There are 2 problems with eating ice cream.
- It’s delicious, so I always eat too much.
- It’s delicious, so I always eat too much, AND it’s not all that good for me.
With problem #1, it’s not that hard to tell when we’re eating too much. Most of the time it’s pretty obvious that our small cone isn’t all that small.
It’s #2 that’s harder.
How, for the love of all things delicious, do you pick the best ice cream out of everything the ice cream world has to offer?
Best Ice Cream Choice, No Contest
If you’re looking for a straight answer, here it is: a small cup of plain vanilla soft serve is your best choice.
Vanilla soft serve is like a respectable, no-nonsense older gentleman. Moderate and responsible. Reliable and consistent. It’s a fairly healthy choice, all the time.
Soft serve is an aerated mixture of ice cream ingredients that gives you more volume with less actual mass. That means, you get more in the cup even though you’re actually eating less. A wonderful trick when every lick counts.
Pick it up from a truck like Mr. Softee and you’ll get somewhere in the range of 130-170 calories per serving and somewhere between 5-10g of fat.
This is a very appropriate range for a snack, which should fall somewhere in the range of one third of a healthy meal of 500-600 calories.
It won’t keep you full with only 3g protein, but it sure will make you happy. And it won’t completely ruin any other parts of your healthy day.
Add a few fresh berries or cut up fruit and you’ve created an elevated version of strawberries and cream. Nothing wrong with that.
Out of all our ice cream choices, soft serve (even chocolate) is almost always going to win.
And it’s still going to win even if we put it in a cone.
Get either a vanilla or chocolate soft serve in a cone and you’re going to get another 60-100 calories added to the small serving. That still comes in around 190-270 calories per cone.
A little outside the range of a GREAT snack and a lot closer to an OK snack. But still not too far off of great, and if you’re careful, not that hard to balance out for the rest of the day.
Just don’t start adding things on top.
Like sprinkles – those add an extra 40 cals. Chocolate or strawberry dip – another 100 cals.
See what’s happening here? This is where trouble starts.
Stick to fresh fruit if you want to be able to call your ice cream cone a healthy(ish) snack.
And don’t even touch a milk shake if you’re watching your waist line. That’ll get you in deep with 460+ calories in per shake.
That’s basically another meal made up of just fat and sugar.
Soft Serve Vs. Frozen Yogurt
Frozen yogurt is one of life’s biggest scams. It sounds healthy, right? Like really healthy because yogurt is so healthy. Right?
Even though it’s usually “low fat”, there are 2 major problems here. And they’ll both get you into trouble every time.
First, those fill-your-own cups are HUGE.
They’re SO big.
The cup itself can hold 16 oz.
But we’re all grown ups here, so no one going stop you from filling it up over the top. I get it. It’s hard to get all the good flavors into that one cup.
Second, they’re full of sugar and not much else worthwhile.
Anytime you see fat-free, be prepared to be smacked over the head with a ton of sugar to compensate the taste.
Per ounce, it doesn’t sound like it’ll be too bad for you. There’s about 30 calories in every ounce of plain vanilla fro-yo. Sounds OK until you start doing the math.
That’s about 480 calories in one cup of DIY plain vanilla frozen yogurt.
Remember our soft serve cone? It had half the calories of this non-fat fro-yo.
And that’s BEFORE toppings.
That toppings bar will get you into trouble. Like really, really bad trouble. Trouble so bad, we don’t even need to get into it.
Just know that if you’re picking anything other than that fresh fruit and MAYBE a SPRINKLE of regular nuts, you’ve gone too far.
Close Second to Soft Serve
Hard ice cream comes in second when you order a kid’s size.
If you have to get a small, tell the person scooping to stop at one scoop and not to top you off.
I know, I know, it’s asking a lot. But it’ll save a whole lot of fat and calories. Maybe a whole soft serve cone’s worth of fat and calories.
Hard ice cream is different than soft serve. This is where the density creates deliciousness. The density is also where all the fat and calories hide.
In case you’re wondering, a serving of hard ice cream is half a cup.
No one eats half a cup.
I probably couldn’t even tell you what half a cup of ice cream looks like without a measuring cup.
But that half cup is going to have somewhere in the 200-300 calorie range. For the vanilla. Almost double of that vanilla cup of soft serve.
If we assume that a normal scoop from your favorite ice cream place has over half a cup, 3 scoops can get you close to 2 cups of ice cream.
Do you know how many cups are in a normal pint? 2 cups. Yea. 800 calories or more are in that.
It’s not that hard to eat close to a pint of ice cream piled into a medium or large cup.
If you need a visual, think about it like this: one of those little Dixie cups of ice cream, you know the ones that come with the wooden spoon and have about 4 bites in them?
Those are LESS than half a cup (about 3.6 oz).
A vanilla Haagan Daz dixie cup comes in at 220 calories and 14g fat.
See where we’re going with this?
You can get a soft serve cone for about the same caloric price. The Haagan Daz tastes better, but you get more licks from the soft serve cone.
PLUS, when was the last time you grabbed some ice cream and they gave you a scoop the size of that Dixie cup? The answer is never. NEVER.
Because you’d send your cone back complaining that they forgot some of your ice cream.
Bottom Line
How do you eat ice cream? One word: responsibly.
You don’t have to stick to plain vanilla, but remember that when you don’t things start to add up and add up fast.
Start with simple, keep a close eye on serving sizes and watch what you put on top. Kids size or small is where you want to live.
The aim is to keep your ice cream close to snack size, about 200 calories or less. And the best way to do that is soft serve.
A small soft serve cone beats a small cone of hard ice cream. And just about anything will beat out a full cup of frozen yogurt with all the “required” toppings.
If your ice cream has got some kind of ribbons of goodness like caramel or fudge, or chunks of candy or cookies or cake, then don’t add anything else. Save the toppings for a plain flavor like vanilla or chocolate.
And when the day comes for some ice cream and you haven’t had it in forever, enjoy it. Enjoy every bite of it. Lick to bowl clean if you need to. Because in a perfect world, you won’t have having it again for a while.
Are you looking for the right way to eat more than just ice cream?
Here are a few more ways to help you keep your snacks in check:
- Eat Dessert Responsibly: A how-to guide for treating yourself well
- Are your snacks really snacks? Here’s how to tell
- Your handy guide to choosing healthy snacks on the go
- Snack better with this one essential hack
Don’t forget to join the newsletter. Get everything you need to stay on track and make hard food decisions easy, sent straight to you.