Snacks, Namkeen and Late Dinners
Reviewed by CDE Mehandi Sharma · Updated
Two eating patterns come up repeatedly in Indian households, and both work against you in a specific way.
The evening tea snack. Biscuits, namkeen, samosa, chivda — usually eaten while doing something else, rarely counted as food. These are typically refined carbohydrate with added fat, and the portion is decided by the packet rather than by hunger.
The fix is not to remove the ritual. Keep the tea, change what accompanies it: roasted chana, peanuts, a boiled egg, chaas, or fruit with a few nuts. Serve it in a bowl rather than eating from the packet, which does most of the portion control on its own.
The long gap and the late heavy dinner. Lunch at one, nothing until dinner at ten, and then the largest meal of the day eaten shortly before lying down. Arriving at dinner ravenous reliably produces a bigger meal, and a large glucose load with no activity after it is the least favourable timing there is.
The fix here is a genuine mid-afternoon snack — which reduces the size of dinner more effectively than resolving to eat less does — and moving dinner earlier where household routine allows.
If dinner cannot move, a short walk afterwards does more than anything else available at that hour.