What is Chocolate and Beyond?

If you’ve stumbled across this site you may be thinking “Wow, something devoted to chocolate!” or you may be wondering if it’s about giving up chocolate. Neither is true. Although the freedom to eat chocolate is truly part of the philosophy, but there's more to life than chocolate, such as curry.

Chocolate and Beyond is a personal journey. It’s my attempt to seek a life that no longer revolves around the control of food or dieting.

Like many women, and some men, I’m fed up of having my daily thoughts strangled and subdued with thinking about what time I can next eat, planning out meals, considering calorie content, counting fat grams, and thinking about the foods I should or shouldn’t eat. I remember a time in my life when it was from the moment I woke to the moment I got in bed (whether my tummy was rumbling or whether I was groaning at its fullness).

I’ve restricted, I’ve overeaten, I’ve banned, I’ve substituted and I’ve attempted numerous other measures that I believed enforced some control over my food intake. I’ve felt triumphant (yippee, my willpower stayed and I only ate a banana and a jacket potato today) or horribly guilt-ridden (yuk, I lost control and stuffed myself on curry, chocolate, crisps and other ‘baddies’).

I’ve done a few diets and I’ve tried a few ‘eating plans’ – Slimming World ‘fat units’, WeightWatchers Points, Atkins (Lordy that was terrible), Carol Vorderman’s Detox and run-of-the-mill calorie-counting (you eat three crackers and a lettuce then realise you’re buggered for the rest of the day and have to go on fat-free mineral water).

But I’ve come to the conclusion that dieting is a no-win situation. You try it, then see it as a panacea to all weight-gain problems even though the results are often short-term, and then you find that you can never break free, trapped in a downward spiral. In fact, you might not even have had a problem with weight until you began the diet and therefore obsessing with food.

I got really fed up of this way of life a few years ago and made an effort to improve my own relationship with food. Every so often, I get dragged back under that wheel and I do some kind of diet. Never have I broken free from the feeling that I could do with being a few pounds less, even when I was a few pounds less, and skinnier than a pencil.

It’s time for all this nonsense to stop. A couple of months ago I read a book called Beyond Chocolate, written by Sophie Boss and Audrey Boss, which brought back some of the ideas I’d experimented with previously about learning how to eat intuitively - and I think this is the key to ditching the diet.

I’m following some of the book’s principles, as well as those in other books I’ve read, (The Chocolate Conundrum explains a little more) to find my own life ‘beyond chocolate’ in which I can dump the diet for good, find a natural weight I’m happy at, and stop being stifled with the ‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts’ of food obsession.

This site is intended to track my ups and downs, as well as include fun, informative or otherwise interesting articles and snippets that I think may be of use to others who are considering how diets are not doing them any favours. And also it intends to celebrate the wonder that is food - something we should enjoy and take pleasure in, not be afraid of.

'Let us eat cake' will allow you to follow my journey from the start.