Eat chocolate every day for a year? If we must.

Scientists are investigating the effects of the flavonoids in chocolate on heart disease and are looking for 150 women to eat chocolate for a year. Seriously! For the good of humanity! Well, we knew that it was good for you, but the potential to actually fight disease with a Hershey's bar? Mind-boggling!

Given our discussion about intuitive eating and disorders yesterday, I wonder if knowing that you were going to be eating chocolate every day would somehow demystify or take away some of the illicit sense of cheating is programmed into our brains. In one anecdote in Geneen Roth's When Food Is Love, a mother is worried about her child's obsessive relationship with food and weight issues. The mom worries that the little girl would, if left to her own devices, eat nothing but M&M's. As part of an attempt to break the "naughty" connotations built over years of dieting, the mother was told to buy several pounds of M&M's and pour them into a pillowcase and let the girl carry it around with her. The security of knowing that she had an unlimited supply of chocolate that she was allowed to eat, at her whim, allowed her to eventually start hearing her stomach hunger and after nine days, the pillowcase stayed in the girl's bedroom, and then after about a month, the girl had lost six pounds.

Whenever possible, I try to honor my food impulses for the exact reason that I don't want to let them build to the state of a food fetish in my broken little noggin. And even greeting card writers know that chocolate holds a collective power over us. Would eating chocolate for a year take away some of the illicitness? Would we begin to equate it with the same lack of emotion that we view, say, our morning vitamin?

How would you feel if you were asked to each chocolate every day for a year?

The comments are heading straight to Vosges.

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