I’m painfully hauling myself out of a long slump in both exercise and diet and trying to get back on track after the cold, dispiriting days of winter (when I don’t want to make a smoothie and I don’t want to do yoga in the big, cold living room!). Last night I finally broke with the evening dessert cycle (ice cream or pudding, largely enabled by my boyfriend’s penchant for either or both) and opted for getting back to snacks that I love, that I think of as comfort foods, and that might actually be good for me. Here are a few that help me out in the evenings, when I really could use that bowl of ice cream:

applesauce with any of the following: granola (my first choice), sliced bananas and wheat germ, just wheat germ, or cinnamon sugar

tea cookies (pretty harmless, especially if you get nice natural-ingredient ones; and I tend to actually have them with tea, which is pretty good for you)

a couple squares of very dark chocolate (60-70%) or some Ghirardelli dark chocolate baking chips

a can of Mandarin orange segments – great finger food and really fun to eat – I love the texture!

Peanut butter and jelly

whole grain toast with peanut butter, or just butter and jam, or more recently with Earth Balance and creamed honey

yogurt

raspberries – always a major treat if I can find some that look worth forking over several bucks for!

a mug of hot chocolate: I use either a high quality mix stirred into hot skim milk, or an actual partial bar of dark chocolate dipped into hot milk – half the fun is just stirring it and watching it melt. Either way, probably better than most dessert alternatives, and in the latter case there’s almost no sugar involved either!

when I’m really good (and feeling virtuous) I make a mug of tea and call it dessert. For someone with my kind of sweet tooth, this is a major accomplishment. The tea can range from something really dessert-like (decaf vanilla tea with honey and milk in it) to a simple cup of herb tea for bed time. It’s so comforting in its own right, with a good book, that I can often forget that I was craving something else.

That’s all for now, but those are the “treats” that get me through my healthy spells when I really feel it’s time to cut back on the fat, sweet stuff. A lot of them could really help me out if I ever do end up on a seriously modified diet due to health concerns. (More so than just being vegetarian to help avoid cancer – though they help a LOT, because you can’t just be a junk vegetarian – as we all know!).