Say no to other food to improve your mood.
If a slice of apple pie with vanilla ice cream on top makes you happy right now but makes you feel guilty an hour later, you should be aware of one crucial side effect of avoiding that dessert: happiness.
That's correct. The results of three clinical tests studying self-control and life satisfaction published in the Journal of Personality reveal that simply saying "no" to dessert can make you grin in the end.
While the experiments had little to do with skipping dessert, they did demonstrate how practicing self-control improves emotions of wellness and directly leads to happiness by avoiding and resolving motivational conflict.
According to the researchers from the universities of Chicago, Minnesota, and Illinois, self-control is generally "connected with drudgery and self-denial rather than pleasure and delight." However, their findings show that people who are better at resisting temptation are happier and more satisfied with their life.
The secret appears to be avoiding frequent decisions or "vice-virtue conflicts," such as choosing between dessert and the third glass of wine. Researchers claim that avoiding the daily dilemma by adopting a "no-dessert" policy relieves the mental tension between vice and virtue and boosts self-esteem.
How giving up dessert might have a lot of positive consequences.
Making a habit of preceding dessert may provide you with a mood lift, as well as other mental and physical benefits. Here are a few examples:
1. Feel-good chemicals will be released.
When you volunteer, do you receive a pleasant sensation or a sense of accomplishment when you mark things off your to-do list? You can re-create it by vowing to abstain from dessert. According to scientific evidence, creating and achieving small goals will increase endorphins and produce feel-good neurotransmitters like dopamine.
2. You'll almost certainly lose weight.
As you may be aware, the key to losing weight is to cut calories. The simplest method is to focus on the primary sources of calories in your diet: sugar-sweetened beverages and, you guessed it, dessert! Consider a visit to a Cracker Barrel restaurant. Don't order dessert after dinner, such as their peach cobbler with one scoop of ice cream, and you've just saved 490 calories, 20 grams of saturated fat, and 49 grams of sugar. If you make it a practice to avoid high-calorie treats, you'll be well on your way to losing weight.
3. You'll maintain your muscle.
We lose muscle mass as we get older, especially if we don't practice resistance training regularly. Sarcopenia is the term for age-related muscle loss, and studies show that eating much sugar increases muscle wasting. For example, a 2015 animal study published in The Journal of Nutrition found that sucrose-fed rats lost more muscle and gained more fat than starch-fed rats. Sugar consumption appears to stifle muscle-building protein synthesis. You can keep more power as you become older by avoiding dessert.
4. You'll prevent fat from forming a warm relationship with your heart.
When you don't eat dessert after meals, you're cutting down on the amount of sugar you ingest in a day. That implies you can have more nutritious food in a single sitting than if you had saved room for dessert. That's excellent news for your heart. Long-term research of nearly 3,000 healthy adults compared food and beverage consumption to CT scans of the chest and abdomen over 20 years to examine the link between sugar consumption and body fat. The findings, published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, showed that excessive sugary beverage and processed food intakes were linked to fat deposition around critical organs, including the heart. "We know that fat deposits are linked to an increased risk of heart disease and diabetes," said Lyn Steffen, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota and research co-author. As a result, skipping dessert will likely lower your risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes.
5. You'll be more alert and recall things better.
A high-sugar dessert may make you forget what you ate for dinner. However, if you skip dessert, you may be doing your brain a tremendous favor in the long run. A University of California Los Angeles study discovered that a consistent diet of high fructose corn syrup, a sweet component present in many manufactured sweets such as cake, cookies, and other baked goods, slows the brain and impairs memory and learning.
6. You may appear to be younger.
Another advantage of minimizing your diabetes risk by avoiding sugary sweets is avoiding premature aging skin. Advanced glycation end products, or AGEs, are inflammation-promoting molecules generated when protein or fat interact with carbohydrates like glucose and fructose in the bloodstream. People with high blood sugar levels (a sign of diabetes) are more likely to produce them. According to dermatology researchers from Baylor College of Medicine, this process, known as glycation, "results in recognizable structural, morphological, and functional alterations in the skin...characterized as sugar sag."
7. You'll get a better night's sleep.
After dinner, a sugary dessert may put you to sleep, but it will keep you up at night. According to a research trial published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, removing the excessive saturated fats and sugars found in most delicious desserts will help you sleep better. The small study included 26 healthy adults who ate various diets on several days and had their sleep duration and quality assessed. According to the researchers, low fiber and high saturated fat and sugar intake (typical of dessert meals) were linked to less restful sleep and more arousals during the night.