Chocolate Diet

Yes, really, the Chocolate Diet does exist, but hold on to your Mars bar; it’s not quite what it seems

The Celebrity Follower: Kelly Osbourne said her recent weight loss was down to eating chocolate; “If I’m hungry, I eat chocolate. That’s my only diet and I lost a bit of weight,” she said.

The Idea:

There are in fact a couple of variations on the chocolate diet. One devised by Lenny Neimark called the Pasta-Popcorn-Chocolate Diet is just that – a diet that not only allows you to eat chocolate, but also popcorn and pasta. In the Sky Style office, that’s not a diet…that’s life!

Another, the simply named Chocolate Diet, replaces in-between meal snacking with chocolate-flavoured liquids and powders which you mix with milk or water to make a healthy hunger suppressant. You also take a chocolate-based pill which is said, in conjunction with a healthy diet, to stimulate the metabolism and kick start the body’s fat burning mechanism. But there is no evidence to suggest that chocolate can speed up weight loss.

The Pasta-Popcorn-Chocolate and to a certain extent the pill-popping Chocolate Diet, work on the principle that total abstinence is counter productive. By making a food ‘forbidden’ you merely make it more appealing. So many diets fail because people feel deprived of their favourite foods and therefore tend to binge eat.

Before you get too excited and crack open a massive Dairy Milk and jump into a bucket of Butterkist, neither of these diets are the chocolate fest that they first appear.

While it doesn’t ban chocolate there are plenty of other foods that you can’t have on this diet including alcohol, dairy products (other than the milk in chocolate), oily fruits like avocado, red meat and nuts and seeds as well as the usual list of ‘bad’ foods like fried food and foods high in sugar. It’s a pretty restrictive list of forbidden foods and includes some healthy stuff such as nuts and seeds that have far more nutritional value than chocolate and popcorn.