Make Dessert Smaller

Earlier this month I posted about drinking more water. For this coming month I have two changes to talk about. The monthly changes will focus on making healthy, environmentally and financially sound lifestyle choices. As with all the changes I write about, do what works for you, if you are interested in making changes. If this particular change does not suit you for some reason, skip it. First up, for July, is making dessert smaller.

My family enjoys dessert! I used to find myself in a bind between wanting to limit the sugar intake, but also not wanting to deprive us all of dessert. Dessert is fun! I want my kids to learn to partake of dessert in a responsible manner, not just think that there is no room for dessert in a healthy diet. I don't want them to see sweets as "bad." I'd prefer they see hydrogenated fats and things like that as bad. I want them to enjoy good treats, but responsibly. I don't want to deprive my kids of sweets so that they go wild with them when they are away from our house. Rather, I want them to learn to be self-controlled in their food choices. I want them to tune into how they feel when they eat responsibly versus how they feel when they eat a bunch of junk. It is a process and my kids are learning to be temperate in eating treats and junk food. Thankfully it isn't a race. It is just one more area where we live life side by side, learning and encouraging one another to do the right thing. Each person in our family is at a different place in this.

For desserts in our family we often make mini-desserts. With the smaller glasses, as shown in the photos above, I can use 2 or 3, twelve ounce, bottles of root beer to make floats for our entire family. There are six of us, not counting pets. This is beneficial in several ways. I can buy a root beer that is higher quality and not sweetened with high fructose corn syrup. If we went through six bottles every time we had root beer floats, it would be too spendy to buy the good stuff. Then we would be drinking way more of the really cruddy stuff. Not good to drink so much sweet stuff and really not good to drink the cheap, corn syrup laden stuff.

We also eat small, really small, bowls of ice cream for dessert. Or I serve up tiny cookies. I forget how small my cookies are until other people comment on them. But, when they are small, if I eat, say for example, five cookies, it isn't as big a deal as if I ate five larger size cookies.

This change has been a positive one for our family because everyone likes dessert, so we eat dessert! And we eat it regularly. No deprivation there. But we eat much smaller portions. And smaller portions means we can afford higher quality and it means we aren't consuming so much sweet stuff. It helps us all to be a bit more self-controlled and to learn to be content with a smaller portion of a higher quality sweet treat. Okay, so for my friends that were out with me and saw me order two desserts last week, yeah the waitress did look at me funny, that was a splurge and I did take 3/4 of the second dessert home to M and we were at one of my favorite restaurants and the quality is high...and...um...well, an occasional pig out is okay, right? ;-D