[Alan T]

The problem that I have with things like the reduced fat nilla wafers or baked ruffles is when I tried to cut down the calories, I found I really have to focus on making the calories count. Reduced fat is good, but I found for myself at least I would eat the meal I needed for the various protein/vitamins/nutrition but then snack on top of that and really not be effective with my dieting.

I pretty much had to cut out all snacking outside of meals other than things like veggies which was very difficult. The two biggest things I did to try to accomplish that was:

1) add an additional two meals. One of them is more of a snack than anything else of healthy fruit+yogurt. But then four smaller fairly evenly balanced meals paced out through out the day help take away the snacking for me. Yes, that means I can't have a huge whopper 600 calorie steak for one meal though, or I have to adjust things appropriately. Now I try to aim for roughly 5 meals of 400 - 400 - 100 - 400 - 400 for a total of 1700ish calories a day. So a smaller cut of chicken or smaller cut of meat or whatever along with veggies or a salad or something that has virtually 0 calories is what I have to do.

For me personally adding in the snack food didn't work too long because I still ended up needing more to eat later. Maybe it is just a me thing and everyone is different though.