No Chocolate For A Year- DID IT!

Just some follow-up thoughts on my "not eating chocolate for a year" challenge...

Was it hard? Yes!

Was it worth it? Yes!

Will I do it again? No! Life is too short to live without chocolate!

The whole experience really ended up teaching me a lot. A few things include:

• I can do hard things!
• I can have self control, especially when it comes to my appetite.
• The feeling of improving my self discipline was pretty awesome! Self discipline is SO hard. But honestly, it's helped be more disciplined in other areas of my life besides not eating chocolate. This has probably been the biggest benefit of this challenge
• I have so much more empathy for people who have severe addictions and are trying to quit them.  I had dreams at least once a month, usually twice about eating chocolate. A lot of times I would eat a whole plate of chocolate chip cookies in my dreams! It was pretty ridiculous. The addiction was/is REAL people.
• Doing something like this really makes celebrating your birthday way more fun! I was way less focused on getting a year older, and way more excited about the prospect of eating chocolate!

What was the first chocolate I had after the challenge?

- Dan made me chocolate chip pancakes for my birthday. I had told him that's what I wanted the morning of my birthday, but it was interesting that when I sat down in front of those giant chocolate chip pancakes, the first thing I felt was fear! I was not expecting that! I had just told myself no for so long, that it wasn't so easy to switch to yes. Which surprised me! But I did eat the pancakes, and they were delicious!

Do I still like chocolate after not eating it for a year?

- You betcha! But it's definitely not in the same way. I can taste the wax WAY more than I ever could. The only "cheap" chocolate I've liked is Kit Kats. I ate a Reese's and it was NASTY! Which is shocking because I LOVED Reeses before. Apparently I'm a bit of a chocolate snob now and can only eat Ghirardelli and Lindt truffles...

Did eating chocolate make me sick?

- Yeeeeaaaahhhh. It did. So after my mound of chocolate chip pancakes, I came to work to find a bag of chocolate doughnuts on my desk, and two packages of brownies. We had chocolate cake with lunch. By about 3:30, I was SICK. Mind you, I didn't eat any of the brownies, and only had one doughnut, and tiny slice of cake. But don't worry, I still had my birthday party with a chocolate fondue fountain and a 16 layer chocolate cake to go home to :) Yeah it was delicious and awesome and feeling like crap was totally worth it!  But I still have a pretty low chocolate tolerance.

My friend Shan made this cake. IT WAS DIVINE. Anything she makes is heavenly! In fact, if you live in Cache Valley, you should check out her blog and order some meals from her! You'll never go back! http://mealsbyshan.blogspot.com/

I think every person should try doing something like this once in their life. It really was a fun, challenging experience and I feel like a stronger person for doing it!