Confessions of a chocaholic

After typing down my confession last week I had decided to take the bull by the horns. It was time for a small experiment of a little theory I had. I personally believe that starving yourself is not a good way to lose weight. The opposite is what will help much better, feeding yourself properly. Eat as much as you like as long as it is vegetables or bread. After all, when your stomach is already filled up with “normal” food, there won’t be much room left for snacks. I went to the library to find myself some books with healthy, tasteful recipes for dinner because my inspiration on that part of daily food is miserable. I’ve found as much as four books of our Dutch diet guru Sonja Bakker. I skipped her diet plan as a package and only made some dinner recipes from the books. Breakfast and lunch I could decide for myself, I thought. In the books of Sonja I’d read that losing weight depends on having variation in what you eat. People who eat the same food daily, although within the limit of the calories they use, won’t lose weight. That’s because the regularity makes the body lazy. Digestion and burning down calories should improve with variation in the menu.

It was not so hard sticking to that great plan of mine. Instead of having the same breakfast, cereals (with chocolate flavour!) I chose some of the many other goods from the store. I took my home made sandwiches for lunch with me to the university and didn’t feel hungry during the daytime. My peers and me spent a couple of long busy days in the lab, testing people for our project. I granted myself one cookie after coming home because I did a great job without snacking. And after dinner I enjoyed my tea with another one. The third day was a pretty stressful day and I took a small piece of my favourite chocolate bar when I came home. I’d tried to melt the chocolate slowly in my mouth and really taste it before swallowing. That felt good! Way too soon the chocolate was dissolved but I convinced myself to close the cupboard firmly and concentrate on cooking another tasteful meal as I planned. I am feeling proud of my culinary prowess lately. Sonja came up with really nice recipes.

Unfortunately I was craving for chocolate again within an hour after dinner this day. I was stressed and tired. I didn’t try very hard to distract myself because how much harm would another small piece do after a whole day being very strict? There was only a small piece left in the package and I could not read the tiny printed nutritional information on the label without putting on my reading glasses. Wait a minute. This needed some extraordinary calculations because it told me only how much calories 100 grams of the bar contained, which is the amazing number of 555 kilocalories. You’ll need to know that this kind of bars weight 300 grams and do some more maths to find out how much a block or even a row contains. I definitely didn’t eat more than a few rows at a time ever, too much would make me feel sick. So, these kind of bars consist of rows of 4 square blocks each, but how many rows? I decided to count the very next bar of chocolate I would buy this week. Done that. As you might expect, it was a little shocking to discover that my daily dose has a minimum of 185 kcal to approximately 400 kcal max. And, since I was confronting myself I also looked up how much a cookie was. My other bad snacking habit. Apparently I like to fool myself with thinking that a whole wheat cookie is not so bad.  I used to chew happily one, two or ten of those cookies away while thinking it is healthy because of the whole wheat. Yeah, only 71 calories a cookie, not so much. But then, ten of them equals the calories of a rich diner. Add up a couple of hidden calories here and there and it is obvious how I grew my spare tire. I must have had days that I snacked an entire day supply of calories

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On the bright side I’d learnt a lot. Another thing still is how to get rid of the extra weight. My experiment of eating as you like, as long as it is healthy, appeared to be not successful and it will take some more effort. What is the attraction of chocolate? It is not that I’m addicted to chocolate in general. I don’t even like chocolate all day long. Only these Milka bars filled with cream and biscuit on moments when I feel tired and stressed. I could, and should really, replace these bars with extra dark chocolate because that contains far less fat and calories and still has the nice properties of chocolate. We all know what those properties are, don’t we? For those who don’t, there’s more here: http://www.ice-cream-recipes.com/chocolate_science_health.htm One could easily consider chocolate as being healthy food, it stems from a veggie after all, the cocoa tree. There’s a limit on fooling oneself however, and the most appealing chocolate and cookies contain too much sugar and other useless calories.   

Three wrongs make a right. I will come up with better results next week, I hope.