Snack Ideas For The Flat Belly Diet

One of the best things about the Flat Belly Diet is that all meals and snacks are 400 calories and are interchangeable. The purpose of the snack on the Flat Belly Diet is to ensure you do not go more than four to five hours without eating. You can choose snacks from the Flat Belly Diet book or come up with ideas for your own 400-calorie snack.

Importance of MUFAs

The Flat Belly Diet recipes all contain a monounsaturated fatty acid, or MUFA. MUFAs are plant-based and are one of the "healthy" fats. They lower the "bad" cholesterol in your bloodstream that comes from the saturated fat in meat and dairy products. The premise of the diet is that you will lose belly fat because MUFAs reduce blood cholesterol so the liver does not produce the excess cholesterol that contributes to unhealthy belly fat. The catchphrase for the Flat Belly Diet is "a MUFA at every meal," and snack ideas for the diet should contain one of the five types of MUFAs: most vegetable oils, olives, nuts and seeds, avocados and dark chocolate.

Creating Your Snack

Create several types of snacks for the Flat Belly Diet. If you develop your own snacks, you will need to do some calorie counting, but as long as they are approximately 400 calories and contain a MUFA, they will fit the diet plan. In addition to several recipes for snacks, the Flat Belly Diet book also contains calorie counts of many ingredients you can combine to make your own snacks. You can choose items to make snacks to your personal taste, whether sweet and savory, crunchy or chewy.

Snack Ideas

Try apple slices dipped in 2 tbsp. of peanut butter and sprinkled with sunflower seeds, but no more than 1/8 cup of this high-fat MUFA. Put a 1/2 cup of low-fat cottage cheese or 1/4 cup of hummus on 10 whole wheat crackers, top each with a black olive and have 1/3 cup of cranberries on the side. You can make a smoothie by blending one cup of fat-free milk, a 6 oz. container of vanilla yogurt, 1/4 cup of chocolate chips and 1 cup of fresh or frozen fruit. If you use fresh, be sure to add a handful or two of ice. Mix up a bowl of 1 cup of cottage cheese and 1 cup of unsweetened natural applesauce, then add 2 tbsp. of walnuts and 1/4 cup of raisins. A wedge of low-fat spreadable Swiss cheese on an English muffin, with 6 deli turkey slices is also tasty. Grab 10 almonds on the side for crunch.

Cautions

Calling monounsaturated fatty acids MUFAs makes it easy to forget that they are real fats with 9 calories per gram. Adding more than one MUFA to a snack or meal may result in having more fat than is recommended -- 25 to 35 percent of total calories -- in your diet. Also, while the snacks contain about 400 calories and the Flat Belly Diet allows three 400-calorie meals in addition to the snack, the program will not result in weight loss for everyone who follows it. Sedentary women, especially, often need fewer than 1,600 calories per day for weight loss. The Flat Belly Diet, snacks included, is more a healthy-eating regimen than a diet regimen.