Personal Transformation, Self Help, Body Image
Date Published: 06-21-2022
A book where readers delight in both an “infectious storyline” and simultaneously a unique venture into their own personal development… including handfuls of interviews and excerpts featuring significantly impactful teachers, mentors and healing, therapeutic guides.
Chocolate, I know you sound clichéd. For
years you’ve been associated with making up for love lost, poetically
punctuating rom-com breakup scenes or presented as a prop in illicit affairs: a
declarative symbol of substitution. Forgive me, my beloved,
where words might fail me; I’ve picked up a drugstore satiny-red
box of liquor-filled chocolate for you. Chocolate has a history through the ages, long
before Hershey’s confectionary affair gained speed at the end of the 1800s.Anthropologists deem we’ve associated the
chocolate bean with love for more than five thousand years, which means that
chocolate might be, to speak in broad sweeps, our longest romanticized
relationship.
Our chocolate devotion, however, is
definitely not just fluff; it certainly stands scientifically solid, whether in
the formation of a solid dark or a solid milk flavor. Ancient cultures
prescribed raw chocolate medicinally as a means to activate powerful
heart-opening energy, and today, the latest laboratory research reveals that
the ingredients in chocolate possess properties that support heart health.
Of course, I would never dismiss any
elements considered divine in sacred ceremonies, and I will absolutely agree
that chocolate, in its purest form, is a potent substance. But what I’m
investigating here when it comes to craving is surely not about gorging on bags of raw,
unsweetened, hard, whole cacao beans from the Theobroma tree of the flowering
Malvaceae plant family. I’m talking about teeth-sinkable, caramel-centered,
sugar-laden, chewy, melt-in-your-mouth, candy-corporate chocolate—the kind that
is first and foremostly a globbity-glunk of vegetable fat and high-fructose
corn syrup, factory designed to dissolve within two to five seconds of making
contact with your tongue. I’m talking about the kind of chocolate you can rake
up in your top teeth, scraping the northmost side of a covered brick of vanilla
wafer, which dissolves just moments after the chocolate-like topping evaporates
into that savory-sweet pocket of the mouth just near the back molars. What I’m
describing is the type of chocolate bar you can accidentally pack into your
oversized purse, wrapped in bright packaging, which comes conveniently in
countable squares; one square, two, five, ten—all fractional justifications of
one wholly complete serving. Finger-licking chocolate, shirt-collar, car-seat,
luggage-staining chocolate; the kind of chocolate that, just like it fills
every commercial, can fill in all the gaps in our regularly programmed
schedules.
Wake up, get to work, chocolate, meeting,
chocolate, drive home, chocolate, dinner, After Eight chocolate. And, most of
all, my favorite kind of chocolate: chocolate that makes us forget what we
might have started to long for. Nostalgic peanut-butter cups, fudge- flavored toffee,
the sticky sweetness of candies kept from my sticky fingers with just one thin
wax paper: oh, how I’ve known you. Mint- thin chocolate layers to support my
own tendency to hide out in layers, in a cool refuge away from the hot,
grilling mess of intensity that is the rest of the racket-filled world: how you
momentarily silence mayhem.
And while I, too, have romanticized you,
chocolate, leaving scandalous trails of wrappers from freezer to carpet-covered
basement staircase, I have no clue why the heck I’ve gone through such war
fighting against you while simultaneously keeping the intensity of your
ammunition alive. Twinkle, twinkle little bar (of chocolate), how I wonder what you are (or what you stand
for). Up above my fridge, so high, (to ignore that
cupboard how I’ll try—yet, next at market, again I buy). Yes, it’s a nursery rhyme for the girl who’s lived a life lassoed again and again by foods that trap her
in a self-deserting scene, forever deploying dessert as distraction from
despair. Oh, chocolate, what do you mean to me?
Here’s the truth: while I’d explored a
multitude of modalities in the past to heal my affliction—my damaged
relationship to my body and self-nourishment—when it came to developing a
healthier relationship to eating, I’d actually never sought the most obvious
type of specialist: a certified and registered dietician. I wasn’t sure exactly
why I’d avoided someone who might make me stare in a cognizant fashion right
down at the nose of my fork. Why would I be turned off by someone like a
dietician, who might expect that I actually put in the time, make the conscious
effort during my living daylight hours to positively review and shift my eating
habits—to be truly self- accountable?
When it came to dietary choices, I’d
lived under a spell that supposed I was a victim of compulsive eating, like an
innocent Giana character going about my day when I was suddenly seized by a
tumultuous weather pattern, teleported to the eye of a tornado, for example. I
felt that this storm pattern rendered me incapable of any option other than
heading, frayed and frenzied, into a food-consumptive hell that, really, I had
nothing to do with. I believed I was bullied by an energy, and I’d share this
condition with any genre of specialist except those who would mandate that I
take the role as my own healer. I chose to go through hypnotisms, rebirths,
clearings, cleansings, ceremonies, and cosmic voyages, rather than decide I had
the power to sort my patterns out. I’d prefer to have crystals, energetic hands
or tarot cards read my energy, but that was my history—and I didn’t have to
repeat it. I could believe in myself to liberate my fortune and fate.
I’d been ready for the last months, and
was even more ready now, to look at my relationship to nourishment head-on. I
wasn’t just craving chocolate, in fact, when I reached for something that felt
opulent and alluring; I was reaching to recognize qualities about myself that
possessed such prowess.
Perhaps I was ready to seek a
well-schooled yet holistically informed nutritionist specializing in complex,
disorganized or disordered eating styles. After all, these were the experts
specifically geared up to help people gain clarity about nourishment itself.
I’d seek the wisdom to help me reach within to access inner wealth, rather than
reach deeper into a decadent box of Pepperidge Farm chocolate-chunk cookies.
I determined that, to get to the crux of
how behaviors are changed around something as substantial, universal, and
essential as eating, I’d go into hard-core research mode. I’d put on more than
a thinking cap, darn it—I’d put on a hard hat, because I had to be willing to
go deep underground to find how behavioral transformation can successfully take
place. I hoped I’d discover some epiphanies in my research, not only for myself
but for all the people I encounter who, like me, have struggled with the
behavioral ABCs of eating.
I’d read the stats: the US diet and
weight-loss industry was worth 71 billion dollars, with the
alternative-therapies industry coming in at around the same and the
addiction-behavior therapy industry raking in 40 billion. Obviously, I wasn’t
alone: all this rigmarole constituted a whole culture crying out for ways to
get a grip on its food behaviors. I wanted to understand, from the leaders
who’d been able to impactfully support healing in this area, what the process
of remediating self- sabotaging behaviors might look like, and what someone who
is truly ready for transformation in this capacity can expect.
About the Author
Isabel Chiara, creator of “The Life Actualization Process,” has been a guide, mentor, and leader throughout her entire life. Over the last thirty years, she has honed her expertise in extensive studies and practices of transformational energy modalities. As a professional intuitive guide, Isabel activates unlimited potential for her clients, helping them to ignite their most liberated, passionate and empowered life path, full of prosperity, miracles, and magic. For more information about Isabel’s “Life Actualization” processes, as well as her previous top-selling book, Eat Your Words, visit her website below!
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