Chocolaty Desserts Can Help You Lose Weight?

You’ve probably heard your parents say “No dessert before dinner” many times. Or have had people claim that they’ve cut out all sweets and invested their time into eating a low-carb diet for weight loss? Well, here’s some news that may shock you into driving down to your local bakery and ordering a cake or tray of cookies – desserts can help you lose weight!

Sweet Breakfast

Well, it’s not exactly that simple, so don’t go home and eat that cake in one sitting, expecting to get a six-pack. Morning happens to be the best time to eat sweets. Our body’s metabolism is at its most active and we have the rest of the day to burn off the calories.

Eating sweets with a breakfast that includes a balance of carbohydrates and proteins helps to keep cravings away later in the day. Breakfast provides the necessary energy to take on daily tasks and helps the brain function better, all while keeping your metabolism going at full speed. A higher metabolism is very important if you’re looking to lose weight and maintain it.

The Proof is in the Pudding

In 2011, a study was done by Professor D. Jakubowicz et al. of Tel Aviv University using 193 clinically obese, non-diabetic adults to determine how sweets at breakfast and dietary restrictions can affect weight loss. Split in half, one group had a low-carb diet including a 300-calorie breakfast while the other had a high-carb and protein diet that included a 600-calorie breakfast with chocolate cake. After 16 weeks, the first group lost an average of 33 lbs per person but regained an average of 22 lbs by the end of the experiment. The second group, however, lost the same amount of weight at 16 weeks, then continued to lose another 15 lbs each.

Group two ended up losing an average of 40 lbs per person by the end of the study at 32 weeks. Both groups had been consuming the same amount of calories, 1600 for the men and 1400 for the women, but the lower carb dieters never felt full after their meals and experienced intense sugar cravings that caused them to cheat on their meal plans. Attempting to avoid these cravings can be dangerous, as it can create a psychological addiction to them over time. Basically, you want what you can’t have.

What Now?

Out of every meal, breakfast is the best at regulating ghrelin, which is a hormone that increases hunger. Ghrelin rises before every meal, but eating breakfast suppresses it most effectively, which is why the researchers based their study on having desserts with breakfast. Consuming more calories at breakfast allows people to face one of the harder parts of losing weight more successfully, which is keeping the weight off long term.

Highly restrictive diets that forbid desserts and carbs often cause dieters to cave due to withdrawal, which is exactly what the participants in the first group went through. It may be effective at first, but soon the body can’t handle the cravings anymore and that’s when you’ll find yourself falling off the wagon, hard. Losing weight and getting healthier is a lifestyle choice, one where dieting will only get you so far before you’re back to where you started.

Open since 2005, Sweet e’s Darling Desserts offers treats freshly baked cookies, bite-size, and cakes for anyone in Vancouver’s Kerrisdale neighborhood. If you have any questions about our products or need to make a large order, call us or visit our Best cake shop in Vancouver and we’d be happy to help.