Chocoholics Anonymous

For those of you out there who, like me, are burdened with the chocolate gene, our lives are never lived in half-measures. I’m sure many fellow gourmet chocoholics out there can sympathize when I tell you that I need to eat at least some chocolate pretty much every day of my life.

I’ve already admitted in these pages that my love for dark chocolate borders on pathological. My favorite kind of chocolate? Lindt dark chocolate--either in chocolate bar form or truffles. Followed closely by anything by Ghirardelli. I’m also a huge fan of Dove dark chocolate, either in chocolate bar form or in those truly evil individually wrapped red foil squares.

Other personal favorites include Perugina, now a tiny division of Nestle. Again, I take it in dark bar form only. Lots of people like Godiva dark chocolate, but I’ve always felt it was overrated and overpriced.

Finally, I can’t leave out our favorite source of locally made dark chocolate goodies: New Jersey’s own Nagel’s Candy Barn, often staffed by Mrs. Nagel herself. There are two glorious locations--Route 10 West in Randolph, NJ and Route 23 North in Wayne, NJ.

And of course in my lowbrow moments, I’ll furtively snag a Hershey’s Special Dark from the convenience store in the lobby of the office building where I work. Special Dark is sort of my Thunderbird fortified wine, if you will. And to extend the metaphor, milk chocolate to me is the proverbial Nyquil. I’ll eat it only if I’m truly desperate and that’s all there is in the house.

The 30-Day Trial

But after the atrocious turn my eating habits took about a week or so ago (where I broke exactly 9 of my 10 strategies to avoid mindless eating), I’ve decided to attempt to swear off chocolate in all forms for one month. Perhaps I should italicize the word attempt because there is no guarantee I’ll succeed at this.

I struggled to pick an appropriate length of time. I’ve already proven to myself in the past that I can make it for a couple of days without chocolate, so it seems like going for just a week would be too easy. It wouldn’t be a real test of my mental and physical resolve.

And I just couldn't conceive of giving up chocolate for a year. Life just wouldn't be worth living on those terms.

But there is a bit of a tradition of using one month as a good test period to abstain from things, Lent being an obvious example. And the 30-day trial is starting to get some traction in many areas of the blog world these days.

So, as I’m finishing off the bar of Cadbury dark chocolate we bought last week, I’ve settled on one month. Starting today, I will go “off the chocolate” until June 5th.

It will be the longest month of my life, I’ll guarantee you that.