Plenty of suggestions (some healthy, some not) in my recent thread:
I -absolutely- understand the struggle to balance the eating because I’m bored and the eating because I’m hungry, as well as the battle with the aftereffects of junky food (heartburn, sugar rush/crash, etc).
Just be wary of the corn-nut concussion!
Oh, and long live the Trader Joe’s Peanut Butter Filled Pretzel Nugget Coalition!
Absolutely not and I’m sorry if I’ve been threadshitty. The point I’m making is that I’ve put quite a lot of thought into this very question and have - with deep reluctance - concluded that I’m not personally capable of snacking in sufficiently low quantities while driving to fall into the healthy category.
Give me infinite snacks and a long enough road trip and I will eat the world.
Last one to mention Trader Joe’s pretzel nuggets is a nuggetless barnacle!
–Double checks the avatar to make sure it’s NOT Galactus, but keeps an eye on @Johnny_Bravo anyway–
Yeah, but seriously, I do share the problem. One of the few things that saves me is that the junky stuff gives me killer heartburn as my body’s way of shrieking STOP!
No problem, mine was in Cafe Society, and yours is IMHO, and yours is specifically about healthy snacks, while mine was more about me and a search for new, better options to break up my rut.
Ah thanks. Sorry I missed that thread.
No, I wasn’t taking anyone’s responses to be threadshitty or snarky. It’s all been good feedback.
I’m just getting the vibe that this is not as common a vice as I expected 
This might be weird, but something I like to snack on that’s mostly healthy (and can be low cal if you avoid the obviously bad ones) is dry breakfast cereal. Things that come in small separate chunks are good, like mini-wheats or corn pops. My absolute favorite is original Cheerios – they take forever to eat if you do it one ‘doughnut’ at a time, and are satisfyingly crunchy.
Best salty snacks are beef jerky and roasted edemame, the latter is also high in fiber and surprisingly filling. Although you would never mistake it for chips it mostly hits the same spot.
Almonds are better if highly spiced; you just eat less. I like the sriracha and wasabi ones.
NB: Did not read most of the thread. If already said, buz buz!
That’s another nice one; the little variety boxes are just the right size too.
(I assume that you have these in the US, maybe by a different name? It’s where you get one serving of multiple cereals in miniature cereal boxes)
Salty snacks aren’t a great choice if eating out of boredom, because you’re going keep eating due to the saltiness.
It depends what you crave. The edamame is so high in fibre a couple handfuls fills you up. People sometimes eat smaller amounts of spicy things, so heavily spiced nuts or jerky may help.
People eat too many sweet things out of boredom also.
I’ve done a lot of long-distance driving, and my typical go-to for a snack is Two-Bite Brownies. Those and a large coffee will keep me going until my next gas/washroom stop.
What I have prepped for my 630 miler next week is:
Home-made chile verde beef jerky. (reasonably healthy, savory, spicey, somewhat salty)
Trader Joe’s Chile Lime Almonds (reasonably healthy, savory, spicey, somewhat salty)
Trader Joe’s Crystallized Ginger slices (barely semi-healthy, sweet, ginger spicy)
Wife’s Homemade Oatmeal, Raisin, Pecan one-bite cookies made with maple syrup (surprisingly healthy FOR A COOKIE, sweet, not spicy, not salty).
None of it should be an unmitigated sugar bomb, although the ginger comes close. It’s just a little treat, and should also be good for my stomach based on personal anecdotal success. All pretty easy to eat one handed (jerky’s pretty chewy though) and none need refigeration.
BUT to keep from overeating, I’m breaking them all into smaller, resealable containers, so I can have some each driving day (one day down, 2 days there, one day back), and the snacks will be fundamentally replace at least one full meal, possibly two.
It’s natural sugar, it’s better than other snacks, and most importantly, it keeps me awake on long drives. It’s a balance - I’d rather have the sugar from the snacks than fall asleep and crash my car. Also eating a ton of grapes is FINE as long as you balance it with your calories for the rest of the day.
Having been on and sustaining a weight loss journey for a couple of years, you can truly eat anything you want, as long as you keep it within a certain amount of calories in a day and “make up” for lack of vitamins. So if you have 20 or 30 or 40 grapes on a drive you might eat very lightly for dinner and make it veggie stir fry only, or even skip dinner if you are full.
A huge part of my weight maintenance has been facing the fact that I will always snack.
So finding/balancing the right ‘snackage’ is pretty much constant for me.
Add in a love of long drives and a massive dose of ADD, and I am often snackin’ my way across the country! Including a trip next week, so I appreciate all these suggestions.
In addition to audiobooks, here are some of the ways I stave off boredom:
I always start a drive with a giant latté from a good coffee joint, and a Cowboy Cookie. Those get me going, and keep me satisfied for the first hour and a quarter (to the first Oasis).
Then it’s a big piece of paper towel on my lap (no distraction from opening packages), with an assortment of salty (mixed nuts), sweet (cut-up Twizzlers, sour gummy worms) and meaty (beef jerky, Chinese if possible).
On a road trip, I’m not trying to lose weight. I’m trying to stay sharp and enjoy the drive!
It’s funny how people react to long drives differently.
Personally, while I have few problems doing them as a passenger (at least in the future we live in where I have a cellular enabled tablet with ample storage for movies, books, and music and an always on cellular connection), I get bored easily while driving!
Which is normally good - because my wife is prone to motion sickness, so she’ll do 70+% of the driving, while I read, navigate, and bring snacks to her mouth or get her beverage ready! Joy.
But this damn trip, she’s working, and so it’ll be me all by myself.
Thankfully, I picked up a BBC recording of a performance of the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy off of archive.org, not to mention 2-3 good audiobooks I haven’t heard yet, as well as another 2-3 I know are good. 6 days (!) of offline music on my phone, and the snacks mentioned upthread.
I’m still dreading the tedium, although this trip I’m going “the back route” to cut 50ish miles out, even if it’s even more of a deadly bore of a drive and fewer places to stop.
If time wasn’t so tight right now, I’d pad in another day so I’m not doing it again after only 2 days respite, but needs must.
Extra things not mentioned yet in thread is that while a paper towel is great, wet ones or the equivalent are key for cleaning afterwards, especially if a lot of your bio-breaks are at poorly supplied rest areas.
I’ve also taken the time to double check what’s in my emergency road kit, and while it’s almost certainly NOT needed in early-to-mid October even going over Raton pass, I made sure my backup wool blanket and 72 hour food/water pack is present, along with the rest.
And of course, since we live in the future, an ample backup battery to recharge phones and tablets as well as car adapters.
Ooh, your “back route” comment has inspired me… to do the opposite of what you’re doing (if I’m bored, I should make MORE stops).
I’m going to leave a couple hours early and make time to take some smaller highways and stop at interesting places. Between Chicago and Detroit, I’ll hug Lake Michigan on Highway 12 and visit the dunes. And a whole lot of antique stores.
Last trip I stopped in a small town with a promising record store and two used book shops. That was the best break I ever took!
Went to the new Asian grocery store that opened up. Was looking for roasted edamame (soybeans) which is very healthy, but hard to find here.
Couldn’t see those, but they did have boxes saying “Crunchy Soybean Sprouts” in different flavours, each with many small packets. They didn’t seem as nutritious from the profile.
I didn’t know what to expect. Guess I was expecting crunchy kernels. They were literally fresh tasting bean sprouts, in a pleasant sauce. I can’t imagine they are very filling, but they are probably pretty healthy.
In Chicago area Pete’s has them. And roasted chick peas (ceci). Not for driving but a mix of them with a variety of nuts and dried cherries or cranberries, or others, are my go to workday snack. Might work as a lower calorie trail mix driving…
I’m more in agreement with @Anaamika on this. It depends on what alternatives you would be snacking on and on how much you can “mindlessly” consume. I don’t know about the OP, but if I ate two cups of grapes I’d be overstuffed to the point of feeling sick, for about 30 grams of sugar (sez the internet). One apple and a cup of carrots, which would be easier on my stomach, should be about 25 grams of sugar. So not a huge difference either way, and if I like grapes and pretzels but I don’t like carrots, I’m better off with grapes.
Hmm, i guess different people mean different things by “mindless eating”. To me, it means i just keep eating them without thinking about it. I’m sure i wouldn’t stop after 2 cups if i was mindlessly eating to pass the time, rather than eating because i was hungry.