Not being funny, but ‘cover me in cocoa and lick me all over – you don’t say!’ Or, my favourite expression at times like this, ‘No shit, Sherlock!’ Please name me one chocolate eater, one ‘chocoholic’, nay, one living breathing person on this planet who doesn’t know that mass-market junkie chocolate is full of sugar and fattening and I’ll eat my creme egg. I think it’s safe to say that, in terms of ‘stripping this chocolate wolf and helping you to free yourself, members of the ‘State the Bleeding Obvious Brigade’ banging on about how bad chocolate is for you – or you saying it to yourself – are about as effective as a state of the art cooker at a raw food convention! In reality this kind of approach often has the opposite effect. One of the times people reach for things like chocolate is when they’re feeling down, so if someone tells you how ill or fat you can get (or are) because of chocolate, that can make you feel even worse, so what do you do? You say, ‘Sod it’ and eat more CHOCOLATE!
THERE’S A WAFER THIN LINE BETWEEN LOVE AND HATE
Everyone and their mother knows that mass-market commercial chocolate is bad for you, you don’t have to be Inspector Morse to work it out, do you? The problem is, although everyone knows that chocolate is bad and fattening, they also strongly believe it’s blooming lovely and has the amazing power to lift our emotions. So what we are dealing with here is what amounts to the ultimate love/hate relationship; the David and Goliath of mental battles. This is why at this stage you will not be entirely sure whether or not you do want to stop eating chocolate altogether. In all probability, you picked up this book to find a way to cut down a little, go on the chocolate wagon for a while – but kick it altogether, like forever? You’ve got to be off your rocker! This is also why I realize at this stage I’m half your friend and half your enemy:
‘Hooray this guy’s going to help me kick chocolate!’ ‘Damn this guy’s going to take away my chocolate … forever – NO WAY!’
It is also why many people who bought the infamous Atkins Diet book only read a small section of it before discarding it to gather dust on the shelf. They were fine up until he pointed out that chocolate was a dreaded carbohydrate and therefore a no-go area. No white bread is fair enough but no chocolate – BOG OFF, ATKINS! Of the millions of Atkins books sold it is estimated that only about 5% of people actually read the whole book and only a small percentage followed it for longer than a week (Jennifer Aniston being one – and don’t we know about it!). This is why if you really want to bust your chocolate love/hate affair, it is essential that you do something that most people who buy books of this nature fail to do – read the whole of the book. Every word has been written for a reason and the book is designed, unlike ‘pointing out the obvious’ methods, to remove this love/hate chocolate tug-of-war by gradually stripping the chocolate industry bare to reveal the truth. Once you see the truth you will find it very hard, if not impossible, to have any desire for chocolate again.
You will notice that in order to achieve this I will be playing the chocolate industry at their own game by repeating certain points over and over again to make certain they stick in your conscious and sub-conscious mind. So if when you’re reading this you come across a similar point or you think ‘He’s said that already’, I know – it’s on purpose! Repetition is the key to their advertising and emotional hooking success and it is also key to unhooking the emotional attachment to chocolate. It’s about time someone used this same approach of repetition to burst the chocolate bubble. Until the chocolate bubble is burst, you’ve got more chance of finding true freedom from chocolate as you have making a cup of hot cocoa using a chocolate kettle!
The fact that you are reading this book tells me you probably already know this and are fully aware that willpower alone isn’t going to cut the cocoa, and lectures on the evils on chocolate are about as helpful as devices such as chocolate patches. (Yes, you haven’t misread, there really are chocolate patches, just like nicotine patches, and I’ll be covering these beauties in depth later!) The idea behind the willpower method is to give yourself a good talking to about chocolate; make a mental list of all the reasons why you shouldn’t have eat it, then take a deep breath and hang on in there until the craving goes away. There is one slight flaw with this approach:
THE CRAVING GETS WORSE!
And this is why the last thing you need is a lecture on the evils of why you shouldn’t eat commercially made chocolate. YOU KNOW THAT! What you need is a full understanding of why you do eat it. You need a simple, yet highly effective approach which will not just allow you to see this stuff in its true light; you also need a unique way of thinking that will allow you to Kick The Chocolate … and be happy about it. After all, anyone can stop eating chocolate and be miserable about it – I pulled that off on many occasions and I’m sure you’ve been pretty good at this yourself in the past; all you need is willpower, determination, positive thinking – oh, and being blooming ratty and miserable to boot!
TAKE FLYTE
Let me give you a quick but simple analogy to explain why so many people struggle using this approach. Imagine a house fly trying to get out of a room through a closed window. What chance does it have? Ummm, not a jot. But what if the fly had just returned from a positive thinking fly seminar, would it have a better chance then? Of course not! Physics will tell you that no matter how positive, determined or strong-willed the fly is, it will never break the glass. Equally, I will tell you and your past experiences should tell you also, positive thinking, determination and a strong will is not enough to kick the chocolate – and be happy about it! It is, however, always enough to kick the chocolate – temporarily – and be blooming miserable about it!
What you need is not a pocket full of willpower, a dose of positive thinking or a lecture; all you need is a mind open enough to help remove the many, many layers of conditioning relating to what can only be described as the king of drug foods.
So, without further ado, let us begin our journey into the world of chocolate by stripping off the first layer. I have called chocolate the king of all drug foods, but king wasn’t the title it was first given, in fact the title ‘king’ would almost be an insult. The truth is that from the dawn of time and even today in many societies, chocolate is still widely regarded as …
GLOBAL ORGANIZATION OF DRUG-FOOD SUPPLIERS (G.O.D.S.)
Let’s face facts, chocolate is a massive global business and there is just no way the chocolate industry will let this lie. Please don’t be surprised if you start to see scientific paper after scientific paper being produced ‘proving’ why their product is not addictive (in exactly the same way that tobacco companies did for years). After all, they have a lot which needs protecting. In the United Kingdom alone we spend a whopping £4 billion a year on chocolate. That’s £65 for every man, woman and child, or to put it another way, 312 oz a year or, to really bring it home, over 22 lb of chocolate per head per year! Now bear in mind this is the