What Can You Do When You Can’t Seem to Stop Eating Sweets and Sugar?
Bad advice to avoid when it comes to cutting down sugar
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I love sweet things. I love chocolate, ice cream, cakes, cookies, and desserts just as much as the next person. And while I tout a healthy lifestyle, I am adamant in the belief that fruit is not a replacement for ice cream, cakes, or cookies.
But that doesn’t mean there is no joy in fruit.
Bad advice to avoid when it comes to cutting down sugar
If you search “How to cut down on sugar” on Google, many listicles will come up, with many of them sharing similar advice —
“Swap your cookies for orange slices!”
“Eat frozen bananas instead of ice cream!”
“Baked sweet potato is just as good as cake!”
Yet it would be hard to have a cup of banana nice cream and believe it to be equivalent to a cup of Ben and Jerry’s Half Baked ice cream — they just aren’t the same. In fact, choosing to have fruit over ice cream for dessert is often treated like a sacrifice in the United States.
While this kind of advice is well-meaning, it makes the fatal mistake of framing a healthy choice as a choice of deprivation. But while I don’t think fruit is a replacement for the classic desserts we all know and love, that doesn’t mean that fruit is the antithesis of sweet deliciousness.
When fruit for dessert is not a punishment
When I was living in the United States, I barely had a basic understanding of when fruits were in season. Watermelons were in season during the summer and apples probably the fall, but when did blueberries or strawberries come in? How about oranges? Grapes? Mangoes? In fact, I didn’t even think to ask these questions because these fruits would be available at my supermarket all year round.
But coming to Japan, I discovered that many fruits were only available seasonally, and so their appearance in markets was celebrated. When it became strawberry season, you would know — you would see many posters of red strawberries in the supermarkets, restaurants would serve strawberry-themed…
