Sweet Tooth

I’m a complete and total sugar addict. If I try to withhold from having sweets when I am craving them I go off the deep end and gorge beyond control. I would recommend having something small and sweet when you want it. I also subbed my normal candy with a lot of fruits, and baby carrots which help me feel better about eating something that is still helping with my sugar craving. If I have to go for bad sugars, I have been doing the mini candy bars, or Skinny Cow products as a fix. That way there are not as many calories and you still get that really sugary fix.

I replaced the processed sweets with more whole foods. Carrots, broccoli, celery, sugar snap peas are all very sweet after weening yourself off the processed sweets. Fruits are great too for satisfying a sweet tooth.

I replaced my major sweets with dark chocolate, great coffee (no sugar, no cream, black), a little cheese here and there, and some other stuff. Sometimes the foods higher in fiber can have a little sweetness to them that can help ween yourself off the processed sweets.

If I were you, I would incorporate a little sweet treat everyday, keep the portion reasonable, and count the calories AND nutritional benefit of it. Most days I have a serving of ice cream, a beer, some dark chocolate, some almonds, some veggies, and then I also have my breakfast and dinner. Variety is the spice of life, you'll stick to your diet better if you don't remove what you love most completely. Everything in moderation.

I have the same problem! Sweets are what Hungry Girl would call my "trigger food." If I have a little, I can't stop! Here's what I've found works:

FRUIT! Lots of people have suggested this, but fruit is awesome for a sweets craving. If you need more than just the fruit itself to kill the craving, I suggest strawberries with light cool whip, or (one of my favorites) a banana dipped in chocolate pudding and frozen. I often find that just having a bowl of pineapple kills any sweets cravings I'm having. SOmething about the tangy-ness (word? It is now!) really works, and the same goes for oranges.

Here's the other thing I've started doing, because I know that sometimes what it takes is a gooey chocolate brownie or cookie. I first make a batch of cookie dough, a pan of brownies, cupcakes, whatever. I always make cookie dough using light ingredients (egg whiltes, light butter, 1/2 the sugar), use No Pudge brownie mix (if you haven't tried this, you should!), and make cupcakes using canned pumpkin, fat free yogurt, or 1/2 can of diet soda (again, another trick you should try if you haven't--someone mentioned the pumpkin trick earlier. You do it by adding ONLY the soda, yogurt or pumpkin to the cake mix and NOTHING ELSE, then baking the cupcakes normally).

Then I divide whatever I have made into single serve portions and freeze it. Brownies and cupcakes freeze and defrost well after being pre-cooked, and the cookie dough I like to keep raw before I freeze it and bake as I go. When I'm required to defrost my sweets ahead of time before I eat them, it requires me to pause for a second and think, "do I really need this?" A lot of times, in the process of waiting for my brownie or cupcake, I decide I don't really want it! It also stops me from over doing it. The bottom line to this method is putting as many roadblocks as possible between yourself and your tendency to overindulge.

This also works well for people who live alone, like me, because if I make a whole batch of cookies or brownies, they'll go stale before I can eat them all. And if they don't, I'm eating waaaay too many!