Ice Cream

I'm not even exaggerating when I say I could sit down and eat an entire half gallon of ice cream in one sitting. I'm a huge ice cream-o-holic. It's a daily struggle for me to pace myself and eat only a little here and there so I don't undo all my hard work, but I have come up with some strategies that may help you if you suffer the way I do with it.

1) Eat ice cream (or comparable indulgence) with a very small spoon. It will take you longer to eat, you'll eat less, and you'll enjoy it more!!!

2) Do not eat ice cream when you're hungry! Ice cream is not a meal! Maybe you've never made this mistake, but I have! I'm hungry and rooting around for something to eat and see that alluring ice cream and once or twice I sat down and ate a bunch of it. Whenever you eat an indulgence, you're either a) eating more than you should or b) replacing the something nutritious you could have eaten with sugary junk. So either you're depriving yourself of essential nutrients or gaining fat deposits one day at a time.

3) Eat foods in a measuring cup. I force myself to put my ice cream in a glass measuring cup and limit myself to 1 cup (and only if I can afford it - which I know because I religiously track my diet on My Fitness Pal). Then I eat it with a small spoon and make it last and then that's that. This way I don't just eat and eat and eat. It's the worst idea ever to eat out of the container. I can basically guarantee you're going to eat A LOT more than you thought you would.

4) Measure your food. This way you know how many servings you've eaten so you can tally up the damage. Hopefully you're tracking your diet somehow and when you measure food it makes it so much easier (obviously) to record your diet. I have a digital scale and a set of measuring cups that are my best friends.

5) If you're going to eat an indulgence because you're bored, don't! If you're bored, read a book, go for a walk, exercise, play a game, whatever, but don't sit there and eat yourself into a stuppor! It's very hard to divorce our emotional attachments to food and to restructure our habits with food, but if you don't like the road you're on now then GET OFF. Take the detour past the coronary bypass and kick that junk that doesn't love you to the curb! KNOW that you're doing something very good for yourself every time you say no to junk. You deserve it, so say no.

6) If you're going to eat something like ice cream, try to eat it at lunch time instead of after dinner/before bed. That way you're more likely to burn off the sugars that go with it so they don't just sit there forming fat on your butt, thighs, and stomach all night long. When you ingest something sugary your insulin levels spike and it sends a message to your body to start storing fat. If you want to keep fat off, you need to watch how much sugar your ingesting. This is, yet again, where monitoring your diet using something like My Fitness Pal can be a life saver.

If you get bored and reach for food, I'll teach you how to knit. It's a great hobby and a dying art! Or pick up Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, I couldn't put that book down for 14 hours til I finished it!

Get strong, stay strong,
Cassandra Wyzik
B.S. - ACSM Certified Personal Trainer
www.FitToYouBrevard.com
Personal training and group classes for
Brevard County residents!