Goodness! Don’t you reckon there’s room for chocolate, wine and bacon in a diet that maintains our most natural weight! I do! We’ve just got to learn to make them work for us.
Back when I had a very unhealthy relationship with food I would eat chocolate like it was my last day of the planet! If I didn’t have a stash in the pantry I’d get stuck into my flatmate’s! I remember working in a shop that had a big tub of Smarties on the counter and I’d nibble away at them just about every day till I was full! Imagine how many Smarties you have to eat to be full!
I was pretty hooked. Then one day I came across this wisdom: if you want to eat less of something, improve its quality. Now at that stage I was eating the same stock standard food as most people out there – toast and jam for brekky, sandwich with cheese and salad for lunch and a plate loaded with carbs and cheese for dinner (I think I was going through my vegetarian stage at that point!). And I’d eat low fat, diet foods loaded with sugar.
So increasing the quality of what I was eating wasn’t that difficult. I swapped white bread for supermarket wholemeal bread (actually not really that much better – read the label!), I transitioned to dark chocolate. I bought Celtic sea salt and cooked with that instead of white salt. I bought corn chips from the health food shop. Ironically once I got used to that as a standard I started to take it up another level buying real wholemeal bread (like Dallas bread) from the health food store or even making my own. In fact I started to cook many more things at home from scratch because so many of the packaged foods didn’t have a healthy substitute and I knew they were laden with the 4 white devils: white salt, white flour, white sugar and “white” oil. If I made my own chocolate chips cookies, for example, I could use butter, wholemeal flour and rapadura sugar (evaporated cane juice or whole sugar) and they were really yummy.
Nutritionist Cindi O’meara, says that if you compare a chocolate éclair made now to the ones made in the 50s they are unbelievably different and that if you really did want a chocolate éclair and made it at home you would be way better off! I agree.
Next time you shop consider thinking from a quality perspective rather than a weight loss or cheap food perspective and notice how you start to make different choices, better choices. After all you’re worth it.
