Know anyone who fights their sweet-tooth cravings all day long? Turns out, enjoying a mocha latte or chocolate muffin may help those dieters start their day off on the right foot so they can make healthier choices all the way to bedtime. Meet Jennifer Aldinger who was able to lose 90 pounds without deprivation. In fact, she ate dessert for breakfast every morning and consistently lost about 2.5 pounds a week. How can that be? Here, her feel-good weight-loss success story (see her inspiring “before” and “after” photos below), along with expert insight into why eating dessert for weight loss may work for you!
What foods do you want to learn about next for their surprising weight loss benefits?
What the science says about eating dessert for weight loss
While this isn’t a topic that scientists research often, a classic study from Tel Aviv University offers some insight. In the trial, two groups of participants ate the same amount of total daily calories. The difference: One group ate a low-carb breakfast worth 300 calories, while the other group ate chocolate cake worth 600 calories. After 16 weeks, both groups had lost the same average amount of weight. But after 32 weeks, the cake group lost a total of 40 pounds each, while the diet group had already regained 22 of their lost weight. The cake eaters felt more satisfied and full because they enjoyed what they were eating.
“The food we eat should be tasty and satisfying for us.” -Dawn Harris Sherling, MD
The key is avoiding deprivation in diets
Why did the cake eaters have so much more diet success? Ob-gyn Daniela Jakubowicz, MD, who authored the cake study theorized that breakfast may be the best time of day to eat the sweetest food since the metabolism is most active upon waking and the body has the most time to burn off those calories so they aren’t stored as body fat. But she admits there is more to the story. There’s likely a mental component. As the saying goes: “You want what you can’t have.”
Avoiding that feeling of deprivation is a key factor for sustainable weight loss, experts say. Considering that research shows about 95 percent of all diets fail, sports psychologist Jen Carter, PhD, an associate professor at The Ohio State University, explains, the body reacts to “deprivation with countermeasures that include metabolic, hormonal and neurological changes that overwhelm willpower.” By eating sweet treats early in the day, dieters can curb any feelings of deprivation so they don’t crave and end up binging later.
And Dawn Harris Sherling, MD, author of Eat Everything, about reclaiming the joy surrounding food, explains, “A key to anyone’s weight loss success is finding habits that we are able to stick with because anything you do to lose weight you have to keep doing to keep it off.” The bottom line: “The food we eat should be tasty and satisfying for us.” Let’s see how eliminating deprivation from the eating equation worked wonders for Jennifer…
Weight loss success story: ‘I ate dessert for breakfast!’
After Jennifer Aldinger of Dublin, Ohio, launched three kids to college and downsized her house, she knew it was time to downsize everything else in her life, including her waistline. Over the years, she’d developed a thyroid condition and knew weight loss would be challenging, but she always told herself, “I’ll deal with my weight later.”
Approaching her 60th birthday and weighing 225 pounds, Jennifer finally felt ready to put herself first. She joined Jenny Craig and started having food delivered to her door. She explains, “I was a picky eater and I didn’t like to cook. But I loved to eat good food.”
Jennifer enjoyed picking out her meal selections each week. She naturally craved sweets, rather than savory foods, so she selected items like cinnamon coffee cake, chocolate muffins and cinnamon rolls for her breakfasts. She also enjoyed blueberry pancakes with maple syrup every Sunday. She added fiber-rich fruit and coffee to her mornings. Then the rest of the day she ate healthy, well-rounded meals like protein-packed burritos for lunch and chef salads for dinner.
‘Every morning I was excited about what I could eat’
“It didn’t feel like work, Jennifer recalls “I wasn’t cutting out all carbs. I wasn’t drinking only diet shakes. I didn’t track macros or cholesterol or sodium or protein. It wasn’t a ton of effort. And I had dessert for breakfast!” She adds, “I rarely felt hungry. This was how I was nurturing myself.”
Jennifer lost an average of 2.5 pounds every week. She recalls, “The weight just really started to fall off.” That’s not all: She began sleeping better, her skin glowed and her kids noticed, “you have so much more energy.” Plus, with every check-up, the doctor lowered Jennifer’s dose of thyroid medicine.
During her transformation, dropping from a size 3X to an 8, Jennifer also added other healthy habits: drinking more water, doing pilates and walking to de-stress. Today the empty nester has a new lease on life. “I’m excited about doing good things for my body. And I’m looking forward to being an active, involved grandparent!”
Why food joy matters during weight loss
Jennifer’s weight-loss experience isn’t like everyone’s. It included more joy than traditional, deprivation diets allow. She says, “I still get to live my life and look forward to food and my next meals.” She adds, “Eating is such a fun, social thing. We get together for holidays and it’s not supposed to center around food, but let’s be honest, it often does.”
Losing ‘food joy’ is often a side effect of taking weight-loss drugs
Jennifer didn’t take any GLP-1 weight-loss medications during her journey. But one well-documented side effect of these popular meds is having appetite controlled to the point where some users have reported losing their joy of eating. In fact, a Danish scientist who was on the team responsible for identifying the GLP-1 drug molecules, Jens Juul Holst, MD, has acknowledged this side effect by saying, “It is a heavy price to pay.” This loss of food joy is believed to account for a portion of the more than 50 percent of GLP-1 users who stop taking the medication within 12 weeks of starting, according to a report issued by Blue Health Intelligence.
Jennifer says, “Any weight-loss method that works for someone is a winner. But let me just tell you that I feel so lucky that food is still a pleasurable part of my life, just in a more controlled way now.”
This content is not a substitute for professional medical advice or diagnosis. Always consult your physician before pursuing any treatment plan.