What Can I Have So That I Can Stay Focused on My Goal of Weight Loss but Feel Like I Can Enjoy a Small Treat?

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What can I have so that I can stay focused on my goal of weight loss but feel like I can enjoy a small treat? This is JJ Virgin, four time New.

York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert.

And Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions, and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Christy Sanner from Instagram asks, I want to lose weight, but when my family is a sweet or salty snack or dessert, I feel deprived. What can I have so I can stay focused on my goal of weight loss but feel like I can enjoy a small treat? All right, that was a deep, cleansing breath, Christy. I have some definite thoughts on this and some easy tips to put into place, so stay with me.

I'll be right back with that answer. Hey, it's J.J. here. Now let's be honest. The holidays are basically a financial ambush. Travel, hosting, gifts, surprise holiday school things. Suddenly you're wondering how December turned into a spending spree. If you want to keep your finances under control this holiday season, you need to be using Monarch. It's rated the Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface on your laptop or your phone. What really grabbed my attention is how fast those little holiday expenses pile up with Monarch. Seeing everything in one place makes it a lot harder to accidentally overspend. And honestly, I appreciate anything that keeps me from starting January with a money hangover. You'll love exploring the holiday spending category. Imagine how good it will feel to actually see what's happening before your credit card statement does that whole dramatic reveal thing. Monarch basically shows you exactly where the money is going in real time, and that level of clarity could change everything, right? Don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks. Use the code virgin@monarch.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year. @monarch.com with code Virgin, the holidays are.

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Okay, there are a couple different ways I can go with this answer. I gotta tell you, Christy, my first time when I read it, I said, you know what? Here's the challenge. What we've got to do is get you to start to think of small treats as things like taking a hot Epsom salts bath, reading a steamy novel, things like that. Things that we often don't let ourselves enjoy, and especially we women out there. So, guys, plug yours for a second. Where we work, work, work, and then we come home and we work, work, work. Although we're probably all working out of the house now. But it just never seems to end because you've got your stuff at home and your stuff for your work and work, work, work. And then you feel like you need a little treat and you think food. And what I had to ask you to think about is, what if that little treat was something more like, you know, again, taking the hot. You can tell what I love hot. Epsom salts bath is like my absolute little treat. I have a sunlight and sauna. Thank you, Connie Zak. So I will get in my sunlight and sauna and watch Netflix. Okay? Big binge or reading a novel. So think about some things that you would love to do that are treats. Let's reframe that word. Treat. Okay? That's the one thing. Now if you just go, you know what, jj? I want a treat. Darn it. Here's the other thing that you can do. There are plenty of yummy things that you can have. I really don't want the snack thing. So I want you to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or even just breakfast and, you know, brunch and an early dinner. So we don't want to do the snacky snacks. And I've talked at length about not doing the snacky snacks. But remember, when you eat, you raise blood sugar. When you raise blood sugar, you raise insulin because your body says, oh, get this blood sugar back down to fasting levels. Insulin comes up, blood sugar comes back down. Insulin does not move as fast as blood sugar does. So if you eat lunch and then you have a snack. You ate lunch, your insulin came up. It never really got back down again. You had a snack, you keep your insulin up. And when you keep your insulin up, you lock the doors to your fat cells. You can't burn off stored fat for fuel and it's inflammatory, so we don't wanna do that. So breakfast, lunch and dinner, drink your fluids in between. I'm saying this, and I've got a big ice cream tea right by me. Drink a lot of fluids in between your meals rather than with your meals. And then a little sweet treat, I'm going to give you a couple that you can do. So nu Find FX chocolates. These are amazing. Oh my gosh. They are made with no sugar, dark chocolate. And they've got different types of, of nutrients in them. So depending on what you want, energy focus, Zen, you can take the dark chocolate that is right for you. So there's one that you can totally enjoy. And I always do. I do dark chocolate every day. It's part of my health routine. I have prescribed it for myself. So why don't we just say, Christy, you've got to eat 2 ounces of dark chocolate a day. If you really look at the research, that's what, that's what it shows. Two ounces of dark chocolate a day. So that could be your thing. Or you can take my dark chocolate coconut fiber bars, 11 grams of fiber, 1 gram of sugar. Amazing MCTS. Good for immune system, good for weight. And so what I do with those is I'll cut them into little pieces and put them in the freezer and then you can just savor a piece of that. Biggest thing though is to make sure that that is not a gateway into bad behavior. So wanna make sure that, that when you do this, you're gonna get to a point. And that's the real goal is that you just. These things just don't impact you anymore. But find your bliss. Now if your bliss can be a non food related thing, even better. But if it needs to be a food thing, find those things that are easy enough to do, that are still healthy. And there's also, by the way, Lily's makes some amazing dark chocolate, salted dark chocolate with no sugar added and sea salt. And that's another yummy thing too. So there you go. There's a lot of great options out there for you. Just make sure that you're not grabbing one that is a trigger that sends you off into, you know, a little binging craziness. Okey. Dokey.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert.

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