It’s absolutely no secret that I enjoy challenging myself to give less-than-ideal things up. Banning chocolate was an attempt to stop practically inhaling a family-sized block of dairy milk or an entire pack of chocolate biscuits every evening after dinner and reset my binge eating ways.

I won’t lie, this was pretty challenging, particularly at first. For a long while I had a visceral reaction when confronted with those lovely purple packages and had to avoid that aisle in the supermarket. Don’t even get me started on the chocolate biscuits – which seemed to be everywhere.

But I made it through the year using my surprisingly strong will power (who knew I possessed such a thing?). Would that I could apply this to other areas of my life!

seriously, counting apps are so good for everything!

WOO HOO!

And to celebrate the one year, I busted out a block of exotic chocolate from the team Xmas hamper.

milk of the gods?

And WOW!

It was … really underwhelming.

Returning to chocolate was kind of meh and nothing at all as I’d expected, which was along the lines of a massive flavour explosion, rainbows, butterflies and kittens. In reality it was just, well, nothing special.

But did it have the desired effect?

Yeah, no it did not, I just moved the bingeing onto things like caramel ice-cream, cakes, caramel popcorn, shortbread, pretty much anything that wasn’t tied down. This is why one of my challenges for 2019 is “no food after dinner”. So far I’ve not worked around this by scoffing cakes before dinner or for lunch or even breakfast. But hey early days, I’m pretty cunning.