To lose, make dessert your first course

Looking for a way to avoid blowing your diet goals during the holidays?

Eat dessert first.

That may seem like odd advice coming from a nutritionist, especially considering all the times your mother told you that dessert had to wait until you'd finished your meal.

But it's an approach that may help you enjoy the holidays with less guilt and fewer, if any, added pounds.

How is that possible?

Let's say you're looking forward to a great holiday meal. No matter how full you are when you finish, you know you're going to eat that slice of pecan pie.

If you ate that slice of pie first, before dinner, you'd take the edge off your appetite (spoil it, just like Mom said you would). You'd eat fewer calories, because you'd eat less food.

You'd eat less of the good stuff - the lasagna, broccoli, whole grain rolls - but you'd get fewer calories than if you ate the meal and stuffed the dessert in on top of it all.

Another strategy is to have some nutritious dessert choices to pick from. Reasonable options are made with fruits such as peaches, apples, pears, cranberries or blueberries. They're made with whole grain, not refined, flour. Dairy ingredients such as cheese and milk are nonfat.

At the same time, lower-calorie, health-supporting desserts are also low in added sugar and bad fats, such as butter and solid shortening.

Better dessert choices include:

Puddings made with skim milk. Homemade varieties are also lower in sodium than packaged mixes.

Kozy Shack is one ready-made brand that is a good choice, because it's relatively low in sodium and has a short ingredient list free of artificial flavors and colors. The low fat chocolate pudding contains only one gram of saturated fat per serving.

Baked apples, apple crisp and other fruit crisps. Top them with nonfat vanilla yogurt.

Crisps are made with a crumbled oatmeal topping. Use trans fat-free margarine instead of butter, reduce the brown sugar and add plenty of cinnamon for flavor.

Pumpkin pie, sweet potato pie and fruit pies. Pumpkin and sweet potatoes are rich in vitamins and minerals, and fruit tends to be high in fiber and lower in calories than creamy fillings.

One-crust (or no crust) pies are also better choices than double crust varieties, because they're lower in calories and likely to have less bad fat.

Other good choices include oatmeal cookies, banana bread, sorbet and a bowl of berries topped with a dollop of whipped cream.

Once we move beyond the holidays, take special care that desserts don't crowd out the good food you need in your diet.

One way to prevent that is to now and then keep a food diary - a simple but detailed log of everything you eat or drink for a week or two.

A food diary can give you a more objective look at what you're eating than memory alone can provide. People are often surprised by the patterns their diaries reveal; they make diet improvements easier to make.

Remember that over the long run, you need a diet that is consistently mostly good.

Happy holidays!