Creative Midnight Snacks - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats. Mmmm, midnight snacking, I get that one alot actually and sometimes it is not just midnight snacking it is "I am hungry after dinner." Well, one of the key things here is looking at how much are you eating at a time when you are eating your meals?, and then, how late do you stay up?. So if we are looking at dinner on, ok. Dinner, generally, you want to be slowing down your quantity. You want to be lessening the quantity of what you eat over the course of the day, so by the time you get to bed, you are not going to bed full. What you want to do is make sure you are kind of almost to the point where you are thinking: maybe within the next hour I might be hungry but I am going to get to sleep before I get hungry. Because you want the body to go into rest and digest and maitenance and really kind of upkeep, you do not want the body to have to try to figure out what to do with all this food that got dumped into its container right before bed. When you go horizontal, it changes what the way the brain operates and tells different systems what to turn on and off. So, thinking about that, there are different types of fuel that actually trigger the body into different types of activities. Carbohydrates, especially the high glycemic carbohydrates, things that turn in to sugar in the blood stream quickly, that is like dry grass on a flame, that is like jet fuel, it burns hot and fast, it is really good for mental stimulation, it is good for lots of energy quick. And then you go Bam! A lot of times people say, "Well that is a perfect thing to have before I go to bed." Actually, there is a better way to go about it because what happens is, if you got all that energy right before you go to bed then, Bam! you go to sleep, what can happen is that your body actually runs out of fuel a couple of hours into sleeping and that is when I start to see people get up in the middle of the night and go searching in the fridge. So really a better idea is to have a lower glycemic index carbohydrate and combine it with a little bit of fat and a little bit of protein. So something like celery and hummus, if you like that sort of flavor. If you like more of the sweet side, one of my favorites, this works really well-it is the one I use-get yourself some frozen blueberries. Go get them while they are on sale, get them organic, stick them in the freezer, buy a case of them, whatever. Pull out about a quarter cup of those, stick it in a bowl. While they are in the bowl, go get a whole can of coconut milk, not the refridgerator section kind, the one when you look at the label all it says in there is coconut. Whole coconut milk, kind of whip that up, take about a quarter cup of that, pour it over your blueberries. Stir it around, put it back in your freezer. Bring it in and out of the freezer a couple of times until you actually end up with almost looks like ice cream. Then crunch it-if you are not allergic-crunch it a little bit of, maybe a tablespoon, or so of nuts on top. And that is about a tablespoon, so we are not looking at a lot but a ground up amount of nuts would be really, really good. So here you go, you have got something that feels like desert, feels like it is a splurge. You have a low glycemic carbohydrate, a good healthy fat in that coconut fat and a healthy fat and protein in those nuts. So that makes you feel like you are getting an indulgence, you are having desert and it is not going to throw your whole system out of balance. so those are the two way you can go.The savory kind where you can do like a humas and bean dip with some veggies, or you can do something that is a little more sweet and deserty with fruit, whole coconut milk and nuts.
