Good Desserts are a Sweet Way to Lose Weight This Fall

It’s back to school time. What are the best foods for you to eat in order to get and stay thin as the baking season begins? How about desserts? Let’s all lose weight with dessert. Not lose weight in spite of dessert, but by using the Top 5 Weight Loss Dessert foods.

Surely I must be jesting, or referring to some of those very small portions that all of the diet programs offer. Or worse, desserts filled with too much fiber or loaded with foul-tasting ingredients or yucky fake sugars and fats. No. Here are some real ways to “have your cake and eat it too.”

First, let me say that gross overeating will not help enhance weight loss. Many large, fatty, sugary desserts a day will not get you where you want to go. That’s not what we mean here. But a few well-placed favorites can really put the pleasure back in your life. And isn’t that what living should be about:enjoying each moment to its fullest? Here are a few of my thoughts from my latest guide, “Desserts That Heal” (MCE Press, 2008), about using desserts for weight loss.

Isn’t dessert bad for me?

No, but in the legion of traditional no-no’s in nutrition, dessert is the biggest. We’re often taught that if it’s food that makes you smile or feel great, it must be bad for you. First it was the calories in the desserts, then the fat, now the carbohydrates. There’s always been something wrong with dessert, until now.

I recently saw Cheetah, hearty, hirsute 74-years-young chimpanzee star of the 1938 Tarzan films, posing while eating a large, sugar-free cake in a big 2006 birthday photo-op, and I had a minor epiphany. “Hey, if he gets to eat dessert, guilt-free, why can’t we?” I thought.

About food science

In the legion of no-no’s in the science of food production — well, there are few. As a food scientist and nutritionist, I can tell you that if it’s a blue, artificially sweetened, imitation bacon-flavored, isolated soy proteinaceous candy nugget product, food scientists made it because you’ll eat it! Why? There’s an obvious economic benefit for food companies to understand your desires. And there are multiple reasons why you might choose one food over another. We food scientists know what you like to eat.

Food science is sometimes about chemistry in an outrageous extramarital relationship with marketing research. In the worst cases it boils down to getting you to eat the most inexpensive artificially produced piece of questionable, readily available material and having it warm the cockles of your heart and remind you of mom’s apple pie and home. In the best case, it is Mom’s organic apple pie, individually packaged in large quantities.

Many prepackaged desserts are delightful, healthy and have merit — you just have to find them. Instead of having guilt, gluttony, or just food-like products, I want you to eat real desserts. No artificial sweeteners, no trans fats, no deliberately low fat recipes, no cardboard-tasting imitation cakes and cookies for you to consume to alleviate your guilt. Eat good nutrients embedded in great traditional desserts.

What about carbohydrates and health?

This “eat-desserts-for-your-health” suggestion is not a low glycemic index, low fat or low calorie recommendation. This is meant to be an earful about why we should eat dessert and a response to the Atkins anti-carbohydrate craze. The “Desserts That Heal” healthy eating guide is a treatise on the overlooked importance of delicious desserts. I feel like a nutritional Martin Luther, giving the no-carb establishment what-for about the way things have been going. And I’ll bet I have at least 95 premises, many of which you’ll be surprised about like using your desserts for weight loss.

But which desserts will help me, you ask?

Butter-filled desserts

How about any dessert with 10 grams of butter in it? Butter? Yes, butter. It turns out that butter, if you have at least 10 grams in one sitting (a large pat), can stimulate a weight loss hormone known as cholecystokinin, which, similar to the hunger hormones ghrelin and leptin, allows you to have a feeling of fullness. Ten grams of butter? Isn’t that fattening? Well, let’s count the calories. Ten grams times 9 calories per gram is 90 calories. Hardly an excessive caloric intake, but potentially a fullness accelerator and weight loss stimulant. It could work for you.

Peanut butter desserts

Another weight loss stimulant is peanut butter. Peanut butter has a great complement of monounsaturated oils and also leaves us feeling sated. More recent studies have shown that peanut butter may help promote belly fat loss. Watch out for the addition of partially hydrogenated oils in your peanut butter — get it without the trans-fat generator.

Cranberry desserts

Of the 17 weight loss dessert ingredients found in “Desserts That Heal,” cranberries score in the top five ingredients, and their power is not negated by being surrounded with happy sweet ingredients, so many cranberry desserts can fit this bill.

Vanilla scented desserts

Apart from the studies that showed vanilla to be an aphrodisiac for men, the scent of vanilla can promote weight loss through appetite suppression. So baking any dessert that is vanilla scented can help. Green apple is another scent which, when sniffed in recent studies, caused a drop in post-sniffing, food consumption.

Chocolate desserts

Chocolate has, among its other amazing qualities, the ability to enhance weight loss. There are several metabolic stimulants in any source of dark or semi-sweet chocolate. These can help rev up your metabolism, which in turn will help you lose weight. Here is one of my favorite chocolate recipes:

EASY CHOCOLATE MACAROONS

4 oz. chocolate (70% or higher)

2-3 cups coconut

1 small can fat free sweetened condensed milk

Preheat oven to 325° F. Spray a cookie sheet with non-stick spray, or grease it with butter or use a nonstick cookie sheet. Melt chocolate (or use 4 oz. of powder) and mix well with coconut and sweetened condensed milk. There is a range of coconut because you don’t want your batter too runny. Start with two cups of coconut and add more if you need to firm up your batter.

Take small spoonfuls of your mix and put them 2 inches apart, on a greased cookie sheet at 325 for 15 minutes or until golden brown.

Dr. Heather MacLean Walters is a lecturer and food safety and nutrition consultant who has taught undergraduate and graduate level courses in these subjects. She has a Ph.D. in food biology from Rutgers University. Her books are available online and at major bookstores and small boutiques. She can be reached at docmaclean@embarqmail.com.