Eating dessert shouldn’t be an activity of guilt. If you learn how to prepare healthy desserts, you can incorporate sweets into your diet while leading a healthy lifestyle and staying fit and lean.
It’s all about the type of dessert you choose, which stems from the ingredients. When you understand how to shop and prepare healthy desserts, you can eat dessert and burn fat at the same time. Let’s explore.
What Are Healthy Desserts to Eat?
The healthiest desserts to eat are those that are composed of single-ingredient, whole, and ideally organic foods. Fruit, dried fruit, nuts, and dark chocolate are all great options. But learning how to assemble a complete dessert plate is the trick. After you leave the table, you want to leave the table without any cravings and feeling completely satiated.
After you finish your dinner, take a few minutes to get in touch with your body. Are you craving a particularly sweet dessert? Do you feel like you want something heavier or lighter? You might not always be in the mood for a thick piece of chocolate cake, but maybe a sorbet or a lemon meringue pie.
Picking the right dessert at the right time is crucial in getting yourself to feel satisfied but not overly full. For this reason, the Mission Lean app provides a wide array of healthy dessert options—some are lighter and less sweet, others are richer and sweeter.
But having a resource to provide you with a selection of healthy dessert options is a must—whether it’s Mission Lean or another fitness program. In this way, you know that your selection will give you curated and healthy options, and you won’t have to worry about sabotaging your workout results.
How Can I Eat Dessert and Burn Body Fat?
It seems counterintuitive, but eating dessert will actually enable you to feel satiated and get the most out of your lean workout. Keep in mind, portion control is important. Ideally, you don’t want to eat a portion that’s larger than your palm. But having some sweets after a healthy dinner will allow you to fall asleep soundly and wake up the next morning energized.
Mission Lean is focused on enabling you to push through lean workouts by making sure you get the proper nutrition at each meal. If you starve yourself or severely restrict calories, you won’t have enough fuel to get the most out of your body when you head to the gym.
This is why eating dessert isn’t a problem, and shouldn’t prevent you from accomplishing your fitness goals. When you combine a structured workout plan with whole, single-ingredient foods, you will reap the result by achieving a lean, fit, and toned physique.
Part of the recommendation to create a healthy dessert is to incorporate fruit. Fresh and dried fruit are great options because they are natural and will quench your sweet tooth. Not only that, but fruit is a rich source of carbohydrates, and when you work out with High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), carbs are a must to include in your diet.
When you work out in the heart rate zone that you achieve with HIIT workouts—which are a huge part of the Mission Lean program—85% of your consumed calories come from carbohydrates.
Not only that, but you are able to burn fat well after the workout by instigating the EPOC (Excess Post Exercise Oxygen Consumption) effect where you burn calories after the workout has ended.
Put simply: don’t be afraid of eating fruit and carbs for dessert as these calories will be burned with a proper lean fitness program. Combining healthy dessert that is carb-rich will only enhance your performance in lean workouts.
What is the Best Lean Dessert Protein?
The best lean dessert protein that you can eat is nuts. Nuts contain a large amount of protein, but they also provide you with “healthy fat” in the form of omega-6 and omega-3 polyunsaturated fat. But just eating a pile of nuts isn’t going to satisfy your sweet tooth and so you need to incorporate this lean dessert protein with dried fruit, frozen banana, and dark chocolate.
You might be asking: What is a “frozen banana”? This is an incredible secret to creating a healthy dessert that not many people know about. Eating a frozen banana alongside nuts, dried fruit and dark chocolate will provide you with a delicious “ice cream sundae”, only the healthy version.
How to Prepare a Lean and Protein-Packed Dessert
To prepare your lean protein dessert, start by buying a few pounds of bananas and allow them to ripen fully, until the skin becomes brown. Peel the bananas and place them in a large Pyrex container and place it in the freezer. Allow them to freeze overnight and then take one out about 5 minutes before you begin to assemble your dessert plate.
Get out your lean protein nuts—whichever nuts you like, but the Mission Lean diet steers you towards almonds, walnuts and Brazil nuts. Choose which dried fruit to include, such as raisins and dates. Then take a few pieces of 70% or 85% dark chocolate. If you have some fresh berries, feel free to add these on as well.
Put your frozen banana on a plate and begin to pick and choose your toppings. Voila! You have a lean and healthy dessert with a great serving of protein. You will be ready to power through your Mission Lean workout the next day.
How to Prepare a Lean Dessert Protein Shake
If you’re in the mood for a shake after dinner, you can prepare a healthy and lean protein shake. Instead of eating your frozen banana, put it in the blender with some water, walnuts, almonds, Brazil nuts, dates and berries.
Strawberries are a great addition to this type of smoothie and will complement the frozen banana well. Feel free to add in a couple of pieces of dark chocolate as well. Blend it all up and you’ve got an incredible lean dessert protein shake.
Not many people think about nuts as a great source of dessert protein. But going down the list of nuts you will see how much protein they offer. Per cup, walnuts contain 12g of protein, almonds contain 30.4g of protein, and Brazil nuts contain 19g of protein. Mix and match your favorite nuts and throw them into your dessert smoothie for a refreshing after-dinner complement.
Will Eating Dessert Every Day Make Me Put On Weight?
Eating dessert every day is fine and won’t negatively impact your weight, so long as the dessert you’re eating is comprised of healthy ingredients. To get toned, lose belly fat, and sport a great physique, you need to know what foods to eat and how to prepare them.
We’ve already covered many great dessert foods along with how you prepare them for a delicious and healthy plate. If you want to get top results, however, there is no replacement for a lean body app like Mission Lean that can provide you with a full library of lean recipes.
Sticking to your Lean Body Transformation and committing to a healthy meal plan can only occur if you have a proven plan in your corner, one that gives you many healthy food options to choose from. Healthy dessert options are one piece of the puzzle and must be complemented with a full assortment of healthy and lean meals, from breakfast to dinner.
If you combine a targeted lean meal plan with a structured workout approach, you have the two major elements of successful weight loss on your side.
Combine Your Desserts with a Structured Fitness Plan for a Healthy Lifestyle
To reap the full benefit of your transition towards eating healthy desserts, you should begin to work out regularly with lean fitness as the focus. When you train with the goal of leaning down and building tone, as opposed to lifting weights and getting bulky, you can shed an incredible amount of calories in a relatively short period of time.
This is the goal with the Mission Lean method: to get you to reap the maximum response from your body in an intense but structured workout. The ultimate goal of your workout should be to push yourself into the anaerobic zone: a heart rate of 80% of your max. This heart rate varies by age, and will be a lower BPM (beats per minute) value if you’re older.
The anaerobic zone is the point at which oxygen no longer fuels the production of ATP (energy). You are forced to tap in to glycogen reserves in your muscles, which is the exact energy that healthy dessert options like fruit provides.
HIIT workouts are a great tool to reach and sustain this heart rate, because you are training in a circuit of exercises with little rest that will successfully raise your heart rate. Creating an oxygen deficit in your body is the gold standard for enacting physiological change within your body.
The longer you can stay in the anaerobic zone, the more calories you will ultimately burn not just during the workout, but afterward. Through HIIT training and this type of response, you will extend your calorie-burning potential into the hours after your training session.
Eating dessert is one of life’s simple pleasures and you shouldn’t eradicate it from your life. Instead, start to prepare healthy dessert options and supplement this change with a structured lean fitness program like Mission Lean. Let’s do this! Mission: Lean!
Jon Pearlman is a former standout tennis player at Harvard, ATP-ranked touring pro, and author of The Lean Body Manual. He founded Mission Lean to share his unique formula for lean body fitness and nutrition, an approach that took over a decade to develop and perfect. He is an ACE Certified Personal Trainer and Fitness Nutrition Specialist.
