Watching your weight? Then don’t get caught out by Snack O’Clock

AS all dedicated slimmers know, being on a diet can feel like a fulltime business.

But, to make life a little easier, experts have identified three times of the day when dieters need to be most on their guard against succumbing to a calorie-filled treat.

Known collectively as ‘Snack O’Clock’, research shows that the crucial moments fall at 11.01am, 3.14pm and 9.31pm.

Over these three periods dieters can wolf down as many as 750 calories in total — wrecking their attempts to fight the flab.

Researchers found that skipping breakfast is the first mistake many dieters make.

They get too hungry to wait for lunch, which is why 11.01am is the first danger point. At 3.14pm, office staff often seek a pick-meup to combat work-related stress and help them over the postlunch slump.

And at 9.31pm – roughly an hour before bedtime for many people – a hot drink in front of the TV is more often than not accompanied by fat – or sugar-filled snacks.

Lee Smith of Forza Supplements, which ordered the study, said: ‘We are all becoming much more knowledgeable about nutrition and how to eat more healthily at traditional meal-times.

‘It is at other vulnerable moments during the day – these Snack O’Clocks – when all the damage is done in diets. All the good work at meal times is undone.’

The same research also singled out coffee shops as a major danger to slimmers because of all the tempting muffins, pastries and sugary drinks on offer.

Mr Smith warned: ‘The key to a successful diet is avoiding coffee shops. They are like sweet shops to a child, offering all sorts of seem- ingly innocuous pleasures like lattes which are the enemies of good diets. It is pointless coming to work with a low-fat salad in a Tupperware box if you are going to pop out to a coffee shop and wreck all that good work.

‘We are all becoming much more knowledgeable about nutrition and how to eat more healthily at traditional meal-times. It is at other vulnerable moments during the day – these Snack O’Clocks – when all the damage is done in diets.’

The study comes only days after it was revealed that some coffee shop drinks contain as many as 25 teaspoons of sugar.

Action on Sugar said that if warning labels were compulsory then 98 per cent of the 131 hot flavoured drinks sold at the high street coffee chains would require a ‘red’ rating for excessive levels of sugar.

Starbucks’ Hot Mulled Fruit – which contains grape with chai, orange and cinnamon – was named as the worst offender with 25 teaspoons of sugar in the ‘venti’ size.

That is three times the recommended maximum adult daily intake in one large cup.

And an extra large Signature hot chocolate from Starbucks contained 15 teaspoons.

Nutritionists also say dieters should opt out of hot-drink rounds at work because it puts them under peer pressure to consume unnecessary calories with colleagues.

‘Lattes are enemies

of good diets’