6 Snack Strategies for Eating Disorder Recovery
Eating regular snacks is an essential component of eating disorder recovery.
Whether you’re recovering from anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, or any degree of disordered eating, regular and intentional snacks are key to both meeting your nutrition needs and improving your relationship with food. ✨
(And even if you have a perfectly normal relationship with food, I still recommend multiple snacks a day!)
Consistent and intentional snacks help with:
- Meeting your macro & micronutrient needs for the day –> no matter your body size
- Feeling more calm and centered around food
- Preventing binge spirals
- Not getting overly hangry
- Having a healthy digestive system, metabolism, and hormones
Not to mention, snacks can be another opportunity in your day to experience joy and pleasure in eating!
And if eating feels like the farthest thing from enjoyable right now, know that this can be healed with time. It all starts with consistent and regular nourishment, snacks included.
Getting comfortable (again) with nourishing my body with adequate snacks was something I learned to do during my eating disorder recovery journey. In this post, I’m sharing 6 of my best snack strategies that I found helpful, and hope that you find them motivating as you continue on in your own recovery!
6 snack strategies for eating disorder recovery
Make snacks non-negotiable
Just like eating 3 meals is an essential part of recovery, it’s helpful to think of snacks as non-negotiable as well.
For most people, 2-4 snacks per day tend to work well.
It can be helpful to have a plan or rhythm of when it works well for you to have your snacks. 📝
An example 3-snack rhythm might be:
Breakfast
Mid-morning snack
Lunch
Afternoon snack
Dinner
Dessert / evening snack
If you tend to sleep in later, consider shifting the mid-morning snack to a late-evening snack (i.e., 2 snacks after dinner).
If you wake up extra early, you might find that a before-breakfast snack works well for you. This is what I do!
🌟 If you’re in need of additional support or feedback in figuring out how to go about snacks in your own recovery, book your free consultation call here.
Include at least 2 macronutrients with snacks
Including at least 2 macronutrients in a snack often looks like pairing a carbohydrate source with a protein and/or fat source.
Examples of balanced snacks include:
- Apple (carb) w/ cheese cubes (fat + protein)
- Greek yogurt (protein) w/ peanut butter (fat) + blueberries
- Dark chocolate (fat) w/ almonds (fat + protein)
- Muffin (some of all 3 macronutrients, but mainly carb) w/ butter (fat)
This is a nutrition rule-of-thumb I recommend for everyone, recovery or not.
We want to pair our carb sources with a fat and/or protein to help with energy levels and blood sugar stabilization.
These 2-part-plus types of snacks are also much more likely to be satisfying and to help with meeting our recovery (or general) nutrition needs!
Plan ahead
Given how important snacks are for recovery and for meeting our nutrition needs, it’s important to plan ahead!
We aren’t always at home with perfect access to our pantry or fridge to run down and grab a snack the moment we need or want to. 😔
And even if we are at home all the time, we still need to plan ahead to have adequate snack options on hand! This means considering “foods for snacks” to be a category of what you need to be shopping for at the grocery store, in addition to items/ingredients for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
I still plan ahead to meet my snacking needs. In my life, this might look like tossing a couple of beef sticks into my purse as I head out for the afternoon, or packing some muffins and energy bites as I head out for a multi-hour drive.
In my previous anorexia weight restoration phase, I had to really plan ahead to try to creatively meet my snacking needs. I’d bring a bag of trail mix to eat quickly in between classes for a mid-morning snack at school, bring a homemade rice krispie to eat in the stands at a sporting event, and prep a protein drink in a water bottle to sip on during Spanish class.
Doing what I need to do to get the job done! Eaiser said than done.
How might you need to creatively plan ahead to meet your own recovery snack needs?
Get creative with bowls
Bowls are such a great recovery snack because they are so customizable with various toppings. You can add more or less toppings depending on your nutrition needs, what you find satisfying, and your hunger level.
Bowl ideas (customize to your needs and preferences!):
- Yogurt bowl w/ peanut butter + granola + honey
- Cereal bowl w/ almond butter + nutella + strawberries
- Smoothie bowl w/ granola for crunch
- Chia pudding bowl w/ chocolate chips + peanut butter + jam
Topping ideas to add or swap out include: nut butters, shredded coconut, granola or cereal, chocolate chips, jam or jelly, full-fat yogurt, honey, maple syrup, fruit (fresh/frozen/dried), nuts, seeds, and more. 🍓🥥🍯
Utilize all the nut butter + spreads
Going off my bowl suggestion, I encourage you to be generous with nut butters and other spreads! (Tahini, coconut butter, regular butter, nutella, etc.)
Not only is something like nut butter a great add-on to just about any snack, it also can function as a stand-alone snack. Grab a jar of peanut butter, a spoon, and a glass of milk, and you’re good to go after a couple quick spoonfuls (whatever amount makes sense for you / supports your recovery).
Recovering from anorexia and working hard on weight restoration? Try adding a spoonful or two of peanut butter as an additional late-evening snack. A spoonful of coconut oil also functions great here.
Challenge the eating disorder
Lastly, snacks are a great opportunity to work on challenging your Eating Disorder Part. Are there snacks that you might genuinely enjoy, but that the ED has convinced you are off-limits?
This could look like crackers with cheese instead of your usual veggies with hummus, a granola bowl with full-fat instead of no-fat yogurt, or a homemade brownie with milk.
What is a snack that would challenge your ED?
Questions for reflection
- How am I doing in my recovery when it comes to snacks?
- Consider consistency, adequacy, challenge to your ED
- If snacks have been a challenge lately, what is my biggest barrier?
- What kind of support might I need to move through this barrier?
- What might my next step be?
- How can I take action on that today?
July 16, 2025
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