How do you think of dessert? Some households treat dessert as a rare treat. Others enjoy a small bite after every meal. And some savor a before-bed nibble larger or smaller than a mint on your pillow.
I remember a former client remarking that an aunt and uncle who were staying with her demanded a LARGE bowl of ice cream every night before bed. This idea was so foreign to her, she felt the behavior was extreme. Both the regularity and amount seemed problematic. But for her relatives, clearly this was normal.
My grandmother had a cookie jar that always contained homemade cookies. You might think this means she baked frequently. She didn’t. She rarely ate a cookie and my grandfather ate none. Dessert in their household was relegated to holidays and having fresh cookies to offer guests. I was not considered a guest.
My grandfather and several of his siblings couldn’t tolerate sugar. They discovered on their own that it made them sick and altered their diets accordingly. No reminder or guideline was needed. They didn’t like to feel bad.
When I was in junior high, the school had vending machines filled with glazed honey buns and a variety of donettes®. If you had cash, you could have dessert between classes or during your lunch break. There was also a donut shop across the street that some students frequented from our mostly but with lots of exceptions closed campus. Dessert was always available.
In spite of the presence of sugary breakfast food at school, I don’t feel like we consumed as much sugar in general as my grandchildren do. We had granola bars, but they weren’t an everyday snack. My mother didn’t carry fruit bars.
Earlier, my kindergarten required fresh fruit as a snack. That was it. No packaged anything. Fresh fruit was the only acceptable contribution. Anything with added sugar besides the breakfast pop-tart, cereal, or donut was considered dessert.
For me, dessert is a treat. How often I allow myself that treat varies. If I bake and it’s readily available, I consume more often. But I can have something in the freezer and never think about it.
Does it matter how you think of dessert?
If you consume lots of packaged, processed food from the grocery store or restaurants, it is easy to eat much more sugar in a day than you realize. In that sense, adding dessert regularly may be providing carbs and calories that you would otherwise avoid. Thinking of dessert as add-on sugar could be helpful to keep sugar consumption in check.
Viewing dessert as a treat can also be an incentive for healthier eating. Dessert can become a reward for following your plan over a period of time. There’s nothing wrong with dangling a motivating carrot in front of yourself.
A shift in what you categorize as dessert can also make a difference in the overall composition of sugar in your diet. My sister keeps her blood sugar even by drinking sodas throughout the day. (We are both prone to sugar lows that make us grouchy.) She doesn’t think of that sugar as dessert. That means that when she chooses to eat dessert, her cumulative sugar consumption can be greater than she realizes.
Similarly, my friend who drinks white wine every evening views it as an apéritif, not a dessert. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but she also doesn’t recognize the amount of sugar she’s adding to each day. This may not be a concern for her, but it could be for some of us.
Since added sugar brings calories without nutritional benefit and has addictive properties, most of us could benefit from an expanded definition of what we consider a sugary treat.
Will this change how you think of dessert?
It may or may not, but hopefully you’ll take away something that will make it easier for you to consume only the amount of sugar that will lead to you feeling your best.