Actually, you can eat dessert while on a diet
One of the first things people do when they start a diet is take away all the bad; the sugar, the fat, the carbs, the list goes on. People assume the first thing to take away while on a diet is dessert. But why go through that withdrawal? Why break up with the food you love the most?
People in Fort Collins are active and watch what they eat. But what about all those yummy dessert places? What’s going to happen to their business if we all decide to cut dessert out of our diets? Will they disappear? (Sounds like my worst nightmare)
Yes, it is a good thing to get rid of all those sugary foods in order to lose weight. Yes, this does work for people. However, people can also lose weight while still eating dessert. This could be a reduced dessert, think fruit filling instead of sugar, or even that piece of chocolate cake with a side of ice cream you’ve been craving all day.
It’s okay to go on a hike and come back for a yummy treat in Old Town that you’re just dying to have. You’re not going to regret it. Trust me. In fact it’s worse if you knowingly ignore it.
Adam Bornstein states that by eliminating something that you love from your regular eating habits, “you create a terrible relationship with food . . . This instills a mindset of restriction, which leads to frustration, which leads to a lack of consistency.” Then “you end up hating any diet, give nutrition the middle finger, go to town on everything in your pantry, and feel even worse about yourself.”
By eliminating something you love, you will end up going crazy and have multiple moments of weakness where you will “treat yourself”, eat everything sugary in your eye sight and regret all your decisions once the deed is done. Instead of avoiding it, you’ll actually have enhanced cravings for those sugary foods and find yourself going towards it anyway. There is no need to even go through this hardship. Just don’t remove something from your life that you really love. Don’t do it. Don’t.
This isn’t something that I’m making up, science also agrees with me. Researcher's found that reduction of foods for a diet increases hunger and cravings and actually results in a regain of weight rather than a loss of weight.
Another study found that the students who were restrained from eating chocolate ate more than the other group who wasn’t.
Eating dessert while on a diet is possible! You still can lose weight while eating that dessert you look forward to eating every day. There are numerous lists of desserts you can eat while on a diet. There is even a “Dessert-a-Day Diet”, and as the title states, it literally involves eating a dessert a day. “8 desserts to help you lose weight” offers low-calorie foods everybody is looking for, yet still caters to your sweet tooth.
So after your long hike in Horsetooth or your adventure out to the snowy mountains, go eat that dessert. Don’t let any diet, or any person, stop you from enjoying something you love!
