A mid-morning muffin? An afternoon cookie (or 5)? A late night bowl of ice-cream slathered in Midnight Moo? If you’re anything like me, you make an effort to eat well, trimming your portions and choosing a salad at lunchtime but you get derailed by the daily pick-me-ups that you can’t seem to do without.

It’s great to get on track when it comes to eating well. The benefits are vast and even if you don’t want or need to lose a few pounds, feeling good, having more energy, and a happy digestive system is something to shoot for.

I decided I needed to knock off those regular diet-disrupters one by one.

My personal list of snack-devils can take me out at any time of the day. I can literally hear them call my name from the back of a cupboard, a pantry shelf, or the fridge.

Let’s start with the mid-morning muffin. This was the easiest thing to stop for me. It was adding 350 calories to my daily intake of around 1800 calories, 3 to 4 times a week. That’s a big chunk and if I’d stuck with it, I would have become a big chunk! Making myself look at the calories of each thing I’m about to eat is another thing that helps. Quite a few times now, I’ve put myself off eating something I would have regretted simply because I saw how high in calories it was.

I started eating better breakfasts. Now, every morning I prepare a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal topped with a little agave, banana, nuts and flax seeds and pour unsweetened rice milk over the top. It is delicious and so hearty that I couldn’t squeeze in a mid-morning muffin if I tried. Sometimes I’ll start to feel a little hunger pang by around 11.30am. If so, I simply eat lunch early. For the late afternoon and night time cravings my strategy has been to eat a piece of fruit. Remember your mom saying that, when you constantly complained of being hungry between meals?

Oranges are my savior. Their sweetness feels like candy and they’re pretty filling as well. I drink a lot of tea and a couple of cups of coffee a day which is extremely satisfying. I’ve virtually eradicated juice and soda and my biggest challenge now is to drink more water.

There are so many up-sides to removing the daily extras that throw off your diet plan. Losing weight becomes a lot easier and the cravings go away surprisingly quickly. The ice cream, cookies, chocolate, and muffins barely whisper my name these days. I can even keep those things in my house and ignore them – as long as I don’t run out of oranges and tea…