We all love eating dessert at Tampa restaurants, right? There’s nothing quite like ending a very satisfying meal with a sweet treat. Unfortunately, if you’re familiar with eating out at restaurants, eating a full course meal at these places can pack quite a lot of calories and aren’t exactly the best for you, health-wise.

Most restaurants make sure that their food tastes delicious, which means that they usually tend to pack it with fat and sodium. It’s often been said that if your food doesn’t taste like the ones you’d find at a restaurant, you have to add more butter to get the same taste.

So it makes sense why you have to be conscious of what you order when you eat out. Fortunately, there are ways to make healthy choices even when eating dessert at these restaurants. Here are some tips to help you out.

Choose fruity desserts

Cakes, sundaes, and brownies may seem tempting, but you have to know that even a small brownie can have up to 200 calories in just one square. With that in mind, it’s important to be mindful of what you’re going to order.

If you want a healthier option, it always helps to go with a dessert that gets most of its flavor from fruits. You can have a whipped cream mixed with fruits, for example. Or perhaps a fruit tart is more suitable if you’re looking for something a little sweeter. A fruit sorbet can make for a very refreshing end to your meal.

Frozen desserts instead of ice cream

Ice cream seems to be the ultimate guilty pleasure when it comes to desserts, but as much as possible, it helps not to overindulge yourself with these. You probably already know this, but ice cream is loaded with sugar and saturated fat which is not good for you in large servings.

You can substitute these for sorbets or yogurt if you’re looking for a frozen treat. You can even go with a frozen fruit pudding if you’re looking for something a little richer.

Be careful with portion sizes

Of course, if you really want to eat the richer desserts that you really want at Tampa restaurants, a good way to make sure that you stay on the healthy side is by regulating the portion size that you’re given.

It might be tempting to devour that entire slice to chocolate cake, but if you’re really devoted to sticking to a healthier lifestyle, then it really helps to employ a more disciplined mindset when figuring out how much of a portion size you should eat. A few cookies may not seem like much, but they do add up in terms of calories.