Everyone who likes ice cream likes it a little bit too much. No ice cream lover can honestly say that they've never sat down with a pint of ice cream and polished it off in one sitting. A good TV show or movie can make the pint go by even faster. It's good for the soul, great for the tastebuds, but not great for the bod.
We're definitely all for occasional indulgence, but eating a whole pint of ice cream often just feels worse in the end than if you'd given yourself a hefty serving in a bowl. Most pints of ice cream contain more than 1,000 calories and more than 60 grams of fat - no wonder you feel gross afterwards, that's close to the daily requirements for both.
Enter Halo Top, a revolutionary new ice cream brand whose nutrition stats are almost too good to be true. A whole pint of ice cream only does around the same amount of damage as a chocolate bar - 240-280 calories and about 8 grams of fat. That's one-fourth of the calories in a pint of Ben & Jerrys and one-fifth of a pint of Haagen Dazs. As a bonus, they're also high in protein!
It's nothing like the grocery store ice creams that are disconcertingly soft and squishy and aggressively sweet, and that's because the ingredient list of Halo Top is completely different.
The ice cream has no artificial flavors or sweeteners, no corn syrup, and uses dairy that hasn't been exposed to growth hormones. It's all-natural, and frankly, we don't know how they make such delicious ice cream with so few calories. It has something to do with the fact that they use part cane sugar, part stevia to sweeten the delicious dessert. Stevia is an all-natural, plant-derived calorie-free sweetener popular in Japan and South America.
Reviewers have noted that the ice cream is a little harder than most others, but if you let it thaw slightly, the texture is perfectly creamy. The vanilla flavor has real flecks of vanilla bean and a very strong flavor, and the chocolate tastes like a fudge popsicle. Other flavors available are lemon cake, birthday cake, strawberry and mint chip.
The ice cream is sold in Whole Foods and other natural food stores. It's roughly the same price as Ben & Jerry's.
Happy (guilt-free) indulging!
