Hello, I'm Kate Freeman and this is The Daily Doll. Transform your eating habits and achieve long-term wellbeing with Ayla Health. Ayla Health is a mobile app that combines micro-learning with me planning into a seamless user experience that teaches you how to eat well for the rest of your life. One habit at a time.
Download it now from the app store. It's free. On this episode of The Daily Doll, we're chatting about snacking and what the resource is about snacking and your body weight. Delta snacking calls weight gain will answer this question and more.
It's dollar time. Hey, hey, my name's Kate. I'm a Redis of Nutritionist and after 20 years in the field of nutrition, I'm tired of seeing people stressed about eating and confused about where to start. And so, I'm changing the conversation.
You deserve to feel confident in your food choices and empower to maximize your health. Every weekday will dolphin episode into your feed covering everything from busting nutritionist, practical food ideas, my thoughts on trending topics and habits for a healthy life. My promise to you, it will always be sustainable, realistic, restriction-free and strictly no-woo. Only good science translated into easy everyday advice.
Let's do this. Welcome back to The Daily Doll Podcast, everyone. We are deep into a series on snacking this week and going through a recent review paper on snacking that just summarized what is the current evidence around snacking and its effect on health. And today we're talking about the link between snacking and your body weight.
And in my professional opinion, much of the confusion online about snacks occurs because so much of the nutrition advice given online is actually given in the context of weight loss. And whether it's given by a really good credible qualified person or a person or trainer or someone who's not qualified or a quack or a quack, most of the nutrition information online is given in this context about making everybody smaller about losing weight, right, and or being leaner. And one of the key ways that experts and any kind of expert helps you lose weight is by creating or making up some kind of structure in either their protocol or their program or their product, so that whoever follows their program or their protocol or their, you know, takes their product is in an energy deficit so that they're consuming less energy than their body needs, which is the only evidence based way to lose weight. Now I'm not going to get into the nuances of this because it is actually very complex and there are a lot of individuals who's weight does not change in an energy deficit, but this is a whole other put out.
So, but essentially the structure is there to create an energy deficit, the structure is there to help you eat less, the structure is there to keep your calories controlled. That's that's the context of much of the information that we hear about food online. And unfortunately the structure communicated by one nutrition expert can often actually contradict another expert structure and sometimes they can both be right and they can both be right. It's really confusing.
So let's take an example. So snacking is eating, right? Obviously that's not rocket time. And so when you eat, you consume energy along with that food.
So one of the structures that my pop up from an expert is that if you eat less energy and expert might say stop snacking or snacking is bad or snacking will help your progress. And that will be part of their structure and that'll be their black and white messages around snacking and weight loss. But another expert might say that's rubbish. Like if you ensure that the calories of your snack are within your energy budget for weight loss then snacking is fine.
And then you might have another person say, but if you have a small taste of sugar or you have that kind of snack like you open the flood gates and you'll be in your own sugar and it's better to just fully cut it out. And so on and so forth and arguing it's like it's out of control. And sometimes, you know, most of these statements have an element of truth to them. You know, another thing are incorrect, but essentially they very narrow minds and they lack context.
And then because they contradict each other when held side by side, you as a consumer are like, well what the heck am I supposed to do? And I do think particularly having worked in the weight loss industry for a very long time and I now do help first weight nutrition. I do feel a lot of the problems and the confusion around food is because so much of the food information we consume online is in the context of weight loss, which is actually not how you're supposed to eat well for the rest of your life. But I do want to address what the science says about snacking and body weight because what does the evidence actually say.
So the first piece of evidence is that the evidence for snacking and increased body weight is inconsistent. So there are many confounders, lots of variables that are difficult to control and as such it's difficult to draw conclusions. So some population studies suggest that on average we're snacking like as a whole population more than we used to, but other studies looking at the same thing don't show this. Regardless is that snacking is frequently blamed for increasing body weight around the world and it seems pretty logical to sort of look at ultra processed snack foods.
You know and combine it with knowledge of how delicious and more as they are and then that conclusions that snacks are blamed for the overall weight gain in larger bodies. But you would actually be wrong in concluding that because the body of research is easy and conclusive. We can't competently say when we look at these studies that the increase in snacking is causing an increase in body weight. Okay, so the next thing that the research tells us is that in frequency when comparing isocallric diets has no effect on weight loss.
So when we're thinking about snacking and body weight we can't make any conclusions, but the research actually shows that when it comes to weight loss when we're comparing two different diets that have the same amount of energy. So that's where the way that isocallric comes from so they matching energy, but maybe one diet has two meals a day and the other diet has six meals a day. That has no effect on weight loss. We still see similar weight loss results within the test groups regardless of the frequency that they eat.
So essentially, you know even though I do weight neutral nutrition now I did start my career in the weight loss industry and so I have experience with this. And certainly the evidence I have to say but also from my professional experience you can snack as defined as small amounts of food between meals and still lose weight. So I've worked with plenty of people back in my weight loss days who were snacking and having some into each between meals and they lost weight. So it actually doesn't matter how frequently you eat.
Essentially like I said earlier weight loss requires an energy deficit that is maintained over a sustained period of time. And like I said the metabolic response of an individual to this energy deficit is unpredictable. But this is not something we're talking about today. So the next thing that the research tells us is that food choice.
So what you choose to eat is a stronger determinant of body weight than eating frequency or snacking habits. So another key takeaway really that encourages us to focus on the quality of our diet like we chatted about yesterday. So what you eat is more important than how often you eat. And I will also add that you can't tell anything about someone's health by their weight.
Healthy bodies come in all shapes and sizes and that's really important to remember. But again the key takeaway here is that what you're choosing to eat regardless of long term health or weight management is that what is more important than how often. So one of the key challenges that people face when it comes to eating is that they're trying to eat to this set of black and white rules. I've meet each of people who are afraid of being hungry or they avoid snacking because they feel that even if they would eat even a small amount that it opens the floodgates and they feel like they can't stop.
Or if they are to get hungry it just they feel out of control and really panicky about food. But this avoidance of snacking leads into feeling hungry in between meals or exacerbates emotional eating or symptoms of depression and anxiety. And they do eventually break and then feel that they everything that they can find and this is a really frustrating cycle for people to be in. And so I developed a series of habit building models on snacking that walks through the fundamentals of choosing food and really understanding this hungry versus non hungry eating how to manage this and understand this in yourself and how to create a nourishing snack.
You have decided you're hungry and it's time for you to eat. The end goal here is always that you are empowered to choose what's right for you with how you eat and feel confident in those choices. And that you're making one that you're happy with that you feel to support your long term health. So you can complete those snacking habit building modules as part of the nourish your body pathway in the ailer health app.
You can download that sign up get started for free and then you can access a habit building modules via our opinion subscription. But that is it for today. There's a link in tomorrow's episode. We're going to chat more about that.
And specifically on time. The daily dog podcast is proudly brought to you by ailer health. Build food confidence and learn how to choose foods that are right for you and your body. Download the app today and we'll have it set up last.
As always you can find out more about our chat in the show notes. You can also join the conversation over in the ailer health community group on Facebook. We'd love to see you there. If you've got a topic you'd love to hear us chat about on the daily dog.
Please let us know. Email us at hello at ailerhealth.com.au or you can send us a message on Instagram. Until next time.