Vale - Chocolate busters: how to kick it ... easily!

Ahhh, chocolate. Just the word is enough to make the average person melt faster than the cocoa butter itself, which explains why just the thought of giving it up is usually enough to fill the average chocolate lover with a slight degree of apprehension, and for others, out and out panic! However, it doesnt matter how much of the dark stuff you eat, how often you eat it or whether you believe life just wouldnt be worth living without it; the beautiful truth is anyone can find it easy to kick chocolate even you!

All thats needed for this minor miracle to manifest itself is an extremely open mind, the promise that you will read some of this book every day, to keep the momentum going, a willingness to follow my guidelines at the end oh, and plenty of chocolate! Yep, contradiction in terms though it is, please feel free to continue to eat as much chocolate as your little heart desires until you finish the book (and, no, that doesnt mean taking 20 years to finish the book!). If you do that, if you are willing to really open your mind and put your beloved chocolate on the rack, then your break to freedom from one of the most heavily advertised junkie foods in the world is as good as guaranteed.

The truth is, once we have slowly stripped away the many different layers from this cunning chocolate wolf and unwrapped the cold hard truth lurking beneath the glamorous advertising, product placements and seductive glossy packaging you will never be able to see chocolate in the same light again. Let me make myself clear here: I dont mean you will go off it slightly and cut down a little, no, no, no I mean once you are able to see this hyped up, sugar-infested drug food for what it really is and not as youve been conditioned to see it, settling down to a bar of the stuff will be about as appealing as plucking your nasal hairs with a fish fork.

For the first time ever the whole business of chocolate is going to get the licking it deserves and by the time you finish this book, unlike with a no-chocolate diet or going on the chocolate wagon, you will not only be happy not to eat it (a miracle in itself), but also, when you see other people consuming the stuff, far from envying them (or wanting to hurt them severely!) you will actually feel sorry for them.

However, for this seemingly impossible feat to happen, your current perception of this emotionally driven food needs to take a massive shift. Fortunately, this will be a piece of cake (not chocolate obviously!). All we need to do is see through the years of brainwashing weve all been subjected to, explode the myths, shatter the illusions, and discover the correct knowledge and unique way of thinking that will make the whole process of kicking the choccie habit as easy as organic pie!

Now in case youre a virgin to my world of thinking and have yet to indulge in my first book Slim 4 Life: Freedom from the FoodTrap, I need you to know from the start exactly where Im coming from. Im not into doom and gloom, I dont do willpower, I speak plain English and I tell it like it is. Let me be clear, Im not here to win any literary awards, by golly gosh no, Im simply here to shake the chocolate world and provide you with the correct knowledge which will enable you to be free to have a non-chocolate break if you so choose! And when I say, correct knowledge I dont mean the usual nonsense you get from what I describe as the State the Bleeding Obvious Brigade. You know, the amazing, mind-blowing and life-changing info they come out with, like:

Chocolate is full of sugar, its fattening and its bad for you if
you stopped eating it, you would feel better.

Not being funny, but cover me in cocoa and lick me all over you dont say! Or, my favourite expression at times like this, No shit, Sherlock! Please name me one chocolate eater, one chocoholic, nay, one living breathing person on this planet who doesnt know that mass-market junkie chocolate is full of sugar and fattening and Ill eat my creme egg. I think its safe to say that, in terms of stripping this chocolate wolf and helping you to free yourself, members of the State the Bleeding Obvious Brigade banging on about how bad chocolate is for you or you saying it to yourself are about as effective as a state of the art cooker at a raw food convention! In reality this kind of approach often has the opposite effect. One of the times people reach for things like chocolate is when theyre feeling down, so if someone tells you how ill or fat you can get (or are) because of chocolate, that can make you feel even worse, so what do you do? You say, Sod it and eat more CHOCOLATE!

Everyone and their mother knows that mass-market commercial chocolate is bad for you, you dont have to be Inspector Morse to work it out, do you? The problem is, although everyone knows that chocolate is bad and fattening, they also strongly believe its blooming lovely and has the amazing power to lift our emotions. So what we are dealing with here is what amounts to the ultimate love/hate relationship; the David and Goliath of mental battles. This is why at this stage you will not be entirely sure whether or not you do want to stop eating chocolate altogether. In all probability, you picked up this book to find a way to cut down a little, go on the chocolate wagon for a while but kick it altogether, like forever? Youve got to be off your rocker! This is also why I realize at this stage Im half your friend and half your enemy:

Hooray this guys going to help me kick chocolate! Damn this guys going to take away my chocolate forever NO WAY!

It is also why many people who bought the infamous Atkins Diet book only read a small section of it before discarding it to gather dust on the shelf. They were fine up until he pointed out that chocolate was a dreaded carbohydrate and therefore a no-go area. No white bread is fair enough but no chocolate BOG OFF, ATKINS! Of the millions of Atkins books sold it is estimated that only about 5% of people actually read the whole book and only a small percentage followed it for longer than a week (Jennifer Aniston being one and dont we know about it!). This is why if you really want to bust your chocolate love/hate affair, it is essential that you do something that most people who buy books of this nature fail to do read the whole of the book. Every word has been written for a reason and the book is designed, unlike pointing out the obvious methods, to remove this love/hate chocolate tug-of-war by gradually stripping the chocolate industry bare to reveal the truth. Once you see the truth you will find it very hard, if not impossible, to have any desire for chocolate again.

You will notice that in order to achieve this I will be playing the chocolate industry at their own game by repeating certain points over and over again to make certain they stick in your conscious and sub-conscious mind. So if when youre reading this you come across a similar point or you think Hes said that already, I know its on purpose! Repetition is the key to their advertising and emotional hooking success and it is also key to unhooking the emotional attachment to chocolate. Its about time someone used this same approach of repetition to burst the chocolate bubble. Until the chocolate bubble is burst, youve got more chance of finding true freedom from chocolate as you have making a cup of hot cocoa using a chocolate kettle!