How I gave up chocolate for a week: an editorial experiment

The editors WANTED to take the risk of changing their diet for a week. I decided to give up... chocolate for 7 days.

How to replace sweets: healthy “snacks”

When we decided as an editor to try to give up bad eating habits, I immediately thought about sweets (rustling the candy wrapper, by the way). For me, this is the same as a snack, an antidepressant, and in general one of the delights of life. Usually it’s like this: a bad mood is a candy, THESE days are a chocolate, the head doesn’t think – again a candy, a bad mood is a candy... Yes, I can eat up a quarrel with a loved one with a bucket of chocolate ice cream accompanied by melodrama. And so on ad infinitum. I think many girls will understand me. In the best traditions, I started not from today, but from Monday. And the weekend was already fatal - I probably never had so many sweets in any of my hardest days (but of course, I need to eat all the supplies at home, fill myself up for the week ahead). After that I thought that I wouldn’t be able to look at candy anymore.

And here is the first day - like the law of the universe - two birthdays in the office and four different delicious cakes in the kitchen. And there are so many sweets, wow! Grievingly, I managed - we limited ourselves to unfriendly glances at my colleagues, who in front of me were gobbling up sweets on both cheeks, discussing the filling of the cake. The next days passed surprisingly simply. When I wanted something tasty, I bought bananas and drank tea with honey a couple of times. Strange, but I even wanted vegetables! Experts say that when you want something specific, it’s not really necessary, it’s just that some vitamins are missing. We wrote about how to figure out what the body lacks. And so it happened - one fine day I ate 3 walnuts. I really wanted them!

Such experiments are great money savers. I noticed that 20-50 hryvnia were spent on sweets per day, which is up to 350 hryvnia per week and up to one and a half thousand per month. Of course - one chocolate bar costs from 10 hryvnia, and adding a cake or ice cream somewhere is almost a fortune;-) Another plus is that even the skin on the face has become cleaner - it’s probably not a lie that rashes can also occur from too much chocolate. I admit honestly – I did have punctures. Credit your conscience with 2 gummy candies on Saturday, at the end of the experiment, and two sips of cola.

Now my unsweetened week is over - now I eat sweets, I haven’t decided to give them up completely. But there are fewer sweets, even I myself notice that I want them less often and not in such a way that “let me at least smell the candy.”

Making such restrictions is definitely useful, because they relate to a greater extent to frankly harmful products or relatively harmful ones (if they are abused). The restriction should be chosen after self-analysis: I think everyone knows about their “drug product” and some discomfort that it subsequently causes (excess weight, rashes on the face, insomnia, etc.). You should not make a 100% refusal of the product, because... our subconscious comes from childhood, when any prohibition caused a completely opposite reaction. Subsequently, after some time of such “food celibacy”, an irresistible craving for a forbidden product arises. And the reason is not so much the habit of regularly consuming a specific product, but rather a psychological factor.

Adviсe:

1. Allow yourself a prohibited product 1-2 times a week as a reward for self-discipline during the week. Or, reduce portions of the prohibited product during the day - this is an easier option. In search of a healthy alternative, you will always discover new tastes, products, recipes that are likely to suit your taste even more than the usual product.

2. The purpose of such restrictions is to improve your diet and create, on an ongoing basis, a food set from the most natural, unrefined products. Therefore, the very concept of “restriction” should be correctly replaced with a comfortable “replacement with a healthier option.”