It was a dark and stormy night. A young girl lay quietly in her bed, yearning for sleep, recoiling from the loud, booming thunder. She hears footsteps approaching her door, but she knows that there shouldn’t be anyone else home. The footsteps get closer; the floorboard next to her bed creaks. She’s afraid to turn around. It is upon her.

Scary, right?

Now, replace the dark and stormy night with a sunny afternoon in between classes. The young girl is me, attempting to be productive, shying away from the eerie sound of my growling stomach. The footsteps are crumbs, trailing from my food bin to my desk. And somehow, the story ends with me succumbing to a snack attack, even though I ate lunch less than an hour earlier.

Still scary? It should be.

In high school, my daily routine typically involved skipping breakfast or eating something small and on-the-go, because I was usually running late. Now, I can barely even make it through Saturdays and Sundays because the awkward timing of brunch doesn’t allow me to have three meals a day. You’d think that I’d be used to it and that it wouldn’t bother me, but no.

At least back then, if I got hungry during the school day, I just had to put up with it if I didn’t have any food left over from my lunch. Then, after school, I would have a small snack that would hold me over until dinner, and after that, I would usually go to bed early enough to not get hungry again. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it worked for me.

Ever since I started school here, awkward meal timing has run rampant 24/7; this, combined with having snacks within arm’s reach whenever I go to my room, has consequently dragged me down into a bottomless pit of crackers, cookies and chips.

I eat a small breakfast before my first class, but then on most days I have a long break between the end of that one and the start of my next, creating the perfect environment for me to snack away.

When lunch comes around, I find sweet relief temporarily. I usually have a class to go to after that, but when I get out of class I just pull out the bin again. To try to cut down on my snacking I always eat an early dinner. But, of course, if I stay up late enough, which I typically do, it doesn’t matter how much food I stuffed myself with for dinner. Inevitably, I get hungry again. And if I don’t finish off a box of graham crackers, I’ll end up rallying a group to go to Late Night. I mean, at this point, I legitimately think my body is 50 percent mozzarella sticks.

It all ends with me waking up the next day somehow simultaneously feeling significantly heavier from the amount of fried cheese I consumed hours before, but also hungry again and ready for breakfast.

There’s nothing wrong with snacking. If I was eating smaller meals and snacking in between those, then it would be fine, and it’s actually recommended by some nutritionists. My problem is that I pile my plate (and get soft serve if the machine isn’t broken), but I still retreat to my room and eventually eat more, sometimes even if I’m not necessarily hungry — simply snacking from boredom. I know I’m overeating. The scale in the third floor bathroom of my dorm has told me as much. And I’m not happy about it.

So what can I, and anyone else who has fallen victim to the snack attack this year, do about it? I tried getting rid of my snacks by not replacing them when they ran out, but I just ended up buying food or going out of my way to find someone who had some, so that didn’t work. I tried forcing myself to go to the gym a lot, but I kept up with it for a week and then couldn’t find the time anymore. I tried keeping only healthy foods in my room, but a lot of those spoil or expire relatively quickly, and I didn’t have the energy to buy them in small quantities and keep having to replace them.

All of these failed attempts mean the problem is not the snacking itself, but my lack of self-discipline. Any of the aforementioned snack hacks would probably solve or at the very least mitigate the situation, so it’s up to me and my fellow snack victims to either hunker down and stick with it, or to just accept the snacking and all of its consequences.

I’ve come to accept that there’s no snack attack monster hiding around every corner. It’s just a product of my own decisions. It’s a struggle to fight the monster within you, but it’s certainly doable. Yes, I am eating a Trader Joe’s oatmeal raisin dunker as I write this, but who knows, maybe I’ll go for a run after.

 

Contact Kassidy Kelley at kckelley ‘at’ stanford.edu.