Not a headline you see often, but its true you can lose weight by eating chocolate. We all love chocolate, well almost everyone, but we won’t worry about those 3 people. Chocolate tastes good, and makes you feel good so eating it and being able to lose weight at the same time is a bonus.
Chocolate can be regarded as a cheat meal because it really tastes good, but its ingredients are also good for you. Now before you get all excited you need to be eating the RIGHT kind of chocolate. Dark chocolate which contains far more of the Cacao ingredient is the one you should be eating. When we talk about Cacao we mean the extract from the coco bean. This ingredient, in its raw form is pure gold. Its tastes very bitter in this form and it’s strangely not the key ingredient in a finished Nestle Bar of chocolate.
The sweet chocolate we all know and love is sweet and is made up of cocoa, cocoa butter, sugar (lots of) milk, emulsifiers and a host of other unhealthy ingredients. So this process strips out the essential poly-phenol, which is an antioxidant, or natural fat burner, making the health benefits pretty much non existent. If you are looking for a fat burner supplement then steer clear of this.
So with that science lesson over we can look at why you need to be eating the dark chocolate which is the healthy chocolate. This type of chocolate has varying percentages of cocoa and can range from 60% to 95% depending on the level of cocoa used.
The antioxidant benefits of cocoa are huge as this ingredient is full of flavoids which are similar to the ingredients in green tea, which is a very popular weight loss product. Scientific studies have identified that the most common benefits of cocoa are controlling anti-hypertensive, anti-thrombotic and your overall cardio vascular system. All these are attributed to the antioxidants all of which help lower blood pressure, and increase the good cholesterol in your body. There are more benefits but for now we can conclude that cocoa is very good for you.
Cocoa has a stimulatory effect which gives you an enhanced mood effect when eating chocolate. The caffeine ingredient is also a known fat burner ingredient, and if eating in large quantities can keep you awake.
To wrap up we need to know how to consume the chocolate in order to get the best weight loss benefits. We know it has to be dark chocolate, the darker the better for you. If you are not a big dark chocolate fan, try starting at 70% and work your way up to 85%. It can be an acquired taste and once you get use to it you may never go back to the unhealthy sweet type.
If you want you can eat the dark chocolate with some sweet fruit like strawberries or any of your favourite berries. There is a very exciting blend if you eat it while drinking red wine, you will notice they actually go well together. You could also have it with an espresso coffee, which will make your taste buds adoption of the dark chocolate less drastic.
Eat, Enjoy, Lose weight..