If you have started following my blog then you read that our family lives a "mostly" healthy lifestyle. By mostly I mean that we are not perfect. We do try hard, but we have some areas that we struggle with...one such area is with ice-cream. We are not big dairy fans and I am one of those weird Americans who does not really enjoy eating cheese (I know kind of odd huh?). I have done a whole lot of research on dairy and I know that it just frankly is not good for us. Even so, with 10 people in our family and the fact that we all have a birthday once per year, we do enjoy a small bowl of ice cream to celebrate. Now with my confession out of the way and my own human-ness revealed...how can we limit our not so great unhealthy indulgences so that we can honestly eat mostly healthy? In the past prior to our family really working hard to eat healthy, we used to make our ice-cream eating, basically a meal! I recall huge bowls of ice-cream being consumed and it was nothing for our family of 10 to polish off a gallon (or more) of ice-cream in one birthday bash. Not so for us any more! My husband Karl bought me for Christmas one year some 1 cup glass sized ramekins. If you don't know what these are, they are wonderful bowls that are made of pottery and they can be taken from the oven right to the table. I love them! Our oldest daughter who is extremely healthy and tall and thin and wants to remain that way, started eating her soup, and chile, and whatever else we were eating in those bowls. She talked of how she loved the fact that they were just the "right size." At the time those of us who were on an eating marathon thought those one cup bowls looked like pretty dinky servings, but slowly we all started taking some advice from our sister Bailey. One way we control the amount of dairy we eat through ice-cream is with our one cup sized bowls. It is interesting that the difference of satisfaction between eating 4 cups of ice-cream and a little under 1 cup of ice-cream is really not that different. The calories saved, with the fat, salt, and sugar however is significant! There are 285 calories in one single cup of chocolate ice-cream. That is quite a lot admittedly. If you have three cups (easy to do when you are not paying attention!) this adds up to 855 calories. This is about half the calories that an adult female should eat for the day. Our one cup servings have saved us a lot of calories, and a lot of other things. Should we eat ice-cream at all? Probably not, but we do here and there and we now control our portions. There are other options such as rice-cream and soy ice-cream which we also enjoy. You still have the sugar and salt issues with these products to contend with as well. They are great alternatives but I still recommend smaller servings.
Summer is a time for fun, and it is nice to eat cooling foods that relieve us from the hot weather. A healthier choice than ice-cream (and very cooling) could be sliced watermelon, or any other fruit. The sugar in fruit is natural and the fiber in the fruit helps stabilize the sugar in our bodies so we don't get the high and then the drop in our blood sugar that ice-cream gives us. I never see my children running around in a crazy hyperactive frenzy when they eat a handful of cherries but Karl and I do see a change in their energy levels when they eat sugar laden ice-cream!
The more we refrain from eating high sugar intense foods such as ice-cream the more we enjoy the tastes of natural foods and the sweeter they taste to us.
Is there a time to celebrate and yes, even with ice-cream? Sure. Should we eat it all the time? No, but when we do eat it, let's try eating it in smaller portions and instead of adding a fudge topping, let's top our ice-cream with pure fun and no guilt!
Happy small portioned/guilt free/ice-cream eating!
