eating? Is it really that difficult for someone to go 2 short hours without food? Sure, this is hard exercise and drinks are in order - but there are two water fountains there. But do they really need to be eating even if it is healthy snacks?

Then just now I see this article come up, and as it turns out this constant snacking is a real concern, and people are doing studies on it! 27 percent of a child's calories come from snacking, and in an age of rampant childhood obesity this is not at all healthy!

Cutting out the constant snacking was not really a conscious decision on our part, so I guess we just got lucky. But when out-of-the-blue our son started asking for snacks because he'd seen his friends in a constant state of grazing, it did at least strike me as abnormal. And I'm glad to see I'm not alone with that concern.

For my own part, I started snacking more at work about 3 or 4 months ago, and noticed that I'd put on 5 or 8 pounds over that time - weight that I can attribute almost completely to my snacking. It was extremely healthy snacking - yet completely superfluous. So I resolved a couple of weeks ago to cut out the snacks - and it is going well. I've always been firmly of the belief that people need to feel hungry a few hours a day - it is good for the soul. And as it turns out, good for the waistline.