June 22, 2013

• How I Transcended my Chocolate Addiction

  I’ve binged on brownies more times than I care to remember.  I used to use a few dirty clothes as an excuse to give myself access to the pop and candy machines at the laundromat.  Once, after starving myself for weeks on the Air Force Diet, I weakened, drove 23 miles to a truck stop, bought a carton of 12 Cherry Mountain Bars, and ate most of them on the drive back home.  Chocolate is not the only sweet thing I’ve binged on.  Candy of all kinds, pies and cakes, cherries, blueberries, watermelon… I’ve overdone them all.

  More times than I’m comfortable admitting, I’ve cut those things out then relapsed.  I educated myself and understood, nearly 40 years ago, that sugar was harmful to my health.  I abstained from it off and on for three decades or so before I learned that wheat and gluten were probably just as harmful to me.  Once I cut that out, cutting out the other crap became easier.  I went along, doing okay for several years, sticking to a healthy diet, not thinking about my weight, just trying not to be sick.  It worked about as well as can be expected for someone who has abused her body as extremely as I have for as long as I did.  As a side-effect, losing about half my body weight has made it easier to get around, too.

  I think I overdid the healthy eating thing some at first.  It was sorta white-knuckle, grin-and-bear-it a lot of the time, or just bear-it.  Some of that was necessary.  I had a systemic yeast infection that required a ketogenic diet to knock it out.  However, the draconian self-denial was harmful to my peace of mind.  Cautiously, one-by-one, I have added some things, such as gluten-free pizza, that have put some fun back into eating for me without triggering any binges.  I knew it was risky to try chocolate again.  I thought about it long and hard, preparing myself for a strong exercise of will if a binge threatened.

  I knew from the start that I couldn’t handle sweet stuff.  Last winter, three times on cold evenings, I put a spoonful of Ghirardelli’s unsweetened cocoa powder in a mug with a tablespoon or so of hot water, stirred it all up, then filled the mug with unsweetened almond milk.  It was mostly bitter, with just a hint of sweet from the almonds.  The aroma was heavenly, reminding me of a carnival in Ghirardelli Square.  My preference for Ghirardelli chocolate is largely motivated by happy memories of San Francisco.  (In a similar way, a visit to Hershey, PA, put me off Hershey’s chocolate for life.)  I inhaled the vapors, sipped the chocolate, and let it warm me from the inside out.  No cravings were triggered.  I wasn’t tempted to overdo it.

  

  Emboldened and encouraged by the successful experiment with the unsweetened cocoa, and tempted by a walk through the candy aisle at the supermarket, I picked up a bar of bittersweet chocolate.  These 4 oz. bars are scored into 8 squares, and I ate that entire bar, half a square, 1/4 of an ounce, at a time.  Before the first taste, I promised myself that if it triggered any craving or tempted me to gobble down the whole thing, I’d give it to Doug and tell him not to let me get my hands on it again.  Knowing that I needed some limit or guideline to consumption, and familiar with my own tendency to rebel at rules and restrictions, I kept them simple and loose.  I wouldn’t eat more than half of a half-ounce square in any one day, not eat them on any two successive days, and never when my blood sugar was low. 

  That must have been inspired thinking there.  I enjoyed the first little treat, was only slightly tempted to eat more immediately, and when I saw the bar in the pantry the next day it wasn’t hard to leave it there and wait until the following day for another piece.  Before that bar was all gone, I was forgetting about the chocolate for several days, up to a week or more between treats… no big deal.  I recognized the mild cravings I did have as wanting sweetness more than wanting chocolate, and so…

  

  The next bar of chocolate was 70% cacao, not so sweet.  Scharffen Berger is a brand I’d never tried before.  It has rich fruity chocolate flavor and I enjoy it occasionally without any temptation to overindulge.  I call this success, and I call it transcending the addiction because if I was just abstaining, forcing myself not to indulge, I’d still be addicted, just not “in active addiction,” as we say in NA.  Of course, I have no idea whether my methods would work for anyone else.  They work for me.

  

  • 4:11 pm
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