As I age more closely towards 60, keeping my weight in a healthy range is not as trivial as it used to be. I find that it wants to edge up and that I have to be conscious about not letting it get too high.

I guess I can’t really know if this has helped, but I stopped buying snack foods years ago. Sometimes in the evenings, I feel an intense urge to snack, and if I kept chips and peanuts or something like that around, I know I would eat them, making weight control harder.

So I buy fruit and other healthier things instead. That doesn’t mean I don’t snack, it means that I don’t keep calorie-dense snack foods too easily available. I think this helps. (Not keeping too much of my favorite IPAs around helps too! lol)

Something that occurs to me is that if I had children in the house, this would be much more difficult. My cupboards groaned with snack food when I was raising my foster son, because he was hungry all the time despite being rail thin. My friends with kids keep snack foods around for the same reason.

And when I was an amateur competitive runner, well, snacking was far less consequential to my health.

All that to say, I guess, that the pros and cons of snacking probably vary per person and situation.