Today we have a fabulous guest post from the beautiful Robyn over at The Real Life RD! She’s a fellow dietitian, nut butter addict, and lover of all things plants. We totally bond over eating alll the food alll the time. I adore this girl and am SO thankful to have her feeding you lovelies some yumtastic cookies while I’m gone. Eat up! Hello Hummusapian aficiandos! I’m Robyn and I write and ramble about my passion for plants and the important of eating enough and nourishing your body well over at The Real Life RD! I absolutely adore Alexis, not only do her recipes have me drooling on my keyboard and pinning like a madwoman, her witty writing has be laughing out loud every time I read. And can we talk about how she just passed the RD exam and has already accomplished more as an RD than anyone I know. I mean, this blog, working with Simple Truth, Barre3, and so many other fun projects! I keep asking her when the cookbook is going to be released. She’s quite fabulous. We’ve got a star my friends. So when she asked if I’d write a guest post while she’s noshing buttery croissants and sipping delicious wine in Europe with her besties, I said OF COURSE. I’d be honored to hijack your splendid space on the internet for the day! So let’s talk about snacks. Personally, I can’t go more than a few hours without eating, and I don’t think you should either. To put it briefly, our bodies release counterregulatory stress hormones from the hypothalamus if we go too long without eating. When these stress hormones are released it sends a signal to our brain to tell our liver to stop metabolizing glucose for energy. It doesn’t get burned up for energy, but rather stored away for later in case our body doesn’t get fed again. Essentially you’re storing energy rather than burning it. Not good. Which is why we don’t want to skip meals and why we don’t want to go longer than about 3 hours without eating. We want our bodies to be energy burning machines right? I surely do! So now that we have that out of the way, back to the actual food. I just started a graduate nursing program to become a Nurse Practitioner and so I’ve got little time for food prep, BUT I’ve also got a limited food budget so tons of prepackaged snacks and bars aren’t really on the grocery list these days. $1.50 for a Larabar?! I’ll make it for a quarter, thank you. And you can too. I love to make a big batch of homemade granola bars or energy bites once or twice a month to have on hand all month long. Not only does that mean more money in my wallet, it also means there isn’t 32 ingredients, 2 tablespoons worth of sugar and some whack whey or soy protein isolate in my bar. I want to snack on real food ya know? Some of my favorite snack recipes include these peanut butter chocolate chip granola bars, this super basic vegan banana bread slathered with almond butter and jam and these flourless peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. I like nut butter…a lot. And these cookies are snack-worthy. Flourless and dairy free, these cookies please paleo peeps, vegans and everyone in between! Oats, peanut butter and dark chocolate make anything healthy and you don’t really need to add the coconut palm sugar, they’re perfect as is! I love to eat them straight out of the freezer or throw a few in my lunchbox to have mid afternoon. Throw a glass of chilly almond milk in there and I am CONTENT. Happy snacking Hummusapians! [tasty-recipe id="22623"]  ]]>