It is tempting to reach for sweet and salty snacks after a long of work but regular noshing can add to weight gain and poor health.

Replacing junk food with with healthy snacks filled with fiber and protein can stem cravings and provide nutritionally dense foods which are beneficial and filling.

One family has given up processed, packaged, fried and sugar laden foods for 100 days and has reaped the benefits of a healthy diet in as little as 100 days.

Staying away from sweet treats and fried foods may be the best strategy to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

You’ve been eating healthy and avoiding junk food.

There is a kind of momentum which develops where you are gaining will power by exercising your will to stay away from fatty, sugary foods.

But, that first whiff leads to that first bite which can lead to a slippery slope into over indulgence.

There’s a reason this tends to happen almost exclusively with fatty and sugary foods and not, say, lettuce. The saturated fats in foods like bacon and cheese impair your brain’s normal ability to regulate appetite and cravings, so you don’t realize you’re full until you’re completely stuffed, says Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D., a health psychologist at Stanford University and author of The Willpower Instinct. What’s more, that effect on your appetite can last for up to three days, the length of time it takes to flush those fats from your system. So one unhealthy indulgence can end up triggering a major relapse.
Add sugar to the fatty food, ice cream, cake, doughnuts, and you have a double whammy. High-sugar foods increase your levels of ghrelin, a hormone that stimulates appetite and increases cravings. “So you may tell yourself ‘Just one bite’ but find yourself wanting more and more, the more you eat,” says McGonigal.

Moderation is a term that gets tossed around often, however, the definition seems to have a wide range of meaning.

If being around treats could derail your diet, then better to avoid them altogether especially considering that there is no nutritional gain to be had from eating junk food anyway.

The Mid-afternoon slump that leaves you drowsy and craving junk food can be avoided by replacing some of your old habits with new healthier habits.

Eating low calorie snacks full of preservatives don’t really do the trick. Opt, instead, for healthy high fiber foods that help you to break the destructive cycle caused by eating the empty calories in nutritionally void foods.

Maybe some quiet time or a brisk walk will do the trick.

Experiment to see what works best for you.

Feeling bad about yourself, facing a “sugar crash” later and too much caffeine may get you over the hump but only for a very short time and will ultimately leave you feeling more diminished later.

“Most people have a lull around 3 p.m. If you’re stressed out and all you can find is junk food from the vending machine down the hall, you may start this cycle that can lead to even more stress,” she says. “Having some fruits and vegetables readily available lets you indulge in something sweet that tastes good and has nutritional value, without the snowball effect.”

The surprising ingredients in a Twinkie are revealed in Steve Ettlinger’s book, “Twinkie, Deconstructed”.

Hostess, the maker of Ho-Hos, Wonder Bread and Twinkie, has filed for bankruptcy protection recently which has stirred up some nostalgic pangs for the tasty snacks.

These wonders of chemistry seem to resist spoiling and decay and by the list of ingredients can only loosely be categorized as food.

Processed food ingredients are made in large parts from the most common industrial chemicals, like phosphoric acid and sulfuric acid and ethylene, which comes from natural gas. That, for me, is sobering. I’m not saying,, “Oh, shocker, we rely on petroleum for our food.” Petroleum is needed to transport locally produced organic food too. Petroleum is used for transportation, for pesticides and herbicides, for processing.