What desserts can you eat on keto? Sweets you can eat are cake, cookies and ice-cream, but are keto desserts healthy? Find out what your macros are before trying them.
When starting out on a ketogenic diet, you’ll need to find out youare daily calories intake by using a keto calculator. Then factor in the dessert’s serving size in calories stated on the nutrition facts. If you are going to be doing this everyday you need to make sure that your calories are in check and do not end up with a surplus (more calories than your body needs). Otherwise you might be kicked out of ketosis.
Keep in mind, we are not dieticians and are compiling these data based on common sense rather than professional opinion.
From here, you can decide if you want to try some sweets you can eat on keto.
What Sweets Can You Eat on Keto?
You can eat cheesecakes, cakes, cupcakes, cookies, brownies and bars, pies, tarts, custards, candies and even ice-cream. Knowing what desserts can you eat on keto is only half the journey.
You would need to take into account your own daily macros and how much you can consume based on your weight loss goals within a certain time frame. These are very crucial to make sure you achieve your goals without causing obstacles or disappointment for yourself while on your keto journey. Having said that, these are:
Best Store-bought Keto Desserts for Cake, Snack Bars, Cookies and Ice-cream;
- Atkins Endulge Treat Peanut Butter Cups. Rich Milk Chocolate & Creamy Peanut Butter
- Atkins Endulge Treat Strawberry Cheesecake Dessert Bar
- SlimFast Keto Fat Bomb Snack Cup Iced Lemon Drop
- Smart Baking Company Smartcake, Sugar Free, Gluten Free, Low Carb, Keto Dessert
- Lily’s Sea Salt Dark Chocolate Bar (Stevia Sweetened, No Added Sugar, Low-Carb, Keto Friendly with 70% Cocoa)
- Highkey Keto Cookies Chocolate Chip
- Rip Van UFOs Vanilla Wafer Shortbread Cookies
- Quest Nutrition Cookies & Cream Protein Bars, High Protein, Low Carb, Gluten Free, Keto Friendly
- Sweetwell Sugar-Free Strawberry Meringue Cookies, Stevia-Sweetened Keto Snack
- Fat Snax Low-Carb Soft Baked Keto Cookies, Chocolate Chip
- Rebel Ice Cream, Mint Chip, 16oz
- Enlightened, Butter Pecan Ice Cream Keto Ice Cream, 16 fl oz
- Halo Top Creamery, Chocolate 16 oz
Best Keto Desserts Baking Mix for Cookies and Brownies;
If you prefer to bake as needed, here are some keto baking mix that is sure to satisfy your cravings without the guilty carbs.
- Miss Jones Baking Keto Brownie Mix – Gluten Free, Low Carb, No Sugar Added, Naturally Sweetened Desserts
- Kalifornia Keto Chocolate Chip Cookie Baking Mix
- Pyure Organic Chocolate Chip Cookie Mix
- Lakanto Sugar Free Blueberry Muffin Mix – Naturally Flavored, Sweetened with Monk Fruit Sweetener
- Carbquik Biscuit & Baking Mix for Keto
- Lakanto Sugar Free Cookie Mix with Monk Fruit Sweetener
- Duncan Hines Keto Friendly Classic Yellow Cake Mix
Best Keto Desserts Recipes for Cakes, Cupcakes, Cookies, Bars, Pies, Soufflé, Candies and Ice-cream;
The best sweets you can eat on keto are the ones you make yourself so you can really watch what you are putting into your recipe to avoid consuming hidden sugars. It does take a bit of work but surprisingly not as much as you think.
If you do bake already then doing a keto dessert will be an easy transition as the method does not require more work but just a change in the ingredients.
- Keto NY-Style Cheesecake
- Keto Chocolate Cheesecake or Keto Cheesecake
- Keto Strawberry-Lime “Cheese” Cake
- Keto Truffle “Cheese” Cake
- Keto Pumpkin “Cheese” Cake
- Keto Chocolate Cake
- Keto Yellow Cake
- Keto Molten Chocolate Cake
- Keto Coconut Sponge Cake
- Keto Tiramisu
- Keto Carrot Cake
- Keto Red Velvet Cake
- Keto Pound Cake
- Keto Spice Cake
- Keto Almond Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies
- Keto Real-Deal Chocolate Chip Cookies
- Keto Brownie Cookies
- Keto Sunbutter Cookies
- Keto Coconut Macaroons
- Keto Snickerdoodle Bites
- Keto Ginger Cookies
- Keto Florentine Lace Cookies
- Keto Macadamia Biscotti
- Keto Thin Mint Cookies
- Keto Butter Pecan Cookies
- Keto Lemon Cheesecake Bars
- Keto Cookie Dough Blondies
- Keto Magic Cookie Bars
- Keto Real-Deal BrowniesKeto Almond Butter Brownies
- Keto Superfood Berry Chocolate Tarts
- Keto Lemon Tarts
- Keto Key Lime Pie
- Keto Chocolate Silk Pie
- Keto Chocolate Soufflés
- Keto Chocolate Mousse
- Keto Peanut Butter Mousse
- Keto Crème Brûleé
- Keto Almond Joy Bars
- Keto Turtles
- Keto Almond Butter Fudge Or Keto Fudge
- Keto Salted Almond Brittle
- Keto Rolo
- Keto Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream
- Keto Chocolate Ice Cream
- Keto Vanilla Extract Ice Cream
- Keto Butter Pecan Ice Cream
If you would like an all-in-one book that has ALL the recipes above and saves you the runaround, try Keto Desserts by Kelley Herring Review (Tried and Tested).
We have personally tried her real-deal keto chocolate chip cookies on our post titled: Amateur Baker Mum Tests Keto Chocolate Chip Recipe
Are Keto Desserts Healthy?
They are healthier than non-keto desserts as they can provide a lower carbohydrate intake because don’t use processed sugar, grain-based flours or grains, making them a healthier option to eat. This reason alone is the biggest reason to switch to keto desserts, even if you don’t follow a keto lifestyle.
But without the sugar, can you make keto desserts that actually taste good?
Definitely! There are plenty of options available to add the sweetness and different flavors in the desserts. Various keto-friendly sweeteners are added to add the sweet taste. Here are the common popular sugar alternatives;
- Monkfruit (This is our personal favourite natural sweetener)
- Stevia – liquid and powdered
- Xylitol
- Erythritol
Please take note that xylitol and erythritol are sugar alcohols that may contribute to stomach discomforts and have been linked to irritable bowel syndrome and even diarrhea according to this October 2016 article in the International Journal Of Dentistry.
You can also use a combination of these in your dishes. Aside from the sweeteners, here are some of the healthy ingredients used in keto desserts;
- Almond Flour – helps in adding consistency, nutty taste, and volume
- Coconut Flour – it is somewhat binding, absorbs liquid, and has a tropical taste
- Berries and Cranberries – add color and natural sweetness to the dessert
- Chocolate – sugar-free, dark chocolate
- Eggs – is a binding agent and adds nutritional value
- Full-Fat Dairy Products –heavy whipping cream, cream cheese, and butter add fullness, flavor, and creaminess
- Ground Psyllium Husk Powder – it is a binding agent that offers plenty of fiber
- Seeds and nuts – to add flavor
Is it ok to eat keto desserts, even if you’re not on keto?
Yes it is, because keto desserts are primarily made from healthier flours such as almond, coconut or cassava flour and psyllium husk, as compared to regular or all-purpose flour. These flours tend to be low-carb and high in fiber which will make you fuller for longer and squash out most of your hunger pangs.
We are personally not on a keto diet but we still eat keto desserts by following a cookbook that has taken out the guesswork of re-creating our favorite desserts into the keto versions.
Benefits of Keto Desserts
Following are the five major reasons you might consider the switch to keto desserts;
- Better Gut Health
- Improved Blood Sugar
- Reduced Inflammation
- Hormones Support
- Eating Intuitively
Better Gut Health
Sugar encourages the pathogenic organisms to multiply in the gut. Many of these organisms can result in health issues like H. Pylori, SIBO, candida, and digestive issues, such as constipation, gas, and bloating.
Each time you consume sugar, you are basically feeding these organisms, even when you use whole sweeteners like maple syrup, coconut sugar, or raw honey.
The absence of sugar in the keto desserts keep these pathogenic organisms under control, meaning you maintain a healthy gut. There are many delicious keto dessert recipes without refined sugar in the keto cookbook by Kelley Herring to get you started.
Improved Blood Sugar
Hypoglycemia is the deficiency of blood glucose, aka low blood sugar. It causes severe symptoms, like shaking, nausea, irritability, weakness, vision problems, dizziness, extreme hunger, and headaches.
Do you know what contributes to this?
Sugar and processed carbs in desserts, which lead to rapid falls and rises in insulin.
When you switch to keto desserts, you may be able to enjoy more of your favorite sweets and naturally balancing your blood sugar levels.
Reduced Inflammation
Sugar is one of the major inflammatory foods. In all healing diets, including the ketogenic diet, all kinds of sugar are out because it contributes to inflammation. An increase in your blood sugar can produce cytokines, the pro-inflammatory molecules.
The more amount of sugar you consume, your body produces more insulin to stabilize the blood sugar. Gradually, your cells start becoming resistant to insulin, and that increases your risk for diabetes drastically.
Insulin resistance also results in excess sugar being stored as visceral fat that produces inflammatory molecules as well. Sugar also counteracts the anti-inflammatory foods and anti-inflammatory processes. You might try your best to consume as many anti-inflammatory foods as possible, but if you are consuming sugary desserts, it will do you no good.
Therefore, keto desserts are a healthy option to enjoy sweets without causing inflammation in your body.
Hormones Support
Women require carbs for hormone production. It might be confusing to see both refined sugar and sweet potatoes in the same carbs category. Let’s classify the carbs that support hormones and those that don’t.
The carbs that are hormone support are called complex carbs, which include the following;
- Sweet potatoes
- Soured, sprouted, or soaked gluten-free grains, including sorghum, buckwheat, quinoa, and oats
- Sprouted or soaked beans
- Wild rice and brown rice
- Winter squashes, including pumpkin, delicata squash, and butternut squash
- Root veggies like celeriac, beets, and carrots
The carbs that don’t support your hormones include;
- Processed foods, like deep-fried carbs, commercial ice cream, frozen pizza, anything “instant,” breakfast cereals, and toaster waffles
- Whole sweeteners, including honey, evaporated cane juice, maple syrup, and coconut sugar
- And you guessed it – sugar (all types)
Eating healthy food supports healthy hormone production for your stress management, sleep, thyroids, and period cycles.
Unhealthy food, like refined sugar, mess up the hormones, which is the reason ketogenic diet focuses only on healthy foods
Similarly, keto desserts use healthier carbs instead of sugar, which supports your hormones.
Eating Intuitively
Being mindful of what you eat to ensure you are giving your body healthy nutrients. When you listen to your body and eat intuitively, you make sure that you consume the right foods.
A keto diet is designed to ensure that your body gets the right nutrients and minerals, meaning you make sure that your body is getting all the healthy fats, proteins, and carbs.
However, the keto diet isn’t for everybody and have been known to make you sick instead and may cause adverse effects such as the keto flu or canker sores.
In many diets, people deprive their bodies of desserts because they don’t want to gain weight and consume sugar. They label many of their favorite foods as ‘off-limits’ but end up back on the sugar wagon once they have achieved their weight-loss goal.
With keto desserts, you don’t have to deprive your body of what it is craving. There are so many super easy keto desserts that you can try without any guilt. Keto desserts focus on quality protein, healthy fats, no sugar, and are nutrient-dense. Every bite counts!
Here’s how to do it;
How to Calculate The Impact Of a Keto Dessert Using a Keto Calculator
Disclaimer: We have been on a keto diet before but we are not on it at the moment and we are not dietitians. Please use the macros calculators and our methods as a guide and consult your health practitioner before moving forward.
- Finding out your daily calories intake using a keto calculator
- Track the impact of a keto dessert into your daily calories by using a calorie tracker app like Cronometer.
- Use a sample keto meal plan and include the keto dessert.
We are going to try 2 keto macro calculators to reduce bias and increase accuracy. We have decided to use these two because we like sources that actually practice what they preach or have been featured on other medical websites and that are easy to use. You can actually try;
• fatforweightloss macro calculator
• ruled.me keto calculator
Based on the above macro calculators, here is a daily calorie intake that is needed to lose about 11 lbs (5 kg) for a woman over 40 years old, with a current weight of 145 lbs (66 kg) and with a height of 5 feet 7 inches (170 cm).
Fatforweightloss calculator suggests 1232 calories whereas ruled.me version recommends 1206 calories. Ruled.me does suggest using a DEXA machine or calipers to get a more accurate reading of body fat percentage. If you don’t have access to either, then a visual estimate will do. We didn’t have either equipment so we opted for the visual estimate.
Please bear in mind, these calculations are only a guide to start you off, there’s no right or wrong here. Pick the one that is going to be more suitable and realistic to you.
Since both readings are pretty close, we will choose the smaller calories of 1206 to continue with our example. A smaller calorie reading will allow us to be more strict with what we are eating and will lower our chances of gaining a surplus.
Tracking The Impact Of The Keto Dessert
We will use a free account with cronometer suggested by fatforweightloss to demonstrate the impact of the keto dessert being factored into the daily calorie calculator.
What we really like about this calorie tracker is that it not only counts your calories but it focuses on your nutritional intake as a whole. Furthermore, it was created by a software developer that was on a CRON diet (Calorie Restriction with Optimal Nutrition) and he needed an app that could keep track of his daily intake. And the rest, as they say, was history.
Now, let’s fire up the cronometer.
2.1. Go to Settings tab and select Targets to input our macronutrient targets under “Fixed Value” criteria. We have chosen “Net Carbs with Sugar Alcohols” because our keto chocolate chip does use erythritol. Watch Cronometer University that explains this.
The cronometer does have a really extensive list of common foods and brands that people are actually eating for their diets so it does save a lot of time when inputting your own food.
If the food item is not on the list, then you can create a “custom food” which is what we’ll have to do for our keto dessert.
2.2. For this example, we will be using a keto chocolate chip cookie made from Kelley Herring’s Keto Dessert cookbook. The cookbook does show the calories and nutrition facts for each recipe to save you more time when you input it into the app.
Then we figured we needed to cross-reference that with ReciPal that is capable of creating a FDA-compliant label from the recipe. Keep in mind, a single ingredient and its measurements can affect the nutrition facts significantly so we try to get the ingredients that are as close as possible to the recipe but expect some differences nonetheless.
The calculations are pretty close except for sodium that looks a lot higher in the ReciPal’s version. It may be due to the quality and type of dark chocolate chips that we have chosen for the recipe. In order to eliminate bias, we will use ReciPal’s calculations that show the cookie to have 140 calories.
Related Posts:
- Easy Keto Banana Bread in 55 mins [BEGINNER’S GUIDE and RECIPE]
- Keto Diet 101: Getting Started with Ketogenic Lifestyle
- Keto Breads by Kelley Herring Review (Tried & Tested)
- Keto Desserts: What Recipes Are In The Book?
- Coconut Flour vs Regular Flour (3 Brands Compared + Best Coconut Flour REVEALED)
- Grain Free Sourdough Bread: Cassava Flour Recipe
Use a sample keto meal plan and include the keto dessert.
We have chosen a sample meal plan for the day from ruled.me and we have included a freshly squeezed orange into the Cronometer too in order to hit closer to our macronutrient targets.
To be on a ketogenic diet, the consensus says we need to have these macronutrient ratios;
- Carbs (5% to 10% and fewer calories)
- Protein (30% to 35% calories)
- Fat (55% to 60% calories)
We have almost hit our macronutrient targets with 76% fat, 17% protein and 6% daily carb intake albeit we have gone about 16% over the maximum fat target and 13% lower than the minimum protein intake required. We have also added a 20 minute moderate brisk walk as our exercise.
These readings do not need to be precise but it can be a good start. However, if you do need to reach a more accurate macronutrient target, then you are going to have to undertake a proper keto eating plan. But for our example, these results will be suffice for now.
Conclusion to Incorporating Sweets You Can Eat on Keto
This simple example shows that it is very achievable for a woman in her early 40s on a keto diet to have a keto chocolate cookie…or even two, if you want to push the boundaries.
If you do want to try it, be sure to eat real keto-friendly desserts that generally have the above mentioned macronutrient ratios and you’re not eating a whole bag of it in one sitting! You could probably get away with only 1-2 pieces of cookies for the day at 140 calories each.
And if you need to be stricter than most people due to your calorie needs, you may decide that eating a keto dessert everyday is too much of a risk for you and could opt for the occasional keto dessert once or twice a week.
It does feel like you are taking a “cheat day” on ketosis but the difference is you are more likely to stay in ketosis by having sweets with keto dessert options than a standard dessert that uses plain or all-purpose flour.
The best thing about keto desserts is that they don’t include gluten and sugar and use healthier low-carb ingredients instead. This will help lower your calories to help maintain a healthier lifestyle or achieve weight-loss. However, just like regular dessert, keto desserts need to be taken in moderation based on your current health condition, your daily calories and your own body’s metabolic rate whether you are on the keto diet or not.
Be aware that keto desserts are low in carbs, have moderate protein, and are high in fat. You might wonder how high-fat desserts may be good for you. According to the FDA, the type and quality of fat you are consuming needs to be taken more into consideration as opposed to the amount you are having.
What does that mean? You can certainly eat keto desserts every day as long as you are maintaining the daily carbs, protein, and fat requirements that is catered to your unique health condition and after seeking professional dietary advice.
Many individuals get skeptical of the keto diet because they believe they would have to deprive themselves of desserts and sweets. Since most fruits must be avoided in this diet due to their high carb content, it is easy to assume that the keto diet restricts desserts too. The good news is that there are plenty of keto dessert recipes that you can eat to satisfy your sugar cravings.
Please keep in mind that keto desserts are meant to be a small snack or treat and not to be indulged upon.
What Desserts Can You Eat on Keto Summary
Giving up starch and sugar doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy desserts. Just bear in mind that a dessert is really a small treat and not something you’re meant to have all the time whether you’re on keto or not. Being on a ketogenic lifestyle means you can also satisfy your sweet cravings without putting restrictions on yourself. The keto desserts will not only let you indulge a little but will also ensure that you stay in the ketosis state.
Even if you’re not on keto, a keto dessert is still the healthier alternative to the popular commercial desserts out there that are generally made of more processed sugar and fats that are not good for us in the long or short term anyway.
Perhaps the greatest benefit to come out of a keto diet experience is that you may decide that eating sweets are a thing of the past. It is not unheard of that some successful keto dieters have actually weaned themselves off from their sugar dependency and have found themselves denying their once favorite dessert, sweets, or snack more often than not and are more in control about what goes into their body.
But if you are not at that stage just yet, grab your copy today of over 30 delicious keto recipes that we have personally tried and tested; Keto Desserts cookbook by Kelley Herring
