Dessert is a common end to most meals, regardless of whether in a fancy restaurant or just at home at your dinner table with family. Unfortunately, many desserts are full of ingredients that when eaten too frequently can cause a negative impact to your health. This does not mean you have to give up dessert all together. However, how often you can eat dessert before it starts to affect your health depends on your other eating and exercise habits.
Calories of Dessert
The problem with desserts is the calorie content. Most desserts feature ingredients that are high in sugar content, like chocolate, or higher in fat content, like ice cream which provide a lot of calories in a small nutritionally-void package. When you add these calories onto all the other meals you've consumed throughout the day, you can quickly create a calorie surplus.
Calorie Surplus
Whether or not you can get away with eating a dessert depends on how many calories you've already consumed in the meals preceding your dessert. If you can maintain your weight at 2,400 calories a day, and you've already consumed 2,200 calories, then you only have a 200 calorie leeway for including dessert with your meal. When you regularly go over the calories needed to maintain your weight, you create a calorie surplus. When extra calories are available, your body often stores them as fat in your adipose tissue for later use. This results in an increase in the size of your fat cells as well as an increase in your body weight.
Exercise
If you still want to eat dessert, you can either decrease the amount of calories you eat during other meals of the day or you can increase your exercise. Regardless, you should always strive to include the 150 minutes of moderately intense aerobic activity recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By increasing your exercise, you burn calories. This opens up calorie availability for desserts as part of your meals.
Low Calorie Options
Even if you exercise and decrease the calories in other meals to make room for dessert calories, it's important to try to choose healthier dessert options when possible. Beyond calories, many desserts contain ingredients which are high in saturated fat or high on the glycemic index. They gylcemic index is a tool used to measure how a certain food affects your blood glucose levels. Desserts high in simple sugars or other carbohydrates which digest quickly are high on the glycemic index, which can flood your bloodstream with glucose. Desserts high in saturated fat, such as full-fat ice creams, contribute to the levels of LDL cholesterol in your blood. Too much of this bad cholesterol can lead to cholesterol plaque, which clogs your arteries and increases your risks for heart disease. Healthier options include fresh fruit, sorbet or sherbet ice creams.
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