Singapore Personal Trainer explains how to enjoy pastries while on diet

Working as a fitness boot camp instructor and personal trainer in Singapore, I often talk to my clients and friends about diet and nutrition for weight loss, fat loss and muscle building. Many people I talk to get anxious about their ability to stick tight to their clean diets because the occasional craving can be so powerful!

What is the best step to take, when we are sincerely, absolutely, dying for a bite of sweet, warm cookie?

The answer simple: Just bake your own! That's the BEST way to eat your cookies while on a healthy diet.

Baking your own indulgent little pastries and confectionaries is far better than buying them at the store. Why?

1. VALUE - when you bake your own, you get more joy per calorie, because the fun of making them, especially if you are making them with your friends or family, the good smells that drift out of the hot oven, the feeling of warmth that comes from sharing handmade goodies, become part of your cookie experience. You don't get to experience all these things when you just pick up pre-made or packaged cookies.

2. QUALITY CONTROL - when you eat home-baked cookies, you eat only cookie and nothing else. When you buy stuff in packages, your cookie, biscuits etc has stabilizers, preservatives, artficial flavors, bulking agents etc added to it, to give it a longer shelf life and to help the producers save on costs. Granted your ingredients (unless you raise and mill your own flour, harvest and roast your own cocoa beans etc) will have gone through a fair amount of chemical treatment, it would still overall have less added junk than commercial versions. Furthermore, you know for sure that your goodies are made from the best ingredients e.g: real butter instead of the cheapest commercial bakery-use, trans-fat saturated margarine.

3. ABSOLUTE FRESHNESS - you can pop them right into your mouth the moment they're done (and cooled off!). Nothing gets fresher than that.

4. INCONVENIENCE - It takes work and time to make your own cakes and pastries, more than just picking them up at the store would, so if you only eat those you make on your own, ten-to-one, you'll be eating these far less often.

5. AWARENESS - when you make your own cookies or muffins, you see what goes into them. Half a cup of butter. A cup of sugar. 2 cups of white flour. This makes you more aware of the depth of badness baked goods have. This helps us to say "No" to baked goods full of refined sugar, more cleanly, more often.

6. CALORIE CONTROL - I'm NOT an advocator of counting calories, but when it comes to baked goods, you can play around with ingredients to cut the calorie count, e.g. less sugar, some applesauce in place of fats etc. This is tricky though, since baking is all about chemistry and your product might taste quite different (in an unpleasant way) from the "original". For low calorie baking, it's best to work with low-cal recipes that's already been tried and tested by those in the know. (My opinion is though, if you're going to indulge once a month, then just indulge!)

Baked goods are awesome. If you put one to your face, it smells like heaven, and when you put one into your mouth, it tastes like heaven. Sweet, savory, nutty, chocolate-y , crunchy, chewy, soft, crispy - whatever the taste and texture, cookies, bread, muffins, tarts and the like - they are all so addictive. My personal fav is brownies with ice cream.

Bake your own - that's the better indulgence.

Here's a recipe for some dietary excess:

The Easy Apple Crumble:

CRUST
* 1 cup quick-cooking oats (80g)
* 1 cup all-purpose flour (125g)
* 1 cup packed brown sugar (220g)
* 1/2 teaspoon baking powder (2g)
* 1/2 cup butter, melted (115g)

APPLE FILLING

* 2-3 thinly sliced apples
* Tablespoon of flour
* Squeeze of lemon juice
* 1.5 g of cinnamon
* � tablespoon of vanilla
* � cup of sugar
* 1/3 cup of water

DIRECTIONS:

1. Place sliced apples in your baking pan, add rest of the filling ingredients over them and mix it up even with a big spoon. (adjust the amount of sugar and cinnamon as you please) Pour in the water.

2. Mix the oats, flour, brown sugar, baking powder and melted butter together in a big bowl. Make sure there are no big lumps and crumble this mixture evenly over the apples. You can double the amount of crust and put some underneath too.

3. Bake at 175C for 40-50 minutes, until the crust is a nice, crunchy golden brown.

For a peach-banana version, or a banana-peach version, you can use the following list of ingredients:

Banana-Peach version

* 1 medium banana, sliced
* 2/5 tin of peach
* 1g cardamom
* Squeeze of lemon juice
* Custard pudding (any brand from the supermarket will do)

Mix banana and peach and cardamom and lemon juice together. When the mix is in the baking pan, spoon the custard pudding over it. The custard pudding will become a nice, gooey custard sauce when baked.