What if you could enjoy chocolate, wine, and pizza â and still stay slim?
Forget fad diets, calorie counting, and joyless workouts. How to Be Thin in a World of Chocolate is the witty, anti-diet guide that shows you how to look and feel your best without guilt, deprivation, or willpower you don't have.
Michele Connolly, award-winning author with a background in psychology and coaching, doesnât skip food groups or spend hours at the gym. Instead, she shares 57 clever, real-life strategies that help you:
- Enjoy your favorite foods without overeating
- Outsmart cravings and emotional eating
- Add simple movement â micro-exercise that fits real life
- Stay motivated without perfectionism or guilt
- Build sustainable habits with room for dessert
If youâre tired of diets that make you miserable, this is your sane, sustainable alternative.
Life is short. Have the chocolate â and feel your best while you do.
What if you could enjoy chocolate, wine, and pizza â and still stay slim?
Forget fad diets, calorie counting, and joyless workouts. How to Be Thin in a World of Chocolate is the witty, anti-diet guide that shows you how to look and feel your best without guilt, deprivation, or willpower you don't have.
Michele Connolly, award-winning author with a background in psychology and coaching, doesnât skip food groups or spend hours at the gym. Instead, she shares 57 clever, real-life strategies that help you:
- Enjoy your favorite foods without overeating
- Outsmart cravings and emotional eating
- Add simple movement â micro-exercise that fits real life
- Stay motivated without perfectionism or guilt
- Build sustainable habits with room for dessert
If youâre tired of diets that make you miserable, this is your sane, sustainable alternative.
Life is short. Have the chocolate â and feel your best while you do.
1. Take the die out of diet
Diets make you give up things you love, which seems an excellent strategy because life is short so why be happy?
They offer diaphanous versions of food with names like Yummy Kale Surprise that are at best ironic and at worst a cruel disappointment at the end of an already tough day.
They are spruiked by health and fitness gurus who simply donât understand what itâs like to fall off the wagon due to the sheer weight of your pizza topping.
Diets are not good for those of us who would best describe our relationship with food as, âItâs complicatedâ.
Perhaps over a lifetime of comfort eating food has become mixed up with love.
Perhaps we have epicurean sensibilities and appreciate food at a different level.
Perhaps we donât know why, we just like to eat nice things. A lot.
In a way weâre over-achievers. Finishing our 28-day clean-eating challenge in a mere 5 hours and 27 minutes. Congratulating ourselves for drinking green smoothies that others would dismiss as choc-mint malted milkshakes.
For us, another approach is needed.
We need our chocolate, our wine, our pizza. We donât want to spend our lives without enjoying our pleasures.
But we also want to look good, feel good, be healthy.
For us, dieting is not the answer. The answer is not to cut out all the good stuff. Itâs to find smart and realistic ways to keep the pleasurable foods. Ways to lose weight, but keep our sanity.
Which is what the little strategies in this book are all about.
2. Be the adult instead of the parent and child
Dieting is like having an over-controlling parent. Now you shall have cabbage soup. Now you may eat twelve walnuts. Now you must eat the dish that is warm and smooth, even though you crave something cool and crunchy.
And like any small child denied their desires too long, eventually you will rebel. You will have an almighty dietary tantrum, also known as a binge.
Itâs human nature, not lack of willpower. And if you love food and want to enjoy what you feel like when you feel like it, then itâs no way to live.
Instead, you have to wake up and smell the chocolate eclair. You have to replace the controlling-parent/rebellious-child dynamic with something more balanced: a pleasure-loving, health-loving, self-caring adult.
It means becoming more conscious about your choices and also more willing to enjoy your pleasures. Which at first may feel scary. Uncharted territory.
But hereâs the cool thing about taking the dietary reins: thereâs no prescribed diet, meal plan or portioned pseudo food for you to rebel against. Thereâs nothing to denote failure, to cause guilt.
Decide to become a consciously choosing adult instead of a warring parent and child. And enjoy a happier way to live.
3. Love it or leave it
Make your choice, but believe it. (Apologies to non- Abba fans. Just joking â thereâs no such thing as a non- Abba fan.)
You may be struggling with the idea that you can be thin in a world of chocolate, cheese, wine, desserts, burgers, pizza and other calorific foods. You may be wondering if perhaps Iâm under the influence of some powerful hallucinogenic drugs. Well itâs true: you donât have to deny yourself your favorite foods, yet you can lose weight.
But you have to be honest about which foods truly are your favorites.
If you want to lose weight then you have to pick your calorie battles, saving your splurge calories for the treats that give you the most pleasure.
I call this splurging strategically, and hereâs how it works:
1. If you really love something and feel like it, then have it and enjoy it.
2. But if you could take it or leave it, always leave it.
You canât have the first part without the second. So Iâm going to say the second part again, just in case you selectively tuned it out.
If you could take it or leave it, always leave it.
As in life generally, you canât have everything, but you can have what you really want. Maybe you glance at the desert menu but none of your favorites are on it, so you opt for a small cheese plate or an espresso. Youâre offered chocolates, but theyâre meh, so you say no thanks. You feel like some ice cream but the shop doesnât have your preferred flavors, so this time you enjoy a cool mineral water with lime instead.
When you think about what you really love, and let yourself have it when you really feel like it, you become more relaxed about forgoing the less-favored choices. Decision-making becomes easier.
Over time you can save a huge number of calories by tuning in to what you could take or leave, and leaving it. Not only do you save calories, but you enjoy your most beloved treats even more, too.
4. Treat your body as if it were an exclusive club
Think of it this way: the people lining up at the club door are calories and you are the bouncer.
Itâs not that youâre a snobby bouncer. (Though whoâd give you a hard time if you were? You could crush them with your muscly pinkie.) Itâs just that you want the best for this club. Healthful calories like vegetables, fruit, quality protein, wholegrains â sure, let those guys in. They keep the club in business.
Calories that are less nutritious or come in huge gangs â you have to be more careful. A few of these guys is fine and can be a lot of fun. But you canât let them all in or the club will suffer.
Stop and think before you lift that red velvet rope on your body.
5. Never let yourself get ravenous
Some people think an excellent weight-loss strategy is to eat as little as possible. It goes something like this ...
Try to ignore hunger. Stuff down thoughts of food. Distract yourself. Oops lightheadedness! Cool, right on track.
Hold out till dinner. Youâve subsisted on a piece of dry toast, coffee and four carrot sticks.
What a legend. Youâve got this. Back in skinny jeans in no time. Hehehe ... only a little while now till dinner. Youâre gonna make it. What a star.
Okay dinner time! Sitting down and â oh God, get that food into me. Uhh a bit out of control Iâm eating this really fast itâs already gone Iâm still famished what else is there oh ice cream yeah thatâs good and a few of these Tim Tams not many left finish the packet and cheese! Look more biscuits ew stale but eat them anyway munch munch munch.
Yeah, great strategy.
If you want to be thin in a world of yumminess, then donât let yourself get ravenous.
You canât make good choices because your body wants everything.
You eat too fast and canât stop yourself until youâre overfull, stuffed!
Itâs a survival mechanism â your body is programmed to act on extreme hunger with zealous eating. Youâre not going to override that with willpower and a fervent longing to dig out your short shorts.
Better to eat when youâre hungry with enough of an appetite to enjoy your food but not so much of one that you could eat a horse, his saddle and a couple of nearby jockeys.
Speaking of hunger ...
How to Be Thin in a World of Chocolate: Without Diets, Willpower, or Guilt by Michele Connolly is a book on how to stay fit, at a right and healthy weight, slim and trimâwhile, in the authorâs own words, doing so ââŚwithout giving up what you love or forcing yourself to do what you hate.â (p. 141), so, one thatâs still friendly with your food cravings and pleasures. All this from a womanâs point of view.
The book offers tips and tricks we already know in a new light, rendering them in a language full of elegant humor, cartoons, and a highly appealing page formatting and style. So, itâs mostly a recap of the dieting, exercise, and mindset rules we already know, repackaged and presented in a light-hearted vein.
The book is very shortâ140 pages in all (excluding the introductory and concluding sections, e.g., Table of Contents, Prologue, and About the Author), of which around 10 are blank leaves, occurring between chapters. It contains three parts, one each focusing on diet, exercise, and mindset, the pillars of health and wellness. They collectively cover around 57 chapters. These 57 chapters take up the remaining 130 pages, making the average chapter length 2 1/3 pages. Allow one page for the typical two cartoons per chapter, and youâre left with just 1 1/3 pages as the actual space for the (printed) content!
To be sure, I loved reading this book. The cover conveys what's inside reasonably well, though, in my opinion, the pic of the euphoric woman on the cover gives an exaggerated impression that following the bookâs guidance will be a piece of cake. Put another way, the cover doesnât fully acknowledge the hard work involved. The judiciously chosen page style and formatting, choice of font, etc., result in nice-looking pages, making the reading a superb experience. The humor adds sparkle to it. However, the book has occasional misspellings and other language errors. It doesnât teach much thatâs new; rather, it restates whatâs already known in a witty, humorous language. Taking the positive and negative points together, I finally award it 3 stars.
I recommend this book to health and fitness aficionados everywhere, particularly women. Readers must be literate in English. Itâs recommended first for readers in the USA and next, in other developed countries. Its USP is the delight it brings while recapping health and wellness principles in its unique, polished, humorous style.