Keeping a healthy mindset during the Chocolate Festival

Do you dread eating even one teensy bite of chocolate? Because once you start, you can’t stop? Do you tell the family: No chocolate for me this Easter – get me something else But secretly hope they ignore you?Do you promise yourself this year you won’t spend the rest of the year trying to lose the weight you piled on at Easter? Well join the crowd girls, you’re not alone.

Like Christmas, Easter is a binge time of year, that isn’t restricted to the official religious days. But . . . it doesn’t need to be. Yes, it IS possible to have chocolate, in moderate amounts, and survive Easter without going on a chocolate binge fest.

Here’s how:

Throw deprivation out the window
Ditch guilt
Savour the flavor
Employ moderation
If you slip up and accidently binge, contain it to Easter

Let’s take a detailed look at each of these life-changing concepts.

Throw deprivation out the window

Remind me why it’s important to deprive yourself of chocolate at Easter?

We use deprivation as a way of punishing ourselves for loving and longing for chocolate. We fear that if we let ourselves have a bit, we’ll fall face first into the paws of a giant chocolate bunny. But deprivation just sets us up for a binge. Because sooner all later, it will feel mighty unfair to have nasty rules around chocolate consumption when everyone else is oohing and ahhing over every melting mouthful. And because we’re human, we’ll rebel against those ridiculous rules, and gobble every chocolate in sight.

Deprivation seems like a good idea (with a handy punishment theme as an added extra). But eventually, it will come back and shoot you in the foot.

Ditch guilt

Ahhh . . . guilt. What would we do without it?

Bloody enjoy ourselves, that’s what! You can’t indulge and enjoy yourself when you’re laboring under a mountain of guilt. In fact, guilt makes us binge – because in an effort to minimize the guilt, we scoff everything so fast we’ve created a pile of shiny wrappers before we know it, but have barely tasted a thing.

Guilt = no life-giving pleasure or joy

Guilt = misery, despair and unwanted kilos

Slide the guilt to one side so you can have your chocolate AND enjoy it.

Savour the flavor

If you’re going to have chocolate, you may as well enjoy it! And before you all start arguing with me – just explain to me: what is the point of gobbling down your chocolate so fast you don’t taste it? Immerse yourself in the experience of eating something you really look forward to, and enjoy. Slow down and eat mindfully.

Bring your five senses into the experience, one at a time:

Bring the chocolate close to your nose and inhale deeply
Look thoughtfully at it and notice it’s smooth creaminess, and it’s colour
How does it feel in your fingers as it starts to warm up
Take a small bite and hold it in your mouth for a moment before you let it melt – savour that burst of rich flavour
What can you hear as you slowly and mindfully eat each bite – your taste buds going wild, your stomach celebrating?

Remember, you’ve slid the guilt to one side, so it’s okay to slowly and mindfully enjoy the experience of eating chocolate.

Employ moderation

Moderation is the name of the game, folks. In my opinion, you can eat just about anything, as long as you have it in moderation. And when you start thinking like this – suddenly there’s nothing left on your Forbidden Foods list. Enjoy the experience of eating a moderate amount of chocolate, safe in the knowledge that you can have more (in moderation) tomorrow. This approach to eating chocolate removes the urgency and the guilt from the experience. If you slip up and accidently binge, contain it to Easter

Hey, we’re all human. And as humans, we stuff up, learn from our mistakes, and move on.

The problem with the annual Easter chocolate binge, is that many of us give up over Easter, continuing to binge on chocolate for weeks and months after. It’s like the flood gates have opened.

Of course, this problem is due to:

Deprivation
Guilt
Scoffing, and
Packing in waaay to much

And on top of that – bingeing on chocolate gives us permission to overeat on other things too. Because we feel like we’ve failed, so we might as well cheer ourselves up with more food.

The take home message here is: