Snack substitutions!

Well, for starters. Snacking isn't unhealthy and won't cause you to gain weight.

Eating 'snack food' (aka CRAP) will.

Most health junkies will tell you that the idea way to eat is many small meals per day. This is essentially all day snacking.

However, I am assuming you are eating unhealthy things. Drinking water, IMO, will do little to satisfy your body's craving for sugar, carbs and substance.

I would suggest:

- Eating healthy snacks. An apple, an orange, carrots, or a handful of raw almonds. All these snacks are great for you. A handful of low sugar granola is great as well!

- Don't look down on snacking. Snacking is perfectly healthy given you eat good food. Complex carbohydrates (vegetables, grains and fruits) increase your metabolism.

J

Nutritional overhaul

If you are serious about overhauling your eating strategy, check out Precision Nutrition at www.precisionnutrition.com

I've been using it for over a year, and it had made a lot of significant improvements in all areas.

More fibre in the morning

Try consuming more fibre in the morning. I like eating hot cereal with dried fruits. Dried fruits have natural sugars that flavor the cereal as well as other nutrients. The total fibre helps cut down on snacking throughout the day.

Also, changing major habits too dramatically (ie. junk > water) rarely works. I like the ideas Jordan posted.

well depending on what you

well depending on what you want to do.

Lose weight or fat and maintain as much muscle as you can right now?
or
Build Muscle?

Both have different strategies and it is both pretty different. For either one, it is best to have about 6 small meals a day. This takes some planning though one tool that can help you plan that is totally free is http://www.thedailyplate.com/ I recommend this to a lot of people asking about diets. put in what you currently eat you will probably be surprised.

Losing fat will take some experimentation on your part as everyone is different. Basically the key to it is a calorie deficit. In all honesty the best way to create this deficit is exercise. Still eating better foods is always going to help you.

If you want to gain muscle you need a calorie excess and one very high in proteins and high quality foods. I mean you can easily increase calories by eating cakes and donuts but you really wouldn’t gain a lot of muscle. Calorie Excess does lead to adding some fat so if you are building muscle I usually do about 3 months at about 300 to 400 calories in excess a day of my daily requirement. This will add about 10-15 lbs of fat to my body but it will also add muscle. Then I will cut a little about 200 below and then I will add some more cardio and I do more super sets and so on which will really burn the calories off. I do this for about 6 weeks loose the fat then go into excess mode to build more muscle.

Anyway this is really a huge topic that I could go on for hours upon like don’t eat fruit before bed because it spike your insulin levels which is bad before bed because that interferes with the human growth hormone that is releases in the first 90 minutes of sleep. Which human growth hormone is what burns fat and it also builds muscle. eating 6 meals a day I usually get my fruits in berries in meal 1, then have a real piece of fruit like apples, pears, peaches, oranges in meal 2, meal 3 might contain some more berries like in a salad or something but there are a lot of veggies in this meal too and make sure you get your protein every single meal. Like I said this all takes some planning. Once you get used to it then it becomes rather easy.

The six small meals worked

The six small meals worked for me. I honestly eat constantly started in Feb 06 and lost 50lbs. Lately my constant eating has turned to the junk food side but it was purposely done for a nice reward.

Precision Nutrition

I found gimme20.com from the precision nutrition forums. I'm just waiting to get the manuals in my hands. I'm very exited about it.