People with a sweet tooth - help please !

fruuiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit especially dried fruit. smoothies - milk/yoghurt + fruit.
or go cold turkey and retrain your taste buds (this includes artificial sweeteners).

Murray's sugar-free cookies are not bad.

90 Calorie Special K bars.

I find it that if I have a little bit of exact thing I am craving - I don't get as much craving as when I try to substitute with fruit for example.

I just eat the very chocolate I want (but instead having the whole thing, I have just a square or two)

I used to substitute with energy bars and crap like that, but I don't really like them, so I may as well have what I want.

I realised pretty quickly that giving up chocolate would mean giving up my new healthy lifestyle - I'd never be able to stick to it.

Just eat in moderation. I allow myself 1 treat sized chock a day, or 2 squares of dark chocolate - that way I don't feel like I'm giving up what I love, but I'm (dramatically!) cutting down.

I also have tried to cut out unplanned snacking all together, it's too much of a temptation. Try having a planned snack in the afternoon, I tend to have a cereal bar (Tescos light choices choc & orange are lovely!) or some grapes as I need the sugar - I don't have much in my meals etc.

Good luck, and feet free to add me

Sugar is very addictive and it's going to take a while to wean yourself off it. I think you should stop buying cereal bars and cereals and biscuits which are full of sugar, stop buying them completely and swap them for dried and fresh fruits, wholegrain low sugar cereals, rice cakes, crackers with low fat soft cheese and nuts. Your body will eventually get used to your new way of eating and hopefully your sugar cravings will become more manageable. Good luck

Jell-o makes sugar free pudding and gelatin snacks that are sugar free, fat free, low calorie and good. The Jell-o gelatin usually has only 10 calories and it's delicious. The pudding snacks are around 60 calories each and are also delicious. My favorite way to eat them is to add some fat free Reddi Whip on top so it feels like I'm having a fancy parfait. And, everything tastes better with Reddi Whip on top and it makes it feel more special and like you're not depriving yourself so much while only adding 5 calories per serving.

I used to have a really sweet tooth, and I used to use artifical sweeteners and "diet" crap, which just made me fatter. Although there are fewer or even no calories in these products, the chemicals are manufactured and may have an effect on insulin resistance. Some people believe that the body cannot differentiate between low/no cal sweeteners and sugar, and therefore the body releases insulin the way it would when eating sugar/high carb foods, hense pushing any of the glucose in the blood stream into storage in the fat cells, rather than being used immediately for energy.

My advice would be to cut out the sweeteners, look at limiting the likes of high carb/sugar bars and to think about a suppliment with chomium in it. Many of us who crave sweet things are deficient in this mineral, and supplimenting with it may also help regulate blood sugars in the body.

I personally find that eating the low GI ( glycemic index - ie how quickly the body can break down foods into simple sugars) to be the best thing ever for controlling sugar cravings. I no longer crave sweet things and products using artificial sweeteners now taste foul! A good rule of thumb is to eat foods that don't have more (or better any!) than a few ingredients on the label, and if you can't pronounce an ingredient don't eat it! Hope this helps.

I'm actually pretty good at losing weight - my problem is that I then stop paying attention and eat a load of crap and it all piles back on - and I can tell you that it's perfectly possible to lose weight and still eat sweet things every day (although I do tend to be over my suggested amount of sugar). Yes, sugar is bad; yes, diet fake sugar is evil, but I know that if I try to cut out sweet things altogether I'll climb the walls and then fall spectacularly off the wagon, which so far as I'm concerned is ultimately worse than getting back to a healthy weight and getting into shape whilst eating a technically-imperfect diet. So, I incorporate sweet but not-too ruinous things into what I'm eating.

I'll quite often eat one of those teeny-tiny bars of really good chocolate - Green and Blacks or Lindt, say - they're about 200 calories a go, so it means being careful about other things, but I eat it slowly and really enjoy it, so it's worth it.

I tend to keep some Carte D'Or ice cream in the freezer - a serving of that is only 110 calories and I have it with a massive bowl of fruit, so I feel like I've had a big pudding. If you're out and about, a Mr Whippy-type ice-cream is generally not too bad (skip the flake). Actually, lots of ice lolly type things are pretty OK, too. Soleros spring to mind.

I'm a bit of a cake obsessive (I even have cupcake tattoos) but if I'm trying to lose weight, the fact that cake is high in both fat and sugar means I really need to try to steer clear. Although I've found in the ast that certain things - meringues and eclairs, for example, which are both mostly air - are less of a disaster than others, so if I'm going to work a treat into my eating for the day, I'll go for one of those. Tonight I'm going round to a friend's house for dinner, and I offered to bring pudding so I'd have some control over what it was. I've made some meringues (120ish calories for 2) and I'll take a load of summer berries to have with them.

Overall my advice would be, try to use fruit as a basis for desserts/sweet snacks (e.g. stewed fruit with a dollop of low-fat custard or yoghurt) ; and watch out for the fact that sugar and fat can often go hand in hand and you can only get away with so much.

Bummmmppp, for later. I'll be back.

Fruit is dessert. Fruit is dessert. Fruit is dessert. There is plenty of natural sugar in fruit. I will say that it is very hard to cut out added sugar. Just about everything has some sort of added sugar in it. I cut out artificial sweeteners all together as they do more harm than good and have stayed away from anything that has more than 4-5g of sugar per serving. It seems as tho, the more sugar you eat the more you want. So it can be a struggle to stay away from it. I'll usually grab an apple or an orange if I have a sugar craving. Worst case, I will grab a square of 85% LIndt cocoa. Sugar can have a huge effect on your health and make it hard to lose weight. My biggest culprit was sugary mixed alcoholic drinks. That totally sabotaged my clean eating lifestyle.
Cutting back is the best thing. Maybe even chewing sugar free gum that is flavored like Key Lime Pie or Chocolate Mint. JMHO.

90 Calorie Special K bars.

oh, yum. I actually had to ban these from my house. The chocolatey pretzel are so good that they might as well be donuts and I will overeat them, as in, the whole box. not fair they make them taste so good.

Sounds weird, but Cool Whip free [about 8 T] with 1 T reduced fat peanut butter. Mix it all up til it melts some, then dip a banana in it. It's sort of like peanut butter banana ice cream, if such a thing exists. For some reason, that satisfies. Not terribly healthy. Not saying that. But it does the trick. Got this from HungryGirl.

Hollycat
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