The Chocolate Diet

Eating chocolates to lose weight is the dream of most dieters. If you are overweight, you can consider melting the fats in your body by including chocolate in your daily diet. Chocolate diet is considered a fad diet by some health experts. Nonetheless, numerous obese and overweight individuals have indeed managed to lose weight with the help of this diet. According to the supporters of the chocolate diet, a morbidly obese person could lose almost 200 pounds within 16 months by eating six slabs of rich dark chocolate daily. Low calorie diets that eliminate chocolates from the daily diet often leave the dieter dissatisfied. Excessive sweet craving often prevents dieters to sustain their weight loss diet for a prolonged period. The chocolate diet recommends inclusion of a small amount of chocolate in the daily diet to satisfy the sugar craving of the dieter. Dieters following the chocolate diet are not tempted to abandon their healthy diet plan. Moreover, supporters of this diet plan claim that chocolate diet could heal chocolate addiction. According to Sally Ann Voak, a successful British diet author, chocoholics could be divided into six categories. Secret bingers eat chocolates secretly. 

Romantics consider chocolates as an alternative to emotional and physical affection. Chocolate serves as a comfort food of depressed or stresses individuals. Sugar addicts address their sugar craving with chocolates. Weekend indulgers overeat chocolates on weekends or for celebrations. Women often overindulge in chocolates for treating emotional distress before periods. At the beginning of the chocolate diet, dieters should avoid chocolates for a week. According to the supporters of this diet plan, this helps the dieters to control their chocolate addiction. The normal daily diet of dieters should comprise of low calorie vegetables, low fat milk and herbal tea. Dieters should snack with chocolates daily. The rich dark chocolate should provide between 50 and 300 calories per day. On the first week of the chocolate diet, the dieter should follow a 1000 calories diet per day. From the second week, the total calorie intake of the dieter should be between 1200 and 1500 calories per day. To facilitate weight loss, dieters should combine the chocolate diet with regular activities like brisk walking, swimming and yoga. You can find out more info here: http://www.weightshapes.com/calorie-diet/

Christian Lander

It would be easy on the one hand to consider McCandless a self absorbed jerk. In fact, so many of his ideals have been perfectly satirised by Christian Lander at Stuff white people like, especially Making you feel bad about not going outside, Hating their parents, Being offended and Taking a year off. It does seem to me that McCandless was experiencing a kind of extended adolescence, needing to be different, railing against conformity and searching for meaning, but only within the boundaries he feels safe in. There's a real irony to the fact that the very society he so despised both provided him with the economic freedom to pursue his ideology in the first place, and provided the kind of organised safety net with which to fling himself upon the world. Had he been raised in poverty, had he had to fight hard for his place in University, he might have found his education a blessing, not a curse. If he really wanted to go off into an alternate way of living, he could have taken himself off to any non-democratic, third world country and burnt his remaining money there. Some of the things he wrote to his sister about their parents show a great misunderstanding of his importance to them and how his actions affected them, and disregard for their feelings. But, it can't be that he was simply an arrogant and misguided young man. As Krakauer says McCandless made an indelible impression on a number of people during the course of his hegira, most of whom spent only a few days in his company, a week or two at most. And many of his writings and letters to his friends reveal a passionate mind, full of the joy of living, discovery and most of all adventure. This book is a really interesting read into the psychology of freedom, and I highly recommend it.

Into The Wild

Chris McCandless, a young man from a well to do family, hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness. He had given all his savings to charity, abandoned his car and possessions, burnt all the money in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a hunter. Jon Krakauer, bestselling author of Into Thin Air, uses McCandless' restless progress around the wide spaces of North America to explore the call of the wild and the mentality of those who succumb to it. What emerges from this mesmerising, heartbreaking story is a version of the wilderness that is hard and seductive, a place where one can quite possibly find one's self, but also opening the dark possibility that we might find our own nature strange and disturbing. As a general rule, I don't read non-fiction, it's just not my kind of thing and I usually end up feeling pretty bored by it. There are some occasions where my interest is piqued enough that I want to know more about something, and that was the case with this book. I had seen the film, Into the Wild which I really loved, but couldn't really make up my mind how I felt about Chris McCandless. In the author's note at the beginning of the book...

Jon Krakauer says that his original article about his death generated an enormous amount of mail, with people falling into two camps: some readers admired the boy immensely for his courage and noble ideals, others fulminated that he was a reckless idiot, a wacko, a narcissist who perished out of arrogance and stupidity. This is what I couldn't make my mind up about, and I decided to read the book to try to find out more. The book opens with the account of the man who drove McCandless to the place where he began his trek into the wilds of Alaska, and follows with the story of the hunters who found his body in the bus where he had made camp. The book contains the information Krakauer discovered about McCandless' life before leaving his family and the two years he spent wandering around all over America. Interspersed is stories of other wanderers, and a depiction of his own wilderness adventure as a young man. All of this information paints the picture of a young man who had not found his place in the world, was confused and had a restless and passionate spirit who was looking for some semblance of truth in a world he couldn't understand. To be continued...