Chocolate and Beyond

An exploration of sausages

Now if your mind got a bit carried away with the title of this post then slap your wrist and blush in shame, dear reader! But tucking into my pork peri peri sausages for breakfast this morning it occurred to me that I've relished discovering the different types of sausages that are sold on the supermarket shelf, and I never, ever think about whether or not I 'should' be eating them.

I have never really considered sausages in terms of whether they fitted in with a diet because I had been vegetarian for so long, far before my diet days, and so they had never been part of my eating plan. However, I'm aware that other people who diet see them as a 'sinful' food and often opt for low-fat options, whereas over the past few weeks since I began eating meat again I've been tucking in merrily, with not a low-fat sausage in sight.

Festival food

I've just spent the weekend at V Festival and as a girl who's really not a happy camper (especially when all the other tent bods are drinking until all hours and you can hear every nonsensical word!), I'm pretty proud that I've come through unscathed and managed to have a good time.

The music was great, but for the whole weekend, I ate (mostly) crap! And do you know, I really enjoyed giving myself the permission to do this? For my supper on Sunday night I ate doughnuts, and for my breakfast that morning I'd eaten a King Curry Pot Noodle! As well as a Snickers Bar.

Intuitive eating: dream or nightmare?

This post on Andrea Amador's Juicy Woman blog mentions that in her findings as a coach and as an experimenter of the intuitive eating process, "if you haven't worked out your emotional issues and if you still have clouds hanging over your life, Intuitive Eating will not work for you."

Andrea goes on to say that you may find yourself feeling hungry when you're actually not, in order to fulfill the emotional needs through food still. Whilst I can see how this may happen, I still believe that you are better working though your emotional issues alongside an intuitive eating approach rather than a dieting one, because the impact of this, when those issues rear their head pushing your head into the fridge, is far less when you have got foods legalised and you don't end up bingeing out of deprivation as WELL as the emotional hunger!

Diet foods can make children obese

The idea that eating low-calorie diet foods increases the likelihood of obesity, as reported by the BBC yesterday, is not news to readers of Chocolate and Beyond, but those who are not familiar with intuitive eating may be surprised by this.

The research shows that young rats who were fed low-calories foods were induced to overeat, whether they were lean or obese, whereas older rats were not shown to overeat at the same rate. Maybe this was due to a learning effect, so older rats just ate according to fullness at the time, or maybe the foods given to younger rats were not sufficient for their growth? But it is yet more compelling evidence to say that DIETS DON'T WORK!

Intuitve eating and ethical food choices

I wrote a recent post referring to an article I've written on fussy eating and food phobics which received a very interesting comment from a reader called Emma.

Emma stated that as a vegan, she believes that ethics have a vital role to play in food choices, and asked "Would you see this as incompatible with intuitive eating? Is it possible for the intuition in Intuitive Eating to encompass not only body wisdom but also a spiritual/moral/ethical intuition component?"

Cooking by the campfire

Can you eat well while camping? I'm actually going to be spending a couple of nights in a tent this weekend - which for a girl who thinks GHD stands for God Help the Demiwave and sees straighteners as essential as oxygen itself, then I'm not quite sure how I will survive.

But the question of what to take to eat with no camping gas stove - being new to this game - is becoming something of a conundrum. Won't fresh salad stuff just turn limp and nasty? Won't my favourite - cheese - go sweaty and greasy? And how on earth am I going to consume substantial amounts of tea to keep me going? Talk about unprepared.

Fussy eater or food phobic?

I thought some of the Chocolate and Beyond readers would be interested in having a look at this feature on fussy eaters and food phobics that I recently had published on www.iVillage.co.uk (and which I've linked here to my new blog, Clear as Quartz).

It was a good one to write, especially as I'm one of the least fussy eaters in the world! Don't get me wrong, I dislike eating too much junk food and I do like my meals to be real and nutritious (so I'm only 'fussy' in terms of having a preference for good quality food) but other than that, I'll eat whatever you put in front of me!

The Pasta-Chocolate Diet? Pull the other fettucine...

Okay. I've seen some ridiculous ways to diet out there but this really takes the noodle! The Pasta-Chocolate Diet, to be honest, just looks like someone has randomly made it up and plonked it onto this website, including two of the foods that most people are likely to try and give up when dieting.

There seems to be a substantial amount of popcorn consumed (which is fairly nutritionally void, as far as I'm aware) and it does actually look like it should be called the 'popcorn diet'!