Beyond Temptation?

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.

I recently attended Sophie and Audrey Boss’s first ‘Beyond Temptation’ workshop and can recommend it 100% - it will definitely help those of you who have been working with Beyond Chocolate for a while to move up to the next level. It will also serve as a good introduction to anyone who is looking for a new way forward that takes them away from self-destructive over-eating and dieting.
Before I say anything else, I would like to thank those ladies on the course who told me they read and enjoyed my blogs – I was very humbled and pleased to know that what I write is helping other people – I write very much to help myself process things I’m learning about myself and about being a Beyond Chocolater and it’s great to know that other women find that helpful with their own practice.
I loved being on the workshop; it was a very safe space with very lovely women all speaking the Beyond Chocolate language of non-dieting and managing food and our eating in a more caring and productive way. Every woman on that course was truly inspiring, truly beautiful in her own right and I hope they all got as much out of the day as I did.
So – am I now beyond all temptation? Can I walk past a bakery without being sucked in as if by some horizontal Charybdis? Do I turn my nose up at buffets? Am I eating only salads and ‘healthy foods’? Am I getting my five-a-day? Am I exercising religiously? Do I follow all the Beyond Chocolate principles to the letter? Would you hate me if I said ‘yes’ to any or all of those?!
Because actually the answer is ‘of course not’! That’s not what I want for my life. I love bakeries, buffets and salads – I don’t want to be beyond some of them and grimly champing my way through others because they’re ‘good for me’ … after all, if nothing else, the goal-posts on what’s ‘good for us’ changes almost daily.

I want to be able to eat cake when I want cake. The difference now is that I know when I’m hungry for cake and when, actually, I really do want the freshness and crunch of a salad, or a crusty French stick, or the soothing smoothness of home-made soup, or the rich meltiness of Cadbury’s Giant Buttons.

One thing the Beyond Temptation day reminded me was of the importance of finding out about myself, my appetite, my needs and desires. If I don’t know what I want, it’s likely I’ll eat something that’s available and if it doesn’t satisfy, I’ll eat something else and something else until I’m either so stuffed I can’t possible eat any more, or until I hit something that is satisfying. Eating by trial and error is very much part of learning how to utilise the Beyond Chocolate principles in my life.
So, I will be practicing Tuning In for a while. It’s easy, cheap (!), quick and virtually undetectable. At least it will be once I can do without closing my eyes and muttering to myself … The more I Tune In, the more I will find out about myself, the more likely I am to be able to spot more exactly what I want to eat, how much and when. And when it all matches and I don’t over-eat, boy does it feel good! And that feeling acts as a spur to me to do it again and again.

So, as I said, I don’t want to be beyond all temptation, but I do want to be in control more often than not – and I also want, on occasion to dive headfirst into a very large, very sticky cake! Hooray for Beyond Chocolate!