From the library (just for fun): Eat Chocolate, Lose Weight; New Science Proves You Should Eat Chocolate Every Day, by Will Clower

Last updated on: July 14, 2014 at 11:23 pm by Jane the Actuary

From the library (just for fun): Eat Chocolate, Lose Weight; New Science Proves You Should Eat Chocolate Every Day, by Will Clower 2014-07-14T23:23:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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So a couple months ago I revealed Jane’s Weight Loss Secrets (don’t snack, especially after dinner, and get up off your butt), and was quite pleased with myself for having lost 5 of the 10 pounds I had gained while telecommuting.

And then we had a couple birthdays, with birthday cakes, and I started getting into the habit of after-dinner snacking again, and we started with the after-dinner or afternoon walks or bike rides into town for treats with the kids that are a part of our summer routine. And I haven’t gained all the weight back yet, but I need to get back to a “no snacks” routine or I will.

So this book caught my eye in the new books section of the library.

I confess that I did not read the book in full. I did a lot of skimming. Honestly, it’s not particularly well-organized, and is fairly repetitive.

The first thing to understand is that the book doesn’t recommend just any chocolate, but dark chocolate, the darker the better, at least 50% cocoa, but preferably 70% or more. Milk chocolate doesn’t have dark chocolate’s magical properties. (One of the negative Amazon reviews was, basically, “ugh, I hate dark chocolate — so the book is a bust.) In addition, part of the objective of accustoming oneself to dark chocolate is to “lose the sweet tooth” — the author claims that if you accustom yourself to dark chocolate, then ordinary sweets will begin to taste “too sweet” to you. (Though at the same time, he instructs the reader to abandon eating sweets, in general.)

He also counsels the reader to have small pieces of chocolate 1/2 hour before and just after meals, just letting it melt in your mouth. The objective is that the before-meal chocolate will (just like mom always said) ruin your appetite, that is, cause you to decrease the amount you eat at meals, and the after-dinner chocolate will allow you to feel satisfied and less tempted to have a snack afterwards.

Then he gets into goofier ideas like becoming a chocolate connoisseur and “tasting” different types of chocolate like different kinds of wine. What the point of this is I’m not sure, except to make this a book-length monograph rather than an article. Then he offers a set of recipes in which he incorporates chocolate into entrees such as chili as well as desserts that he claims are healthier because they have more/darker chocolate and less sugar, and a meal plan using those recipes, which is fairly ordinary except that he advises for skipping breakfast or eating only a very small amount. There are also various sorts of bigger health benefits due to the chemical composition of chocolate, but his book is disorganized enough that I can’t pull up a quick list to summarize these for you.

Is his overall plan, “eat chocolate and the weight loss will happen”? No. Depending on how you interpret it, it’s either “eat chocolate, but also eliminate sugar elsewhere as well as processed foods, and eat small portions,” so that the real dieting is in cutting out the other sweets, or “eating chocolate will help you eat less overall.”

Does it work?

It’s not a good sign that the Amazon reviews, while generally favorable (average of 4 stars), were all of the “what a great idea” variety, not “it worked for me.” But I have to admit to being curious as to whether eating small amounts of chocolate can help me control snacking, and in particular whether his suggested pre-meal chocolate bite would help me conquer the temptation to snack just before and while cooking dinner, so I might give it a try anyway.

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