How to be a chocoholic and lose four pounds during Easter

If you visited this page looking for a great tip on how to lose weight over a holiday weekend, like I did this Easter, unfortunately this article is not really about a diet program. It is more about a sad chocoholic who wanted to enjoy some Easter chocolate, but instead came down with the worst sore throat of her life.  Swallowing water was painful, let alone eating any chocolaty Easter treats. Feel free to look at my diet below...but I do not recommend it!

So now I am on day six of the terrible sore throat (which also moved my ears somehow) and I find myself staring longingly at the pile of Easter weekend chocolate. So this morning once my painkillers kicked in, I thought I would take a tiny piece of each item and find out what they tasted like, just to satisfy my curiosity.  So here are the chocolates that I did not eat on Easter:

Hammond's Sea Side Caramel bar is a 64 gram dark chocolate bar with a soft caramel centre and sea salt. The texture was nice, the ingredients were natural and the combination overall was tasty. The company that makes it, Hammond's Candies, comes from Denver, Colorado.  This particular bar was purchased at Chapters.

Milk Chocolate Salted Caramels by IndigoSweets (TM) was a beautiful box of milk chocolate covered caramels sprinkled with chunky sea salt.  They tasted great, and like Hammond's, the ingredients were real and natural (i.e. no artificial flavours or hydrogenated oils). This was made in the U.S. for Indigo Books & Music in Toronto (www.indigo.ca). It was also purchased at a Chapters (Indigo) store.


Kilwins New York Espresso Mix is a product that my mother brought back from Sarasota Florida for me.  With every piece containing an espresso bean, this chocolate product has a little something for every kind of chocolate lover: white, milk, dark and candy coated. One type had even been coated in all three types of chocolate.  It was a nice gift - I can't wait until I can eat something crunchy again!  https://www.kilwins.com/

The Ferrero Rocher Bunny is very cool.  I was trying to figure out how they would fit all the stuff that is in the original Ferrero Rocher chocolate into a medium-sized 'bunny', but it turned out to be a hollow bunny and the hazelnuts were chopped small and mixed into the milk chocolate shell. 
I was a little sad not to find any Nutella-like hazelnut cream and a ball of crunchy wafer in the bunny, but I think hazelnut mixed into a bunny shell is a new and interesting concept. At least it is different than most of those standard hollow bunnies on the market!

The Russell Stover Dark Chocolate Egg said "cream egg" on it but had a dark soft caramel texture inside it.  I am no longer a fan of the cream centre of most eggs, but I actually liked this.

My own birthday cake is the one I am most sad about. Since my birthday fell on Good Friday this year, and I had no real plans, I decided to make myself a large triple-dark-chocolate cheesecake with coconut sugar instead of cane sugar and 71% dark chocolate chips, and a semi-sweet ganache for a little sweetness.  Too me, it was wonderful.  I had a few bites of one piece before the sore throat came on, and besides a few other people taking the extreme dark adventure with me, the cake has been sitting there ever since.  I know it is time to throw it out, but I just cannot bare to do it.

So that's it for my Easter weekend chocolate.  Of course there are eggs filled with mini M&Ms and foil-wrapped milk chocolate eggs, but I will leave those for the kiddies. And if you really want the terrible diet that caused me to lose four pounds in four days, here it is:


The My-Throat-Hurts-Too-Much-Too-Eat Diet

Days 1 to 5: Little or no eating other than...

Breakfast: a teaspoonful of peanut butter in the mornings to get the painkillers down.  Once the painkillers kick in, a little dark roast coffee. Maybe a yogurt, maybe not.

Lunch: Some cauliflower soup (just orange cauliflower, broth, heavy cream and curry spice, boiled for 20 min. then pureed) or, Vietnamese Pho soup with only a few noodles or...any other pureed soup.

Snack for 1 day: McDonald's or DQ small ice cream cone to numb the sore throat. Works for 20 minutes then you feel worse!

Snack for another day: Handful of unsalted, roasted cashews.  They are almost as soft and easy-on-the-throast as peanut butter...almost.

Dinner: About 1 to 2 ounces of food. A two-inch piece of chicken or soft meat if the painkillers are working. Steamed vegetables.

Day 6 - A little bit of chocolate and 1 toast with PB for breakfast - yay! And no painkillers too! But anibiotics means no wine....booo.

You could probably also call this the '1000-calorie-a-day-diet' or the 'Hey! I am practically eating baby food!' diet.  Either way, it is not fun!