Why you SHOULD be eating chocolate

Ok I admit this title is a bit of clickbait, but let me explain my point.

I am not saying you HAVE to eat chocolate. You may not be a choc fan. BUT if you are like me and you have a major sweet tooth and chocolate brings you joy - you really MUST eat it.

I am going to use myself as a case study here to give you a real life example of what I mean:

Before I educated myself and became a professional in the health and fitness industry, I used to believe it was chocolate that was going to make me fat, or sweets, any kind of sugary/processed food. So I thought ok no I must forbid it all, because the moment I eat it, I will get fat. I had no education around energy balance (calories in vs calories out), all I thought was that certain foods made you fat, and certain foods made you skinny. Little did I know at the time I could eat 3000 cals of broccoli per day and still put on weight (that would however be a sh*t ton of broccoli, but you get my gist).

The more I would forbid these foods I enjoyed, the more I would find myself thinking about them all the time, and ultimately bingeing on them because I would think “oh its only this once and then I won’t allow myself so I better eat as much as I can.” Well I am sure you can guess what happened next. This became a vicious cycle, I was unhappy with how I looked, I hated what I was trying to do to change it, so it didn’t work, I would binge, hate myself for it, feel guilty, restrict, and the cycle continued.

Fast forward a little in time, and I started learning about intuitive eating - basically you allow yourself to eat whatever you want, and the idea is the more you allow, the less you want to binge. I could never get my head around this because to me - I thought I would never have the willpower or ability to have “just one”, so I didn’t trust it it just seemed too far out of reach.

Then came my holy grail - flexible dieting - I started tracking my food but my calories were super low so I still was in a bit of that all consuming food all the time mindset. But I tested the waters and allowed myself little treats here and there. To my shock, because I was allowing myself, I was not so fixated on wanting more and more, because I knew if I wanted it again tomorrow I could have!

This really helped improve my relationship with food, and it got even better when I entered a building phase, because I was actually fuelling my body properly with nourishing foods, I was not so fixated on eating all the time. It was one of those things where I did not realise how damaged my relationship with food was until I got out the other side.

BUT the bottom line is - food itself doesn’t make you fat, the quantity does. So you are better off having a little bit of choc here and there every day (or whatever your guilty pleasure is). If you were like me and you think “no way I cannot stop at just one”, adopt the mindset that your favourite food is not scarce, you can always come back for more, later today, tomorrow etc. It is not going anywhere.

Happy chocolate eating!