[smashd]

In the short-term I found that eating a piece of fruit whenever I craved sweets was a good replacement. Over time the fruit started to taste sweeter and sweeter (in a good way), and junk foods started to taste overly sweet. You can taper down the fruit later if you think you're eating too much of it. I think you also need to minimize non-caloric sweeteners for this to work.

Long-term, I took a food I was already interested in eating daily and made the minimal tweaks necessary for me to think of it as dessert. In my case it was oatmeal: adding 0.5T/11g of blackstrap molasses and 0.5T/6g of brown sugar to 0.5c/40g oatmeal (dry weight) makes a complex, subtly-sweet treat. It's ~200 calories total (~50 from molasses & sugar).