Should I stop eating bread?

When I was a child, I would listen to my mother and aunt spend hours comparing notes on awful they felt when they ate this or that. My mother did terribly on green beans and just couldn't eat bread without bloating like a balloon whilst my aunt reported migraines with cheese and terrible side effects from onions. 

As a child who had a stomach of steel and could eat an entire sweet shop without suffering any of the dire predictions regarding tummy aches, I couldn't -  for the life of me - understand what they were going on about. I just could not compute the idea that eating certain foods could make you feel unwell.

As a teenager and young adult I would roll my eyes and shake my head with scorn when I heard them go on about what they could and couldn't eat. When I heard about sleepless nights blamed on cheesecake and painful bloating pinned on onion soup, I would shrug my shoulders, and happily take another bite of donut thinking  that old people were, well just a bit pathetic, really. 

And then suddenly one morning I was one of those old people. 

Over the past few years I have noticed that - to my dismay - I really don't do very well on certain foods.

I love lentils and when I eat them I bloat horribly and get trapped wind. It's painful and very uncomfortable.

I adore garlic and nowadays if I eat it in more than homeopathic quantities I get awful headaches, nausea and, when eaten raw, diarrhoea. 

I am a fan of fruit, especially summer fruits: peaches, apricots, figs but when I eat them my belly swells and I feel pregnant.

I am very partial to crusty yet chewy sourdough bread but sadly when I have it I feel just awful: I bloat, feel a bit sick and usually want to lie down and sleep it off.

So does this mean I must cut out bread and pulses, fruit and garlic? No more garlicky, winey lentils with crunchy bacon bits? No more roasted garlic bruschettas? Bye bye summer fruit pavolva? Adieu bread - forever? 

I did for a while think that this would be the only solution. I reasoned that if I just cut out the foods that don't agree with me, I would solve the problem. What I forgot was that deprivation, under any guise, fuels cravings and overeating. As soon as I told myself I would forgo bread I found myself baking ciabattas like they were going out of fashion and eating 3 bagels for lunch. I  found myself eating sweets instead of fruit, just to taste something sweet. After years of having a balanced and 'take it or leave it' approach to food I suddenly found myself in diet mentality all over again: starting 'properly' on Monday, vowing to stay away from this or that food, having lots of last suppers to cleanse my kitchen cupboards of the culprits, rebelling and telling myself this was all a load of crap and NO-ONE (not even myself) was going to tell me what I could and couldn't eat and so on and so forth....

Luckily I know better. I went back to basics and to being my own guru. I became curious, I asked myself questions: how much of these foods did it take to make me feel unwell? Did eating them at particular times make any difference?  Did I need to cut them out entirely or was there a way to keep on eating them without paying with my health? Was I willing to face life without garlic and how did it feel to ban bread from my diet? I experimented and made notes and slowly began to untangle myself from the all or nothing mentality that I got caught up in. 

So, will I be cutting out carbs and all the other foods I love but feel terrible when I eat? Here's what I discovered... 

Lentils are defiantly a no-no. I do love them but not enough to suffer the side effects and not eating them does not drive me into binge mode. I can live without lentils. Arriverderci lentils.

Garlic is a tricky one. It's not just that garlic is delicious to eat, it makes such a difference to the flavour of so many dishes. So after much trial and error I have arrived at the following conclusion. I am not willing to eat raw garlic, however much I love the dishes it comes in. It's just not worth the pain and discomfort. However, I can cook with it in small quantities and have recently found the magic solution: garlic infused oil. Thanks to this wonderful invention, I can get the perfume of garlic in my cooking without actually having to eat any!

Fruit, I have discovered, is fine as long as I eat it on an empty stomach. It seems that when I eat fruit with other food it all ferments in my stomach and that's what causes the distress. So goodbye fruit puddings and hello fruit salad for breakfast!

Bread, is a tricky one. What I've found out by trial and error is that the problem is caused by yeast, especially fresh yeast. So it's not just bread, it's all types of yeasted carbs. And it seems that the more I eat, the worse the symptoms get. I can eat a slice of bread or a croissant but 2 isn't great and more than that for more than one day in a row makes me feel generally yuck. The thing is it's not like the lentils which have a really massive effect or like the garlic with which I feel very ill. No, with the bread and yeasty stuff it's a general bloaty, sluggish, lack of energy feeling which I can - and do - live with. It doesn't keep me at home within reach of the toilet or in bed with a sick bowl. It doesn't disrupt my life. I just don't feel as well when I have a lot. And I'm just not willing to cut bread and baked goods out. So I'm still debating this one, still experimenting with how much I can get away with. Nowadays I make sure I only eat really fantastic bread and truly delicious baked goods. I savour each bite, enjoy it and make it last rather than wolfing it down in a couple of mouthfuls. I am going for quality rather than quantity. 

My experiments have given me useful information with which I can make informed decisions. I now feel I have a choice about what I eat. And choice is so powerful. It means that when I go for the egg salad instead of the egg sandwich I am making a choice. A choice to look after myself. A choice to care for my health. And this feels very different from the self imposed depravation that I started out with. It feels kind and respectful. It feels good.

This is what I love about the work we do at Beyond Chocolate - it's all about empowering women to make choices that feel good, good about what we eat and good about our bodies.

Oh, and it touches so many other parts of our lives too. After all these years I feel I owe my mother a public apology for being so dismissive and intolerant. Sorry Mum!

Beyond Chocolate ‘Mistake’ Number 9 – thinking we can diet AND do Beyond Chocolate

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.




Ok, so maybe it’s not a mistake, but it may well be a delusion. Imagine someone who had been a fervent believer in a religion for many years, suddenly deciding they didn’t believe any more, but they carry on with all their religious observances, just in case. A ‘saved’ dieter who continues dieting while starting to work with the Beyond Chocolate principles, is someone who is hedging their bets and will possibly end up not ‘doing’ either ‘properly’.


I can see the attraction, though. It may be that someone has been dieting for many many years. Dieting is familiar territory; it feels ‘safe’ and ‘known’. Dieters know exactly what to expect; they sign up, they buy the books, special food and equipment, they tell friends and relations so that their food can be ‘policed’ and keep them being ‘good’, they make charts to plot the progress of their weight loss, they go to clubs with lots of other women in the same boat as them, to be weighed and praised (or condoled) and they talk the same language as all the other women out there on diets. Constantly.


Beyond Chocolaters venture out into completely new territory. There aren’t that many other Beyond Chocolaters out there in comparison with the major diet companies. There’s nothing to buy apart from the book. No 'special food' (just the rather bewildering concept of being able to choose from ALL foods!), no gadgets. Beyond Chocolaters may find it tricky to talk openly about what they’re doing because there’s no shared vocabulary with the majority of other women. And, if they’ve come to Beyond Chocolate from many years of dieting, there may well be re-education to be undertaken with near and dear ones who think they are helping by ‘policing’ all food and drink. Charts may help, but are not a requirement. Weight loss can take a back seat to some of the other benefits of Beyond Chocolate and the Beyond Chocolater can find that her relationship with food and her own body takes over from the initial desire to lose weight.


All of this can be isolating to the new Beyond Chocolater. A changing relationship with food and her body can (in some cases) result in weight gain and this can further alienate the new Beyond Chocolater from her former dieting buddies – not only has she dropped out of the choir, but LOOK! IT DOESN’T WORK! SHE’S GAINED WEIGHT!! And this can lead the new Beyond Chocolater to think, ‘Ok, I know I can lose weight on a diet, and I do understand and believe in the Beyond Chocolate principles, so if I combine the two, I’ll lose weight AND improve my relationship with food and my body.’


And maybe she can. I personally can’t see how the two can be compatible. But that’s just me. One of the beauties of Beyond Chocolate is that everyone gets to make their own choices – if it works for you, keep doing it. But, at some point, I suspect, you will reach a point at which a firm decision will be needed – do you continue dieting or do you commit to working with the Beyond Chocolate principles? I'd be curious to hear from anyone who can do both.

When dieting works

A good friend of mine in Italy swears by dieting. For years, she has been successfully controlling her weight in the same way: about twice a year - usually in January and then again in July she puts herself on a controlled eating and exercising regime that lasts a month or so and she gets the results she wants. She's perfectly fine with this method and it causes her no great distress. Observing her over the years, I have come to the conclusion that, for some women, dieting really does work.


We often talk about our different approaches to weight-loss - I think we are mutually fascinated by each other's take on it. Sara's is quite straightforward: at certain times in the year, mainly Christmas and in deepest, darkest winter, she tends to sit around on the sofa eating too much and as a result she puts on a some weight. Her clothes feel tight and she feels sluggish and uncomfortable in her body. Her tried and tested solution is to cut down on sugar, refined carbs and processed foods and alcohol for a certain period whilst working out at the gym at least 3 times a week. Within 4 or 5 weeks, she has shed the extra pounds, has gone down a dress size and is back to 'feeling like herself', as she puts it.


When I ask her how she feels when she's on her diet and how she motivates herself to stick to it she says: "Well it is a little boring, I do sometimes crave chocolate and I don't always fancy going to the gym but I remind myself that it's not forever and that I really will feel better when I lose the weight. I know that I feel uncomfortable in a bikini if I'm feeling 'fat' and I hate the muffin top I get when I put my jeans on after all that eating at Christmas. It's no big deal, really. I've been doing it for years. It works."


"But don't you go off rails once you've reached your target weight. Don't you have the urge to make up for the deprivation and stuff yourself with all the stuff you haven't had for ages?" I ask. "Uhhh...no. I don't really see it as depriving myself - more like I'm doing myself a favour," she replies "in fact, I tend to carry on making healthier choices for a while after I've come off the diet. I find I eat less crap and move more. It's like it gets me going - until Christmas comes round again and then I just think, 'oh what the heck' and dive in!"


Several things strike me when I speak to Sara about her approach to weight management. The first one is that she has a relatively simple relationship with food. She likes it, she sometimes has too much of it but ultimately - food is just food. Although she's not what would commonly be defined as an 'intuitive eater' - she does tend to label foods as good and bad, she does manage her weight with deprivation - somehow, she has that 'take it or leave' attitude that is common to intuitive eaters. She doesn't have that tortured, out of control relationship that is common to so many Beyond Chocolaters. The other thing that stands out for me is how kind she is to herself. Sara views her dieting as something positive that she is doing for herself. As she puts it, she sees it as 'doing herself a favour'. On the flip side of that, I've never heard Sara berate herself for overeating or about her body. She'll say things like: "I really stuffed myself at Christmas, I practically lived on panettone! And look where it's all ended up!" as she grabs a roll of fat around her middle, "It's time for a little self restraint ladies. Salad bar and gym - here I come!" There's humour and kindness there - something which I rarely hear coming from Beyond Chocolate newbies.


So where is all this leading? Well nowhere special except to say that there will always be people who will diet successfully. People like Sara who don't understand what all the fuss is about and who really do live successfully by the 'east less, move more' mantra.


And then there will always be people like us. Women for whom chocolate has never been just a 'naughty indulgence' but the friend and the enemy. Women who feel guilty whatever they eat and ashamed by the way they look, whatever their size. Women who feel despair when they are on a diet...and despair when they come off it. Women who go on diet after diet after diet and just end up getting fatter and fatter and fatter. Women who feel out of control, weak and hopeless whenever they think about food. For these women, Sara's approach to weight-loss will never work. It will only make things worse. 


For us, dieting will never be the solution. It's not a simple equation. It's about working on our relationship with food and our bodies. It's about changing what, but also why and how we eat. It's about finding ways of dealing with life in ways that don't always involve food. It's about self esteem, it's about love, it's about patience and kindness and acceptance. It's about awareness. It's about not comparing ourselves with the 'happy' dieters like Sara and wondering why we can't do it that way. It's about support and community and talking with others who understand. It's taking one day at a time, taking one small action that brings us closer to a life Beyond Chocolate. 

Beyond Chocolate ‘mistake’ number 6 – thinking that we are ‘above all that dieting stuff and don’t need to make any effort any more’

Gretel Hallet, is a trained Chocolate Fairy and is running the Getting Started half day workshop in Norwich. If you live in East Anglia and want to know more about Beyond Chocolate, get in touch with Gretel. 


Thank you again to Truffle35 for reminding me of this (remarkably subtle) ‘mistake’, which is probably the outcome of a hostile Gremlin (for those unfamiliar with the term – a ‘Gremlin’ is our own internal saboteur(se) that tells us we’re not thin enough, pretty enough, successful enough etc and that we’re doing it all wrong and that we’ll never do anything right etc etc) ...


In her comment to my first blog post in this series Truffle35 said, “The great news, though, is that I don't have to think about what I'm going to eat at breakfast, lunch and dinner as soon as I wake up, I don’t have to remind myself how little that will have to be, I don’t have to wonder what I'm going to do if/when I'm hungry but am ‘not allowed’ to eat etc. The effort I have to make, though huge, ‘only’ involves three things: being aware of my gremlins and shoeing them away, being aware of why I’m eating and how, in order to stop when I’ve had enough, and thirdly, actually STOPPING when I have had enough! This is the key, but I can’t do it without the first two being in place. (At least not a lot of the time…)”


You’ll notice that Truffle35 has spotted the Gremlin’s interference there – and it may be that we don’t notice that little voice in our heads at first. It’s very sneaky and this time it’s saying, ‘Oh now that you’re not dieting, you don’t need to bother about anything, you can just eat whatever you like and as much as you like!’ And it is a great relief, as Truffle35 says, not to have the day’s food eked out by the latest diet, or force ourselves to eat huge bowls of free (undressed) pasta or salads because they’re ‘allowed’.


But the bad news box on this liberation contains the words, ‘you do have to work at Beyond Chocolate too’. That may seem obvious, but it is surprising how many new Beyond Chocolaters think that stopping dieting means not having to make any kind of effort around food any more forever. And, of course, it’s not that simple – very little in life is, I find.


So, if you have reached the point beyond the dieting and bingeing where you are thinking, ‘This isn’t working,’ it may be because you’re not actually working at it either. It’s a two way street – you work at your relationship with food via Beyond Chocolate, which starts helping you with your relationship with food and your body. The results can be subtle or dramatic, slow or roller-coaster fast, comforting or invigorating – but trust me, there are results.


In Truffle35’s words, ‘It is hard work but this is liberating, whereas dieting is like an imprisonment.’

Beyond Chocolate ‘mistake’ number 5 – Just Not Dieting

Gretel Hallet, is a trained Chocolate Fairy and is running the Getting Started half day workshop in Norwich. If you live in East Anglia and want to know more about Beyond Chocolate, get in touch with Gretel. 

In response to my first blog post in the Beyond Chocolate ‘mistakes’ series, Truffle 35 said...


“I have realised I've been making a HUGE mistake. I've been expecting not to have to work very hard (at all?!) on the 'listen to your body/satiety levels' front. I thought that by just eating what I fancied, I would stop when I had enough. Not so. It takes a LOT of awareness and courage and, therefore, mental energy to stop. I thought stopping, even just pausing, would be easy, and worse, would not be necessary. How wrong I was. I've learned this lesson the hard way - I've put on a few pounds/my trousers don't fit so well (I haven't weighed myself for a year).”


Certainly, I agree with Truffle35 – this is another ‘mistake’ that ex-dieters can make. Once we’ve made the decision to stop dieting, it can be difficult to accept that, if we want to work with Beyond Chocolate, it’s not going to be a piece of cake (deliberate pun!). In fact, it may take many many pieces of cake before we realise that we’re not actually working with Beyond Chocolate at all – we’re just not dieting. We may think, as Truffle35 did, that our bodies will know what they’re doing and we will stop eating automatically when we reach ‘full’ and/or ‘satisfied’. But why should we? If we remember the diets we’ve been on – what in those diets would lead us to believe that our bodies will be anything other than confused by this sudden freedom?


For example, I spent 2 years of my life never allowing myself to become hungry – my diet guru at the time warned me that to do so would lead inevitably to uncontrolled eating and that the only way to avoid that would be to eat every 2 hours regardless of whether I was hungry or not. So, when I stopped listening to that diet guru, I no longer knew what it felt like to be hungry. And, if I didn’t know how it felt to be hungry, how would I know when I had satisfied that hunger?


Beyond Chocolate has taught me how to really listen to my body, to respond to genuine hunger and to recognise when I’ve ‘hit the spot’ as regards satiety and/or satisfaction. I am able to recognise subtle gradations of hunger from a realisation that it’s been a while since I last ate, right up to ‘get out of my way, I’ve got to eat NOW!’. I know that letting myself get that hungry is likely to lead to panic induced over-eating, so I choose to eat at an earlier stage and am then able to spot the (often very small) signs that I’ve had enough.


I remember watching an intuitive eater once who pushed her plate away and said, ‘I’ve had an elegant sufficiency, thank you!’ and that’s how I like to feel at the end of a meal or snack – energised and ready for the next thing I have to do, not weighed down and sluggish because I’ve over-eaten.


So the question is, are you just not dieting, or are you really working with the Beyond Chocolate principles?

Beyond Chocolate 'mistake' number two - worrying about 'falling off the wagon'.

Gretel Hallet, is a trained Chocolate Fairy and is running the Getting Started half day workshop in Norwich. If you live in East Anglia and want to know more about Beyond Chocolate, get in touch with Gretel. 


Dieting necessitates will-power. The serious dieter knows she has to stick to the diet to the letter in order to achieve the weight loss promised. This, as many of us know, isn’t as easy as it sounds. Life has a habit of throwing curve balls at the serious dieter – a sudden Wedding, or being invited to dinner or an outbreak of cream cakes at work. On occasions like these, the dieter can choose either to enter monastic solitude in order to avoid temptation, or throw herself off the wagon with abandon. This can then lead to a full scale binge as the (now ex) dieter thinks, ‘Oh well, I’ve blown it now, I may as well eat what I like. I’ll start again on Monday and this time I’ll stick to it.’


And so when we reach the point where we have decided NEVER to diet again, and have found Beyond Chocolate, we may bring with us all the fears and language of the serial dieter.


Worrying about ‘falling off the wagon’ often occurs around those binge times, when all the principles seem to have gone to the four winds and we find ourselves again at the bottom of a biscuit barrel (or 12 pack of crisps or whatever is your binge food of choice). As the wonderful ladies on the Forum will tell you, there’s no wagon to fall off any more. Every binge, every eating opportunity is another learning opportunity. We can observe ourselves with curiosity and compassion instead of beating ourselves up verbally or mentally. We can decide if we want to carry on eating like this or not. We can decide what we do next. Personally I shrug my shoulders and move on – it happened, sometimes I know why, sometimes I don’t ... either way, it’s been a valuable experience for me. It’s another success – at least now I know I’m bingeing!


Knowledge is power – knowing what I’m doing gives me the choice to continue or stop and do something else. I have found over the last couple of years that my binges have reduced in quantity and volume to the point where someone else might not consider them binges at all. Eventually I suspect they will stop all together, but for now I’m working with what happens as it happens, and I’m very glad to be totally ‘off the diet wagon’ forever.

Dieting 'mistakes' and a little tough love

The helpful advice on the internet is now focusing on ‘Your Dieting Mistakes’. These include; missing meals, skipping carbs, eating less, not exercising, ‘all or nothing’ mentality, keeping ‘forbidden foods’ in the house and not avoiding ‘traps’ like cake shops on the way to work ...


I personally think that the first big mistake is to go on a diet! And I’m delighted that none of this is relevant to me any more (apart from the exercise bit, but that’s another blog!), but I know from personal experience and also from the conversations on the Beyond Chocolate Forum, that some of the same issues arise for many of us as we work with the principles. So over the next couple of blog posts, I’ll have a look at some of the more common Beyond Chocolate ‘Mistakes’, and what we can do about them instead ... stand by for some Tough Love!


Mistake number one: Assuming that it’s not going to work.
Let’s face it; Beyond Chocolate is a pretty revolutionary idea. For the last 40 odd years women have looked in one direction only for how to manage their eating – the diet industry has had a field day. It’s become almost expected for women to start a diet before weddings (their own and other people’s), in time for ‘bikini season’, before and after major events that involve a lot of eating (Easter and Christmas), and sometimes just because a friend wants to do a diet and has asked for support.


There is a growing movement in the States and over here that is challenging the notion that dieting is the best way to manage over-eating and/or lose weight etc and Beyond Chocolate is in the vanguard of that movement. However, it will take time to change attitudes and stop women from turning instantly to dieting, rather than investigating the alternatives.


Almost no-one (apart from Beyond Chocolaters!) will start a diet assuming it’s not going to work, so why begin Beyond Chocolate assuming it won’t work? Perhaps having a clearer idea of what you want from Beyond Chocolate at the outset might help with that feeling that ‘it’s not working because I haven’t lost weight.’ Why not turn it around and say, ‘It is working because ...’ and look at your successes rather than your perceived ‘failures’. For example, do you sometimes eat when you are hungry instead of always at meal times? Do you respond to your body’s request for a particular food? Do you buy clothes you like regardless of the size on the label? Do you exercise because you enjoy it rather than because it might help you lose weight? All of these are successes and can be celebrated.


Of course, at the end of the day, if what you really want is to lose weight, you may have to be prepared to either work consistently with the principles and/or wait while your body processes this new change in your eating habits. Remember how long it took you to reach this point – how long you’ve been dieting/bingeing – it could well take time to turn it around again. Diets promise dramatic weight loss in less and less time – Beyond Chocolate offers a way to completely free us from yo-yo dieting hell, and I personally am prepared to wait for as long as it takes.