How can chocolate help weight loss?
Easy! Don’t eat it!
Did you beat me to the punchline? Yes, that’s a joke!
You can eat chocolate and lose weight, and yes, it can actually help you to be successful, but how it supports your success may not be the way you think it should.
I could tell you that chocolate has flavanols, because it does, and that’s the secret ingredient that makes you thin when you eat chocolate.
I hope nobody stops reading now to go run out to buy lots of chocolate so that he can eat it up to effortlessly lose weight!
Yes, chocolate does have flavanols which are a type of polyphenol – antioxidants found in foods like cocoa, tea, berries, and wine. Foods high in these compounds have been shown to benefit heart and brain health in the past.
Do flavanols also benefit the waistline?
No, probably not, but there are still weight loss benefits from eating chocolate.
There are several benefits from eating chocolate.
# 1 If you happen to like chocolate; eating it makes you happy instead of deprived. Happy people are in a better frame of mind to make good decisions including what and how much to eat and when to stop. Deprived people can fail miserably at making good eating decisions.
# 2 Chocolate helps strengthen a special muscle needed for weight control. That special muscle happens to be your brain muscle. Weak brain muscles tell us that we “can’t eat just one.” That wouldn’t be so bad if we could actually and happily cut out favorite foods for good. The problem is the same weak brain that tells us, “we can’t eat just one,” won’t stop telling us, “you just gotta have some and you gotta have it now!” The weak brain causes us to crave and give into cravings and blame overindulging on influences outside of ourselves so that it can escape any responsibility.
Chocolate isn’t the only food that helps us build up our brain muscle so that we develop flexible restraint, but it’s one of them. Eating treats such as chocolate can help reduce or eliminate cravings and make us feel extremely powerful at the same time. Empowerment comes from self-control. Saying “no” isn’t self-control, that’s deprivation! Saying “yes” and choosing a serving size and sticking to it – now, that’s self-control!
# 3 Allowing and planning for indulgences makes it easier to live a life monitoring food intake. Losing weight takes monitoring food intake. Keeping lost weight from coming back takes continued monitoring food intake. Many chocolate lovers have given up chocolate (among other things) to lose weight. When they reached their goal they believed incorrectly that food monitoring was no longer needed. Back they went to all of their old habits and back came all of the weight. Most people cannot choose “staying at goal,” over never eating their favorite foods again.
# 4 Chocolate can help weight loss when you “earn your chocolate.” Find out how many calories are in your treat and then pick a physical activity to earn those calories.