There’s no worse time to be on a diet than during the holiday season. Anyone who’s been on any kind of extended diet will probably agree. No matter what you are actually celebrating, that period during December and January is a time of indulgence for most of us. Everybody is relaxing and taking an opportunity to treat themselves and people tend to get very creative with the type of holiday treats and desserts they make.
It’s terrible to have to lose out on one of the more enjoyable holiday traditions on account of trying to lose weight. But if you know what you’re doing, you don’t have to miss out on anything. Here’s 3 holiday treats that you can enjoy while dieting.
1. Low-Fat Gingerbread Men
Gingerbread men are a staple food of Christmas and are they tend to be especially popular with children.
Gingerbread is delicious for all ages though, and this is a great, healthy treat you can make which will be enjoyable for anyone in the family.
You might not think that you can make any kind of holiday cookie that would be genuinely low-fat but gingerbread is something that isn’t inherently bad for you so this isn’t too hard.
What you need to do, is cut butter out of the recipe entirely. By cutting out butter, you will reduce the fat content of the cookies by about 50%.
Of course, seeing as how butter is a staple ingredient, you need to find something to replace it with in the recipe to actually be able to make the cookies.
And there’s no more ideal substitute for it than applesauce. Mix the applesauce into the primary mixture at the beginning of the process and you’ll have cookies that still look exactly the same.
You could even make homemade applesauce if you want to ensure that it’s healthy. You can control the entirety of the ingredients.
It will of course taste a bit different, but it will have all of the other elements of gingerbread men so the change won’t be hugely noticeable.
And there will also be a few somewhat unhealthy stuff in there especially in the icing, but the lack of butter will cut the fat content down significantly.
2. Low-Carb Chocolate Rum Balls
This is far from a common holiday treat, in fact I wouldn’t be surprised if most people haven’t heard of rum balls before, but it’s a great thing to try for a number of reasons.
Alcohol-based desserts are very popular during the Holiday season, and although it might not sound like it, they can actually be very healthy.
A big part of the reason for that is because you can get a lot of flavour from the alcohol that would otherwise come from something like sugar.
Rum balls is just an example, but you can use certain other spirits too depending on what your preference is.
The goal here is to have something that is free of sugar, gluten, is low-carb and also tastes absolutely great.
A small concoction of dark chocolate and rum is the perfect thing to encompass all of these factors in the one simple treat.
The right recipe will have very few ingredients and will also take very little time to put together too which is a big advantage.
If you think this is the sort of thing that you’d enjoy as a dessert, you should check out the keto diet. This is exactly the sort of thing you’d find in keto recipes.
It’s low-carb so it will keep your weight in check and it doesn’t have any of the negative health effects of sugary content.
3. Healthy Hot Chocolate
A nice cup of hot chocolate or cocoa to finish off a day spent relaxing always goes down very well.
You might think that hot chocolate is one of the worst holiday treats to have if you’re dieting and you know what? You’re absolutely right.
Hot chocolate is extremely bad for your health and can cause an awful lot of unwanted weight-gain if you have an excess of it during the holidays.
Luckily though, healthy hot chocolate is not all that hard to make yourself. It’s as simple as just avoiding all of the bad stuff.
You’ll still have to use some form of sugar, but you can go for a raw sugar alternative. Like a raw cane sugar or organic turbinado sugar.
Also use unsweetened cocoa powder. Sometimes the artificial sweeteners can be just as bad as sugar itself so you have to avoid this too.
Put something vanilla extract in there, you can get a fill of sweetness from that instead. Ultimately it will just taste like a nice cup of regular hot chocolate but will be much healthier.
Conclusion
These are just suggestions of course. For some people, eating these healthy holiday treats can cause them to slip back into the habit of indulging in stuff that’s bad for their diet.
But if you want to enjoy some healthy desserts this holiday season without infringing on any kind of strict diet, there’s lots of ways you can go about it.
