| I love chocolate cake and chocolate cake loves me. I can quite happily sit down and eat a whole one and then come back for more. The bigger the better and the more chocolate the better still! But, as with every great joy in this life, it comes with a price tag and in this case, the price tag is a heavy fine in excess body weight. But it doesn't have to be this way, does it?
Actually, no it does not! There are ways and means of avoiding obesity while still being able to enjoy that devilishly tempting chocolate cake. The problem is, it involves some work and most people, especially those who lead sedentary lifestyles, do not like the sound of that! Especially when that work comes in the form of exercise coupled with eating a good, healthy diet. But this is a necessary evil to have to put up with if we want to indulge in the dark side of life - by dark, I am of course referring to that dark brown, sweet, sweet chocolaty stuff!
The trick to keeping the weight manageable is to make sure your body burns as many calories as you can cram into it. So, theoretically, if you want to eat a whole chocolate cake a day, then you are going to have to exercise like its 1999. But also, there are hidden health risks to doing that, not least of all the specter of diabetes from overdosing on the sugar and let's not mention the increased risk of heart attacks from the increase in bad LDL cholesterol and triglycerides!
But there is even a way of getting around that, to a point. Its not just the refined white sugar that is present in chocolate cake that makes it bad. there is also the refined white flour, butter or margarine and of course the chocolate itself.
Believe it or not, there are some changes that you can make that will still create a very tasty chocolate cake with a far lower level of bad ingredients to harm your body. For a start, you can cut the level of refined white sugar almost in half on a general recipe. It will still be sweet, just not quite as sickly sweet. You can replace the refined white flour with wholemeal flour. Yes you can! You can replace the butter or margarine with extra virgin olive oil. Again, yes you can! And use cooking chocolate that is plain with a cocoa content of around 50-60 percent and that's a lot less dangerous than using milk chocolate to cover the cake (yes, I used to be guilty of doing that too).
The resulting cake will be still come out tasting great but will contain lower levels of harmful ingredients, meaning you can eat more of it without feeling quite so guilty.
Okay, as weight loss tips go, this is probably not the best, because you really should avoid all cake, but if you really, really have to have some, making it this way will not be quite so bad for you and if you can still exercise enough to burn off those extra calories you loaded on by eating the cake, then you can go a long way to avoiding obesity too! |
