The Diet Myths: Is chocolate really fattening?

“Bread makes you fat”, “chocolate is more fattening than low-fat yoghurt”, “I put on weight due to fat”…wrong! No one type of food makes you fat over the other. It is the amount that we consume that makes the difference.

Exercise: 4 days in a row, for lunch , you will have to take exclusively chocolate (100g, a full bar), no bread, butter, or anything else. You will definitely worry about quickly getting hungry again but no, it will take 4 to 6 hours, almost like after a standard meal because you will have consumed enough calories.

Objectives:

– Observe the point of satiety: The decrease in eating pleasure is the first signal, even before the distension of the stomach. Consuming just one type of food can help you focus your attention on it.

– Reassure yourself: You do not “always” want these rich foods. At the end of the day, when you start feeling hungry, you will be surprised to realise that you want vegetables or other foods which you would hardly covet on any other normal day. The body essentially “hungers” for nutrients in a particular type of food. “Once the body is satisfied with the nutrients from, in this case, 100 grams of chocolate, we are hungry for other foods,” says Marie-Laure Thollier.

– As prescribed quantities for the year correspond to a lower number of calories than the traditional meal (roughly 500/600 instead of the usual 750 calories), after 4 days, not only will you not have put on an ounce, you might in fact have lost 500g to 1kg… “Chocolate is not fattening” – point proven.

Instead of chocolate, you can even take Nutella (100g) or M&M’s (2 packs of 48g). If you lean more towards salty food, the same exercise can be carried out with cheese instead (150g or 200g of cheddar or Camembert), sausages (150g sausage) or fries (200g), provided, again, that you eat it on its own, with no accompanying dips or sides.

Read more in our ‘Diet Myths‘ report:

What makes us fat?
What makes us lose weight?
Do we have to follow a strict regime to lose weight?
Should we deprive ourselves of our favourite food?

Mathieu Rached