h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I find that I often reach for the biscuits or crisps (cookies or potato chips, for our US friends) because I'm peckish, but don't want to prepare anything. One solution is to keep some carrot sticks or celery to nibble on, ready-prepared. With celery, you can just pull off a stick. Carrots need to be peeled and cut into sticks, which I class as 'preparation', but you can do this as soon as you get the shopping home. This gives you some nice healthy snacks. Young carrots can also be quite sweet, so they can even satisfy your sweetness craving at the same time.

Some of the easiest snacks are ones which can be bought already prepared, like bags of peeled baby carrots; in the US you can even find them in packages of multiple small bags to take to school or work. Easy and simple to REMEMBER to take along. Also, for a bit of sweetness, small boxes (1/4 oz. up to 1 oz.) of raisins.

If only the exercise bit were so easily packaged!

We have similar things over here. Snag is, a bag of baby carrots costs more than buying a bag of ordinary carrots and making carrot sticks. IMHO, the convenience isn't worth the extra, hence my suggestion of preparing carrot sticks.

I quite agree about the cost, but to actually cut up the carrots ahead of time would make my healthy efforts too premeditated! Bottom line, for me, is that the cost is worth it if it helps me DO it! I have little time left after work, school and sporadic attempts at exercise to plan very far ahead. I should probably do the cut up carrots, though, since I would then have utensils handy to cut up celery as well. (Now, celery is REALLY expensive already prepared!)
SC

Innit amazing what we'll do so casually to hurt ourselves....yet doing something deliberately to be self-nurturing feels odd and sometimes embarrassing....we don't want to do it for fear of putting out a little more energy for our own gain.

Fruitbat

Yesterday Richard bought some carrots - fairly young, but not baby carrots. Today while cooking dinner I had a choice - stand around doing nothing for 15 - 20 minutes or cut up the carrots. I did the carrots, nibbling on carrot sticks as I went along. It didn't take any extra time out of my day and I now have some nice sweet carrot sticks to snack on when I get home tomorrow evening. In fact, I had a small, low-fat cake bar after dinner tonight (only 67 calories). I decided that the carrots tasted nicer, so I may give up cake completely and just eat carrot sticks for dessert!