Beyond Chocolate Mistake Number 10 – Thinking We’ve Got ‘It’ Sussed

Gretel Hallet, is a Trained Chocolate Fairy and is running the Getting Started half day workshop in Norwich - perfect for beginners to experience the core principles of Beyond Chocolate and equally great as a refresher for any Beyond Chocolater. If you live in East Anglia and want to know more about Beyond Chocolate or her workshops, get in touch with Gretel.

Are you familiar with that moment when you’ve been doing something for a while and it feels comfortable and you feel you know what you’re doing? And then maybe you take our eye of the ball a bit and let it go onto auto-pilot ... like driving to work and realising you don’t actually remember turning left at those lights, but you’re here, so you must have done...

These moments can be a bit of a wake-up call for us – maybe it’s time to focus on the road ahead rather than creating shopping lists or ‘To Do’ lists in our heads as we drive. This can happen with Beyond Chocolate too, I suspect.

There may well come a moment in the seasoned Beyond Chocolater’s life when she begins to think, ‘Yup, I’ve got this sussed. I know how to ‘do’ this Beyond Chocolate thing; I can relax and head for the buffet!’

It’s a kind of reverse rebellion – instead of deliberately sabotaging ourselves because our inner rebel has raised its non-conformist head; we sabotage ourselves because we think we have nothing left to learn about our eating and our body.

I know that Sophie and Audrey would say that no matter how many years down the line, there is always still something left to learn, something to discover, something to work on. I don’t mean that to sound depressing – I mean it to show that thinking we can just stop and that everything will fall into place and stay right there, is probably unrealistic (and could be the work of a Gremlin).

Those of you that have dieted over and over again may well relate to the feeling of despair that gripped me each time I started a new diet – gone was the initial enthusiasm of my very first few diets – then I believed, now I know, I was going round in circles. The ennui that stared me in the face as I struggled to get to grips with another set of rules about what I could/n’t eat, when, how much, etc. Until, finally, I reached a point of no return – there really was no return to dieting, there HAD to be another way.

And so began my Beyond Chocolate exploration and what a ride it’s been!

After 3 exciting years, I found recently that I was ‘slipping’, not tuning in, eating because it was 11am and I always have a cup of tea and a biscuit at that time, and I actually ate sweets until I felt sick last night for the first time in ages .... why? One reason may be that I was working and associated that particular type of work with sweets. What have retained is my ability to recognise what it is I am doing (even if rather retrospectively), and I did wonder whether I had just come across Beyond Chocolate Mistake Number 10 all by myself.

I have been working with Beyond Chocolate since I bought the book from Amazon in September 2007. So it will be 4 years this coming September. In those four years I’ve trained as a Chocolate Fairy and run workshops helping other women to emerge into the clear light of a Beyond Chocolate life – and I wonder if I’ve become just a teensy bit complacent? I wonder if I’ve been cruising along a bit, not actually working on and with the principles actively for myself.

And so I bring Mistake Number 10 to your attention just in case there’s anyone else out there in the same position as me. Today I made a conscious decision to Tune In at 11am and, no, I wasn’t hungry. I was thirsty, so I had my cup of tea and monitored my hunger levels until I knew I was hungry, when I ate just enough to be satisfied and then sat with the mental dissatisfaction of not eating biscuits until it passed ... I think that ‘practice what you preach’ needs to be my motto for a little while now!