I enjoyed, and agree with, many of the sentiments expressed in this entertaining article.

Warning: Contains language some might find offensive.

 

Dark Chocolate Is Not Good for You, and Also Sucks.
                    by James Fell

Fuck dark chocolate.

For about a decade, the sales of dark chocolate have soared, regardless of the fact that it tastes like someone melted down a bunch of brown crayons, mixed it with charcoal and then let it solidify into bar form. Why the boost? As a senior VP from Hershey said in 2006 of the 37% spike in sales of their Special Dark, “There are underlying benefits with the consumption of cocoa that give consumers the permission to enjoy chocolate.”

Wait. “Permission to enjoy chocolate”? Just… fuck you.

When I was a kid treats were rare. Cinnamon toast was considered decadent. I remember raiding the cupboards for something sweet and finding dark chocolate and thinking jackpot! But my sister said, “Don’t bother. It says ‘chocolate,’ but it’s really not.”

Milk chocolate tastes like diabetes, which is why it’s awesome. Dark chocolate tastes like you’re being punished for only shoveling half the driveway. If someone put dark chocolate in your candy bag at Halloween it was considered a crime akin to giving you a toothbrush, and you would egg the bastard’s house, as was only right and proper.

But a while back someone came up with an idea to market health claims around dark chocolate to drive sales, and now we have scantily-clad, coconut-water drinking Crossfit junkies “treating” themselves with one or two squares of paleo-approved dark chocolate after they do their dehydrated and well-lit butt-thrusted Instagram selfies, because of antioxidants, or something. And how many cheesy health websites have written listicles about “7 Ways that Dark Chocolate Shrink Tumors/Alleviates Adrenal Fatigue/Eases PMS/Cures Ebola”? Too many. It’s almost as annoying as kale or quinoa.

One thing eating dark chocolate can’t cure is sanctimonious proselytizing.

“Oh, your dark chocolate only has 70% cacao? You poor thing. I only eat 97% cacao fair trade raw vegan organic helper monkey picked chocolate that’s been through the digestive system of a spotted African cat.”

These people exist. They love to obsess over their meager ration of dark chocolate and feel all holier than Hershey-eating thou because it’s a “healthy” treat, even though it tastes like a bag of smashed badger asses and the heaps of sugar and fat somehow don’t get factored into the health-washing. It’s not too guilty a pleasure because it’s dark. Pair it with a glass of red wine for the resveratrol and you’re bulletproof.

If you genuinely like dark chocolate, fine. Move along.

But if you’re buying into the health-washing while rationing nibbles as your reward for sticking to a soul-destroying diet, just stop. Eat a mostly healthy diet, and then when you feel like eating chocolate, eat the shit out of it. None of this “I’ll just have a square of dark chocolate now and then” bullshit. Get some fucking Turtles, or a Caramilk bar, or a Crispy Crunch, or one of those triangle shaped Toblerone things. Get a Jersey Milk and dip that sucker in the Skippy peanut butter and say, “Mmmm … G-M-Oh-my-God-that-tastes-good.” Eat your favorite chocolate, the good kind, made with tons of sugar and cream and LIVE, DAMNIT!

Pretending to like dark chocolate when you really don’t–and even worse, using it as a tool to further your orthorexia–is not living. Just like refusing to eat anything but Kerrygold unsalted grass-fed butter, it’s being elitist and having a bad relationship with food.

Moderation is not a bad word. There are no bad foods, there are just bad diets. There is nothing that should be on a banned list of foods, barring allergies or if you have some kind of runaway cravings where you really can’t stop once you’ve started on a certain thing. There was this chocolate-covered caramel-coated popcorn my wife bought from the Boy Scouts once, and I have never lost control with a treat so badly in my life. I told my wife that shit was off limits from now until I had a terminal disease, and she agreed.

(Note: If there are a number of foods that cause you to lose all control you may wish to speak with your doctor or a mental health professional.)

Focus on eating mostly healthy foods, with some worthy indulgences, and don’t be a jerk about chocolate by getting all snobby over it. Just eat the treats you want most, and don’t pretend that just because it’s dark, or claims to have antioxidants, that it’s some kind of super food.

After all, there are no super foods.

James Fell is an internationally syndicated fitness columnist for the Chicago Tribune. He interviews celebrities about their fitness stories for the Los Angeles Times and contributes to Men's Health and AskMen.com.
He blogs at Body For Wife. com

The video below is an easy way to learn more about the issue of insulin resistance or high insulin levels. The first three-fourths of the video contains information on scientific research with some interesting charts and graphs.

When considering insulin levels, it is important to remember that a high insulin level can exist within a body even without a high blood glucose level.

Below is a transcript of the final one-fourth of the 32 minute video which encapsulates “Butter Bob’s” own personal viewpoint of the solution to the fat dilemma.

“Fat, your body fat is there around your middle, because your body thinks it is in a fed state all the time. And if your insulin pattern is like these we’ve looked at, you probably are in that fed state most of the hours of the day, everyday.

There’s only one way of getting this fat off. If the body believes that fat needs to be stored and held onto because there’s plenty of food, and it does believe this if insulin remains high, then it is waiting for something.

What is it waiting for?

It’s waiting for the signal that food is not available, that’s what it’s waiting for.


What is that signal? Low insulin levels is that signal.

As soon as you give it that signal, that food is not available, it will start releasing the fat. It just will, the work of George Cahill has shown us that.

That’s why so many different diets work, any diet that restricts your calories, makes your calories really low, therefore lowing your insulin levels, is going to send that signal, because it lowers your insulin level and this sends the signal to release the fat.


The problem is sustainability, in a world where food is everywhere, it’s hard to sustain a low calorie diet. Is it impossible? No. People have done it, many people have done it.


A Low Carb – High Fat diet (the diet I used to lose 150 pounds) is a diet hack, it’s a trick. It’s an imitation of fasting, an imitation of starvation. Starvation itself is a situation where circulating fat is high and insulin is low, a LCHF diet is also a situation where circulating fat is high and insulin is low.


So what’s the trick? We are restricting carbs, and we’re keeping our protein fairly low, not low enough to make us sick, but low, because protein has an effect on insulin that is about half that of carbs. That’s right, when you eat protein, especially some low fat lean protein, you are actually raising your insulin about half as much as eating carbohydrates.


We feed our body fat for a reason, firstly, so we can have something to eat, which makes this diet sustainable. You know trying to go without food long enough to make a difference is extremely hard to do. But this way of eating allows you to eat.


This sustainable fat diet allows us to eat, which makes the diet easy and the high fat part of this diet sends the signal to the body that we’re not eating, you see it’s a trick, because if the body has a lot of fat circulating around inside, fat from the diet, the body thinks it’s in starvation mode already, because if it was actually going without food, the body itself would be releasing fat.


So if we eat fat, when we do eat, it’s sending the SAME signal that the body would get if it was actually going without food.


Fat is also the food with the LEAST effect on Insulin, so insulin is kept low by the fatty food and the very fact that fat is in the system at a higher level, and insulin is low, sends the body the signal that it’s not eating.


To the body, it’s all the same, if you are actually starving, insulin is low and the body is releasing fat from your belly, so the levels of circulating fat are higher.

Eating a LCHF meal in essence tricks the body into believing that food is scarce because insulin is low and there’s fat in the system.


So this LCHF diet trick makes this diet sustainable, because we can eat during eating times, and here’s the trick, you need to find a way to not eat and this is the way.

This is the way to not eat, because when we eat a high fat, low carb and a very moderate protein diet, it kills our appetite.

BTW, even George Cahill tells us in his work that you only need about 15% of your calories as protein. These people telling you that if you eat fat it will prevent you from losing body fat are just plain wrong. Fat controls the appetite because it controls insulin, but protein has half the effect on insulin as carbs. And therefore, if the appetite is controlled by the relatively small amount of fat we are eating – calorie wise, then we can go long periods without food, because our body will make up the difference by releasing our stored fat from our belly.

When I say eat a high fat diet, I’m not talking about a high calorie diet. I’m not talking about eating sticks of butter. I’m talking about eating a high percentage of the lower calorie diet that you will be eating as fat. A high fat percentage meal or two, not a high calorie diet. And you don’t have to worry about your calories that much, just eat low-carb, high fat, moderate protein until satisfied, then listen to the appetite control that diet will give you and don’t eat when not hungry. You’ll end up eating a lower calorie diet without effort.

Now listen, this is the trick, not eating and fasting, intermittently fasting. Going without food is what the body has been waiting for, it is the signal that tells it to get rid of the fat.

Because looking for a time when we’re not eating is the whole reason it stored fat in the first place.

This fat that’s around your belly and your butt and chinny chin chins is there and it’s been there waiting for you to NOT EAT. And this diet makes it simple to NOT EAT.


You are fat because you’ve been trying to live off the food you take in, instead of the food you’ve already stored on your body.


In the FED state, this higher and longer lasting insulin level has locked up a huge amount, a big fat bank account of fat and the only way to make a withdrawal on that fat bank account is to stop eating and get the insulin down.


And being able to do that on a regular basis, being able to do that for months, many even for a couple of years, because some of you are so fat it will take a LOT of withdrawals on your big fat bank account before you spend all that extra fat for energy. It took me 14 months to withdraw a hundred and forty five pounds.


A sustainable long term plan of intermittently NOT EATING.


You can only be in one of two states, FED or FASTED.
 Fed doesn’t mean, “I just ate but an hour later I’m fasted”, no, it takes time to transition from the fed state to the fasted state. As we’ve seen from the work of Dr. Joseph Kraft, for some of you, it will take several hours to get into this fasted state. And that means not eating.


The good news is THIS DIET, this LCHF diet makes not eating easy, because FAT controls your appetite. No will power required.


So to be in a fasted state, means you’ve lowered your insulin levels down low, you’ve kept it there for hours and hours on end.


We do this with a high fat diet, that’s what we do, this is a trick.


If you don’t like this high fat diet, go and do a LOW calorie diet, if you can sustain it, have at it. But, it’ll probably be hard for you, you won’t control your appetite as easy as the high fat diet controls your appetite.

But if you go on this LCHF diet, You’ll find yourself going for hours and hours without eating, naturally and without effort, because you’ll be living off your big fat bank account of energy. You’ll be making constant withdrawals on that account and you’ll soon see your pants are falling off.

Because if there’s only two states of either fed or fasted, once we lower the insulin level, that’s one of the signs to the body that we’re not eating. Once our appetite is gone, we actually won’t be eating.

So we eat a high fat meal, it tricks the body into believing that we’re already in a fasted state, it gives us something to eat too, so it makes this diet more sustainable, then we use the actual appetite control to not eat for 12, 14, 15, 16, maybe even 24 hours in between meals. I know for some of you that sounds like B.S., but believe me, this diet makes going without food easy. It’s easy because you’ll be living off your fat savings account.”