FITNESS. FASHION. FOOD.
Don’t fear when chocolate time is here: the nation’s favourite snack helps maintain your gym focus
By Patrick Kelly-Burton. 31st March 2018.
Image: Creative Commons Images.
It’s that time of the year again when indulging in as much chocolate as humanly possible is excused as a ‘holiday tradition’. In other words, the religious aspects of Easter are overlooked in favour of a four-day feast, flustering your entire fitness routine and spoiling the hard work you’ve put into your summer beach bod.
Medical News Today reported that eating chocolate may help lower cholesterol levels. You might be dazzled by that claim when chocolate is habitually being associated with health problems such as obesity and high-blood pressure, but the cholesterol nutrients in dark chocolate can contain five times less mg than light chocolate.
Nutritionist and Colon Hydrotherapist Fiona Corliss advises that eating in moderation is particularly key for gym-goers avoiding the sweet guilt this Easter. “There are benefits to chocolate but because of the sugar within it, it does trigger an addiction,” she says.
“It needs to be a dark chocolate really, 70/80% dark and it needs to be eaten in moderation. I can’t say eat chocolate freely and it is fine.”
As long as you are leading a healthy lifestyle, the nutritionist suggests eating a few squares of chocolate “isn’t going to hurt”. But for those affected by more serious addiction issues, chocolate can add to the compulsion.
“It depends on their medical condition… I get people from all walks of life who have a lot of difficulties and chocolate is an extremely addictive substance,” says Corliss.
Lewis Smith regularly attends Highbury’s Fit4less gym centre and loves a Snickers bar here and there. But he doesn’t let it get in the way of his daily fitness routine.
“I do it [eat a chocolate bar] before a session and after a session to help with a sugar boost. When you’re training, you lose a lot of sugar so I’ll have it before to give me that perk and after to put it back in,” says Smith.
Like some of us, the 21-year-old eats “nothing special”, but admits consuming too much chocolate can have psychological impacts.
“I have eaten a lot of chocolate before; if I do it a lot I’ll tell myself that I need to go to the gym.
“I think it varies for different people. If people eat a lot of chocolate, they might think they are putting on weight. It doesn’t have that kind of psychological effect on me, only if I eat a lot over a short period of time,” says Smith.
The beast from the east may have passed but the beast of Easter is very much upon us. Ensure you eat moderately this Easter – but still enjoy those delightful chocolatey perks that come with it.
Fear not, people. For most gym-freaks, eating chocolate remains a guilty pleasure. The good news: you don’t have to be alarmed about your physique whilst you’re scoffing choccies this Easter.
There’s a growing belief that eating chocolate is actually a great post-exercise recovery aid. In fact, it’s been written in black and white for some time now.
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Chocolate is renowned for its sweet, sensational taste and we’ve known about its health benefits for centuries. Researchers from the Human Performance Laboratory – at Indiana University in the United States – found that eating and drinking chocolate can help bodies recover from tough workouts.
The study aimed to test the efficiency of drinking chocolate milk as a recovery aid following depleted exercise workouts. The results concluded that drinking chocolate is an effective revitaliser between “two exhausting exercise bouts”. The study was carried out on nine men, but shows that chocolate milk can be an important aspect of heath and recovery… How great is that!
Research in 2015 added further substance to this discovery. It was shown that the ingredients in dark chocolate had cardiovascular benefits. The BioMed Central report proved eight cyclists performed better when eating one and a half squares of dark chocolate per day for two weeks. Consumption in moderation is vital to the notion that chocolate can have health benefits. The argument is that these studies have small numbers of test subjects, something that ultimately thwarts its reliability – but hold on just a second…
