Anytime I want. Almost always “good” sweets though- homemade cookies, cakes, ice cream, chocolate, etc. I don’t make everything I just like to buy quality from small local places that make things themselves. I find with quality junk food I don’t eat as much. So maybe 1-3 pieces of chocolate instead of an entire bag of dark chocolate peanut M&ms, or one cup of quality ice cream vs an entire large DQ blizzard. Sometimes I still eat too much, but that’s life.

We don’t eat ice cream, cookies or candies at all. These things are just not kept in our house. We will eat dates or dried figs nightly as a small treat. Kids eat cake/cookies at holidays or when they attend birthday parties. Occasionally we bake muffins and those are a treat for us.

Anonymous wrote:Dessert is available in some form nearly every evening. We keep cookies & ice cream stocked, and this time of year we also have leftover Halloween candy and the remnants of last week's birthday cake. If anyone wants something sweet after eating dinner, they can have it. One of the kids takes something most nights, the other one chooses a sweet maybe 3-4 nights a week - says he's full the other nights. DH eats more sweets after dinner than I do, but I often have something sweet in the afternoon at work - probably a few times a week.

When the kids were young, we had a rule that they could only get dessert if they ate a good dinner (decent portion of healthy stuff, and at least try everything we set out unless it was a long-standing known dislike). Now that they are teens, we don't really have to enforce that anymore. They eat when they're hungry, have a decent balanced diet, and don't over-indulge on sweet stuff.

This.

Anonymous wrote:Op here again, Im so glad you guys responded !!

Im just in awe of you guys , clearly this is just a problem for me then :/.

I can’t stop eating sweets once I start… If I know theres a box of cookies I cant relax until I eat the entire thing or until its in the trash with dishsoap on the cookies

When my daughter was in elementary school I would just portion out dessert after dinner each night. When she hit puberty and was upset about binging on sweets, I started stopping by the market daily and buying a portion for that night- pack of m and ms, pudding cups, etc. I am a SAHM so that obviously would not work for all.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Every day. My family is active, healthy, and fit. We don't do disordered eating at our house.

+1
And it’s the kids that have strict rules and restrictions at their homes who come to ours and search out sweets and have zero self control. I just cleaned out the pantry and tossed tons of Easter candy. My kids have unlimited access so actually rarely eat sweet stuff.

You shouldn’t be patting yourself on the back about this. One of my kids is like yours; never would binge any kind of sweet. The other would eat as much candy as they can get access to. It’s not my parenting or your parenting. It’s their wiring.

Anonymous wrote:Every day. My family is active, healthy, and fit. We don't do disordered eating at our house.

Some would say that eating sweets, chocolate, ice-cream etc every day is disordered eating. Many people who eat this way end up with type 2 diabetes.

We have some type of dessert/snack every night. Cookie, scoop of ice cream, Halloween candy, etc.

We only have dessert on holidays or a birthday. I’m not a sweets person so I’ve never offered every night dessert as an option.

My kids are older so I'm sure they eat plenty of sweets outside of the home, but I rarely buy sweets. I just don't have much of a sweet tooth. Every once in a blue moon I'll buy one of those small containers of ice cream. I bake a couple of times a month; my kids eat my baked goods, but I rarely do. I'll also choose to eat dinner 2nds over dessert. I do have more sweets in the house around the holidays.

Anonymous wrote:Chocolate, candy, cakes, chips, ice cream, cookies etc

Do you go all in once a month? Or have you mastered whatever the f ”moderation” means.

I feel like most people can eat a piece of chocolate and stop. Some need to eat the entire box.
What’s the healthy way to do it?

These particular things rarely. Maybe for a special occasion or seasonal treat. However, I drink sweet tea every day, which I think is worse than a couple daily cookies.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Op here again, Im so glad you guys responded !!

Im just in awe of you guys , clearly this is just a problem for me then :/.

I can’t stop eating sweets once I start… If I know theres a box of cookies I cant relax until I eat the entire thing or until its in the trash with dishsoap on the cookies

Try for a while not buying store bought cookies and making your own instead. Make a big batch and put them in the freezer. It is VERY hard to regulate eating something like oreos because there is so much addictive crap fake food in them. I'd be curious if you have more control around home made cookies.

I shouldn't have said "control" - I mean can you eat a satisfying amount and then look forward to more at a different time.

Anonymous wrote:Op here again, Im so glad you guys responded !!

Im just in awe of you guys , clearly this is just a problem for me then :/.

I can’t stop eating sweets once I start… If I know theres a box of cookies I cant relax until I eat the entire thing or until its in the trash with dishsoap on the cookies

Try for a while not buying store bought cookies and making your own instead. Make a big batch and put them in the freezer. It is VERY hard to regulate eating something like oreos because there is so much addictive crap fake food in them. I'd be curious if you have more control around home made cookies.

Anonymous wrote:Every day. My family is active, healthy, and fit. We don't do disordered eating at our house.

Yes! We eat very healthy and do a lot of cooking. Eat out maybe once a month. We don't buy store bought cookies, but we bake quite a bit and always have ice cream in the house. We have always talked about what is healthy and not healthy about the food we eat without judgment - just for knowledge.

Amazing 👆🏼 Thank you

Anonymous wrote:Op here again, Im so glad you guys responded !!

Im just in awe of you guys , clearly this is just a problem for me then :/.

I can’t stop eating sweets once I start… If I know theres a box of cookies I cant relax until I eat the entire thing or until its in the trash with dishsoap on the cookies

I did that too as a teen. Cookies were my binge food. Lots of adults telling me I was fat (@120lb/5’4”) drove me to sneak and hide treats, and then feel miserable about what I’d done, dump the evidence & destroy any last surviving cookies. As silly as it sounds, I was really scared at the power that cookies had over me! It was awful. I feel for you.

Once I got out of my parents’ house and cooking/eating on my own, it became more intuitive eating, although that word wasn’t really used to describe eating habits back in the 80’s. My weight settled and I started to add treats every now and then - only bought in single-serving size - and maybe only once a week.

I’m in my 50’s now. We raised our DD to focus on healthy foods, but allowed limited sweets when she was a kid, hoping to strike a balance between health and not making things verboten. We *never* mentioned weight. Surprise :/ DD wound up with a raging ED last fall. At 95lb & dropping/5’5” she *needed* calories. Part of her recovery has been to learn to accept all foods, sweets too. Thankfully she’s in strong recovery mode. It has done a lot to reshape my attitude toward sweets. This time around, I find that I can enjoy sweets without inhaling them. I’m far more active vs my 20’s or 30’s, so even menopausal, I feel strong, limber and way more comfortable in my own skin. I don’t use a scale, but my clothes still fit, my blood work is fine - sweets haven’t overturned my world. So I don’t fear the cookie anymore…