Who doesn’t love chocolate?

And when it is raw, natural guilt free chocolate,  even better.

I know a lot of yogis and health conscious people out there that can eat it by the bucket load.  It triggers something in everyone you just want to go back for more.

I love making my own raw-chocolates.

Again, quality over quantity for me.  I can eat 2-3 but that is it. For some reason my digestion can only tolerate small amounts.

My favorite types of chocolate are truffles, or the plain with activated nuts.

I went through a stage putting adaptogens like astragulas, shilajit-ginseng-reishi into my mix and that gets into a whole new level of mind opening craziness!

Anyway, I will be giving a chocolate making workshop at the coming art of life retreat so watch out.

Oksana
The cacao bean used to be the Mayan currency. That’s how highly it was valued!

Put cacao beans under a heavy press and by extraction you get 2 ingredients:  cacao butter and cacao powder. Put cacao butter and powder back together again, and the alchemical process makes chocolate!!

Raw, untreated, unheated cacao has high levels of triptophans!!

Triptophans effect our serotonin levels – that’s why we feel good when we eat chocolate.

Chocolate also contains dozens of mineral and vitamins, the highest of these being magnesium. Magnesium is excellent for us especially after any form of exercise, like after our yoga practice!

I always have chocolate in the house.  I make it myself.  It is really easy to have a week’s supply. I eat it all the time.

Commercialised chocolate is far from the real thing. The majority of it contains gums, emulsifiers and stabilizers, and most brands have been using palm oil too.

The level of sugar (and it’s the bad fructose sugar they use) is stupendously high, as well as flavor enhancers, these days they even replace the whole ‘chocolate factor’ with a substitute additive called PGPR made in the lab (see this link for more http://www.progressive-charlestown.com/2012/02/things-you-probably-dont-want-to-know.html)

Vote with your dollar, vote for nutrition, and eat as much good chocolate as you want!!!


I eat things as I feel like them.  For some reason I tend to feel like a piece of chocolate at the end of the day.

I have always preferred dark chocolate to milk chocolate.  I like trying different types of chocolate with bits of things in them.

I don’t eat much chocolate and I never feel like eating very much anyway. For me it is about having a small taste of something.

I have never been a person to sit down and eat a whole block of chocolate although I know lots of people who tell me they can do so with ease.   I cannot even imagine feeling like I would want to.

Maybe I have a different chemical make up? Enough serotonin naturally?  I used to be a runner and could run for hours and never have a so-called ‘runner’s high’.  I just felt a basic calm and happy.

www.artofliferetreats.com