The wide world of snacks

So there was a request several days ago in a comment about what snacks I generally eat during the day. I have being to respond sooner but clearly I got distracted somewhere along the way. Anyway, here are my personal rules for snacks (note as always my golden rule to do what works for you applies). 1. No snack should be less than 100 calories or more than 200 calories. Less than 100 calories does not fill me up and more than 200 calories is begining to turn into a small meal and not a snack. 2. Try and eat your snack/or snacks at roughly the halfway mark time wise between meals. If I eat lunch at noon. I will have a snack at around 3:30 because I know I will be eating dinner by six. This could be construed as being a late snack but I have a cup of coffee at about 2 pm and usually that fills me up until about 3:30, if I don't have coffee I have my snack earlier. If I have a snack in the morning I will have it at about 10 am since I usually eat breakfast at around 8 am and lunch at around 12 pm. This way my blood sugar does not crash and I don't develop a deep desire to eat everything in sight when eating lunch or dinner. 3. Snacks are an excellent opportunity to get in the fruit/veg/ or fiber you may be missing elsewhere in your diet. Now as to actual snacks I really like to eat (yes I did make you read a lot of stuff to get to this point) 1. Any kind of fruit, apples, grapes, peaches, and bannanas are my particular favorites. I stick to one piece of fruit or one bunch of grapes as a general rule but I will supplement with some other food item. Sometimes if I am just eating an apple I will put a little bit of peanut butter on it and that helps fill me up. 2. Mozarella string cheese (we buy these in bulk at Costco). I have one piece of string cheese and a piece of fruit quite often as my snack. I like string cheese because it comes in an individually wrapped package and therefore I know exactly how many calories it is (80 calories if you must know). Also because it is string cheese it takes a few minutes to eat which is a good thing. 3. Yogurt, again it comes in low-fat and fat free versions and it is an individual serving size which is a big plus. I love yogurt and fruit together. My yogurt is usually 90 calories per container and that fits nicely into my world of snacking. 4. Popcorn. Here I should point out that you really need to read the label, most popcorn bags are multiple servings (although you can now get single serving sizes) and you need to figure out how many calories are in a bag to figure out how much you can eat. My rule of thumb is that I can eat half a bag of popcorn at a sitting provided it is lo-cal popcorn. Generally I either save the other half of the bag for the next day or I just throw it out. Still it is really filling and that is important. 5. Hard boiled eggs, plain or with a little bit of salt and pepper on them. A couple of hard boiled eggs can be a really good snack in the middle of the afternoon. 6. Vegetables are also good, baby carrots especially are easy to transport and snack on if you don't want to prepare anything fancy. Besides my dad always claimed that they made your hair curl and gave you good night vision and who doesn't want that? Anyway, those are probably my staple snacks most of the time, obviously I avoid chips/bread/and sweets but I don't think those things will derail your diet if eaten occasionally and in moderation. Anyway, all of this reminds me that I should go eat my afternoon snack so I am going to go have an apple and a piece of cheese now before I forget to eat.