How Do You Start Eating Dessert in a Healthy Way?

If you are like me, my biggest weakness is to say no to eating sweets, especially when it’s easy to get. When you live in a place like Fort Collins, Colorado, where there is epic cookies, 29 flavors of ice cream, and a whole cafe dedicated to chocolate it is so hard to say no to dessert. After weeks of eating all Fort Collins has to offer, I wondered if there was a healthier was to satisfy my sweet cravings.

I found two words that might benefit my healthy eating and that is: Added Sugars. According to TIME, added sugars are “the sugars that don’t exist naturally in the foods you consume.” Basically saying that cake, candy, cookies, and pies are unhealthy for you. However, the healthy sugars are natural sugars. Natural sugars show up in fruit and dairy products, but we abuse them with substances such as syrup and white sugar. This is why flavored ice cream and candy are not healthy for you.

There are many words that you can spot when trying to determine if the foods you are eating contains added sugars. Some words include corn syrup, molasses, and dextrose.

But it is impossible to just stop eating added sugar because it is in our culture to eat it!!!

When you are a college student, like me, you try to buy the cheapest foods at the grocery store. Most of the time the cheapest foods consist of cookies, cereal, soda, and bread. And of course, these foods/drinks all contain high amounts of added sugar. Its like we cannot escape from those added sugars!

Add sugars are also involved in our celebrations. There always has to be cake for birthdays, weddings, and retirment parties; otherwise are you event celebrating anything? Even for holidays the occasion involves added sugars. For Halloween we are on the hunt for candy, for Thanksgiving we try to save room for the pumpkin or apple pie, and for Christmas we make cookies for Santa, but somehow we end up eating them as well.

It is hard not to consume added sugars, so TIME is able helps us out by giving us some advice.

TIME recommended four ways that you can try to eat dessert in a healthier way:

1. Go for it! Eat the dessert but only eat a small portion. It is much easier to say yes then no so instead of going for 2 scoops of ice cream only go for 1 scoop.
2. Don’t eat the same dessert every time. Switch it up because it will become a habit.
3. Don’t eat out of habit. Just because you happened to eat cookies the last 2 nights, does not mean should a cookie the 3rd night too. There are nights when you don’t feel like eating dessert, so listen to your body.
4. Make your own dessert. When you make your own dessert you can substitute added sugars with healthier oils and possibly add some nuts too!

I was not sure what the phrase ment by “Health Desserts” which is why I found 33 Healthier Ways to Satisfy Your Sweet Tooth.

There are so many desserts that are unhealthy that it is hard to find the right desserts to eat. 33 Healthier Ways to Satisfy Your Sweet Tooth provides a good variety of healthy desserts and provides reasonable answers to why they are good.

One dessert from this list that drew my attention is dark chocolate. People always told me that it was healthy for you, but I never understood why.

The biggest thing that milk chocolate has and dark chocolate doesn’t have is added sugar and fat. This is why dark chocolate is a healthy choice.

If I wanted to eat out one night, I found a couple of places that offer healthier eating and less added sugar foods, located in Old Town, Fort Collins. The two places that I discovered is Ginger and Baker and Tasty Harmony. Ginger and Baker has a “Vegan Dream Bar” that consist of nuts, coconut, and dark chocolate. ITS SO GOOD! Tasty Harmony also has multiple healthy options to choose from!

So, I have created my own solution to eating dessert in a healthier way.

My solution is simple. Using the 33 Healthier Ways to Satisfy My Sweet Tooth, I am going to use healthy dark chocolate to my advantage. As TIME said you do not want to eat the same dessert every time, so I am going to incorporate dark chocolate with other foods.

Because it takes effort to incorporate dark chocolate with other foods it will allow me to decrease my portion size along with not getting in the habit of eating dessert.

Dessert will still be my weakness, I’ll just know how to control it better!