I need motivation to give up cheap children's chocolate!

[artemisandaphrodite]

For a few months now I've really been getting into my exercise and now walk and swim regularly and am enjoying it a lot. I feel like I'm in the habit now and love how strong it makes me feel.

HowEVERRRRR, all that doesn't count for all that much if I can't nip to Tesco for a pint of milk without shoving a couple of Dairy Milks in my basket ... or a pack of Club biscuits ... or 3 Creme Eggs, and I scoff them ALL, usually. Or have a great surge of willpower and shove the remaining packet in the bin sometimes, but that's obviously not good either - total waste of money.

I think the fact I'm not actually overweight is part of the problem - I'm flabby and cellulite-y, but only about 9.5 stone at 5'4'' so nothing drastic, but I think that reduces my motivation to kick the habit. But it's embarrassing, inhaling bloody Maltesers aged 40!! Stupid stupid stupid.

Has anyone got any good tips to kick the habit and stop me buying stuff? Should we do it together???? I think what I need is to be presented with the hard evidence about what all that chemical crap - hydrogenated oils, palm oil, soya lecithin and all that chemicall-y jargon - will eventually do to my body. Has anyone had a wake-up call with this?

I also like a bit of reverse psychology and remember someone saying (possibly on here) that they had kept a Crunchie in their handbag for 6 months or something now, as a kind of willpower test ... not tried anything like that but may give it a go.

Any more tips?! I want to be healthy, not just slim and fit, and I know eating all that crap (every day, pretty much) is doing me no favours. Oh, and my face is looking old and shit too, and i know it wouldn't be if I just stuck to the fecking spinach smoothies!!

don't deny yourself but have dark chocolate or Jaffa cakes imo/e.

You don't want to deny yourself and then binge, ime.

I find I go through stages where I eat chocolate etc if I'm bored/depressed etc so maybe find something else to do with the hands.

I am currently 10 days into a diet/detox thing. I was spurred into it for several reasons - huge spots that posters on here informed me was cystic acne, which is hormonal linked; I have PCOS so bizarre hormone things anyway; my skin generally looked crap - grey and old and congested; my cellulite was hideous; my weight was unstable; my energy levels were crap; I was massively bloated; I am in a slight 40-is-looming mid life crisis.
So... no sugar, wheat, gluten, alcohol, caffeine, potatoes, corn, soy, dairy for 28 days. As I said, 10 days in, 9 lbs off and I feel better than I have in YEARS.
However, the sugar cravings I had for the first 4 days were unbelievable. I never thought I was so addicted, but I would have killed for anything sugary. Now though, that is completely gone and normal food tastes great, e.g. my delightful gluten free porridge made with water and topped with berries - I wolf it down rather than suffering it. I know mine is a bit extreme, but just losing the sugar has been worth it. Am hoping not to fall back into it ever again.

I'm not one to talk because I devour kids sweeties like there's no tomorrow: haribo, drumsticks, shoe laces, jelly beans... you name it. But I hear that if you develop a taste for excellent quality dark chocolate, you'll find that kids' chocolates taste cheap and way too sweet.

You can be healthy and eat chocolate, even cheap kids' chocolate. On SW you can spend your syns on anything you like and maltesers are actually pretty low in calories. I know you're not on SW but maybe adopt the syn approach when it comes to treats? You get 5-15 syns a day to 'spend' but most people have 10. A 21.5g packet of maltesers is 5.5 syns. Chocolate eclairs (the toffee sweets) are 2 syns each. Freddos are 5 syns. Rolos are 1 syn each. Mini creme eggs are 2.5 syns each, toblerone tinys are 1.5 syns each, supermarket jaffa cakes are 2 syns each (mcvities 2.5). So even if you stuck to 5 syns a day you could have cheapo chocolate EVERY DAY and would still be in a low calorie intake.

Denying yourself is not actually good for you, everything is fine in moderation and if you take time to savour and enjoy your food, you eat better and more slowly.

Catrin detoxing is scientifically and medically bollocks, I'm afraid. Your liver does all the detoxing you need - if it didn't, you'd be dead. I have no idea how a detox like yours would treat hormonal cystic acne at all (hormone imbalances are treated medically and not by cutting out entire food types), but it sounds like you may actually have had a food intolerance and have unintentionally felt better from cutting that intolerance out. Gluten intolerance is easy to detect, it's just a blood test, and btw coeliac disease can cause anaemia which would account for the grey skin.

What's a 'syn'?? And what's SW?

Catrin, really, 10 days into it and you don't want any sugar? That sounds great. I actually have porridge almost every morning but have taken to making it into cinnamon porridge, which involves copious quantities of sugar. I've tried the berries but find them sour and tasteless out of season and in season too, quite often!

LittleBaby but surely you can give your liver too much to do if you indulge in crap food? You can't just throw anything at it and expect it to be super-healthy.

I think I'm maybe being a bit misunderstood here, as I don't want to diet or anything, just eat clean. To me, Jaffa Cakes (for example) AREN'T FOOD, and I really want to kick the habit once and for all so I lose the taste. It's all the additives, sweeteners etc I can't hack (but consume anyway ). I don't know if I can go cold turkey on sugar like Catrin as I think homemade desserts with stewed fruit or whatever are fab (though I'm the only one in the family who would ever eat them and it's hardly worth making enormous batches of apple crumble just for me ...). Ho hum.

Sorry - SW is Slimming World, a syn is their equivalent of a Weight Watchers point.

As for your liver, it's actually pretty resilient and alcohol would do far far more damage than even huge amounts of chocolate. Your liver does not need detoxing, it is a detoxing system.

And of course jaffa cakes are food! Sorry, I think 'clean eating' is pseudoscientific bollocks designed to make people feel bad about themselves so Vitamix etc can make £££££. Jaffa cakes are a nice treat that is perfectly good for you in moderation. No need to punish yourself for liking chocolate.

You need to train yourself to like the posh grown up treats then you won't be able to stomach the crap. It's totally doable - like cutting out sugar in tea, soon enough sweet tea is undrinkable.
I've trained myself to like posh coffee and now can't drink instant (well, it's Bisto really isn't it?) and chocolate over 50% cocoa solids - can't stand Cadburys now. Same goes for shopbought cake etc - once you have trained your taste buds to tell the difference you just think 'what is the point of eating that crap?' Life is too short, if you're going to do something a bit bad for you make sure it's absolutely worth it.

And don't get me started on what most people will accept under the title 'brownies.' Brownies should involve melted chocolate and real butter and should be squidgy. Not some dry slice of cocoa cake. Don't put up with anything less than orgasmic.

There seems to be a lot in the press at the moment about how sugar is addictive (apparently in an experiment rats got more addicted to sugar than cocaine). I certainly find that if I don't eat anything sweet for three days, I don't really want it any more. Naturally, I can't usually resist a biscuit or nine, or a cake, when offered, but do find that often these days the cheap-n-nasty sweet stuff is just far too sweet.

I too want to cut out sugar, to a reasonable degree, and I'm sure it's doable. I just need to do longer than three days...

How did you train yourself, SilkStalkings (har, fab name )?

My diet is 33:33:33 of food:booze:choc
Choc is important imo

"More addicted to sugar than cocaine" - yep, think that's me

While I agree that the liver does all the hard work, my food choices were all wrong and some/all of it was leading to me feeling vile. As I have PCOS, I have issues with sugar/bad carbs anyway, so a diet low in both is recommended. This in turn helps the hormonal symptoms of the PCOS - hair gain, weight gain, poor skin, messed up cycles etc.
I genuinely did not realise how poor my diet had become - for various reasons, I was existing on bread, pizza, pasta, coffee etc. I could not believe how hard the no sugar hit me initially, but now I do not miss the sugar, just the mindlessness of mainlining wine gums.

I have a cupboard full of dark chocolate. I bought it for baking, but have stopped using it since DS1 had to give up chocolate, so it's just sat there. If I really must have chocolate, it's there. I occasionally cave and buy milk chocolate and it's gone in days. The dark stuff ends up going out of date, now I've got myself out of the habit.

I would love to love dark chocolate, and I have tried, but it's just ... bleurgh. The only kind I've ever really like was only flavoured with lavender (which sounds yeuch but actually wasn't). But it was blimmin expensive and I can't remember where I got it.

Get an app, that counts your calories for you.

I'm using my fitness pal app for this. It's amazing how quickly your daily allowance disappears. It's only taking seconds to use each time I eat, and is definitely making me more mindful of what I eat. Yesterday, I did have 200 calories left, so if I'd wanted a treat I could have had one, guilt free!

Thanks, but I don't want to count calories! That's not what I'm asking about ... it's easy enough to eat 1500 calories'-worth of utter shite .

Work your way up to it-aldi chocolate is lovely and you can get 70% stuff to start with and then move onto the 95% stuff.

Same with puddings-I also love homemade puddings-crumbles etc but I'm gradually begining to realise that it's only proper homemade ones I like so I avoid shop bought/frozen restaurant crap and tell myself it's not worth it.

Try thinking of cheap chocolate as chocolate flavoured lard?

That's revolting, notwoo. That is definitely the kind of motivation I'm talking about !

Artemis I have been cutting down on sugar recently. I work in an office where there is ALWAYS sugary stuff - biscuits, homemade cakes, choc, hanging round.

It sounds really silly but I just think to myself: "That is not food."

I repeat it when I'm walking around the supermarket if I am tempted by bags of Haribo, Penguins or whatever, I just keep thinking "That's not food." I try and break it down in my head, so if it was a packet of Clubs, I'd think about the fake orange filling stuff being swilled around in a big vat, put between two flat biscuits and covered in pretend chocolate, being kept in a warehouse for weeks and weeks and weeks and then ending up in the supermarket.

It is stupid, but it works. As a teenager I worked for a week in a cake factory rolling swiss rolls and the fake cream was stored in these enormous overhead tanker things. The cake wasn't real cake, it was like sheets of foam mattress-topper chopped up. And the chocolate machine was never cleaned - it just poured the same chocolate over and over the cakes and had machine oil in it as it had so many components.

It really put me off eating those kind of shop-bought cakes so I stopped thinking of them as consumable!

'That is not food, that is not foodThat is not food, that is not food'

Yes, trainers! These are getting good - keep them coming!

I gave up chocolate and went from size 18 to size 12.

That's great trainers-will adopt that one too!