Embracing Pleasure: How to Enjoy Chocolate, Among Other Things

This guest post is contributed by Jena Ellis, who writes on the topics of Online Certificate Programs.  She welcomes your questions and comments at her email Id: jena.ellis20 @gmail.com. 

Step into any large grocery store, and you'll immediately feel a twinge--if not a pang--of guilt. We've got millions of food items to choose from and each is directed at a certain demographic. In terms of advertising, women are often the prime targets and this is true especially of food. It's truer still of diet food and most diet products are, simply put, advertising scams.

The most insidious aspect of diet food is the attitude that undergirds it. Chocolate flavored snack bars that boast less sugar, less fat, or less calories often make the claim that they are guilt-free ways to enjoy our favorite foods. What here is the implication? Simple: if we need a guilt-free product, there must have been an aspect of guilt in eating the "bad" product to begin with. And in diet terms, the "bad" product is the pure product. We are then told that we should derive enjoyment from a food because we can eat it more frequently, not because we can enjoy the real thing more thoughtfully.

Although this New York Times op-ed--"Discovering Something New in Food: Pleasure" was printed almost two decades ago, it still rings true for us today. Of course, it is completely natural for us to worry about our weight, especially once we hit the point where our naturally speedy metabolism begins to slow down significantly. But we cannot forget that keeping a healthy weight is more successfully accomplished by eating in a balanced way and not by dieting.

A prime example of a product that has been appropriated to make us feel either guilty or sinful is chocolate. Chocolate is notorious for advertising directly to women. Whether or not it is true that women in particular have some sort of fetish for chocolate is quite beside the point. The fact still stands: we are told that if we enjoy chocolate to its fullest extent, we are committing a sin and if we enjoy its diluted cousins we are trying to assuage our guilt.

Now call me crazy, but this sounds like incredibly dysfunctional thinking. If balanced eating is the healthiest type of eating, then balance also must make room for pleasure. While I am not a chocoholic, I enjoy a good quality chocolate, high in pure cocoa whenever the spirit moves me. I eat it slowly and thoughtfully and I find in this act, a bliss that to me is almost spiritual. I think it is because of these quiet, simple moments that I don't lust for chocolate or any other food that I find particularly pleasurable.

Removing the stigma from satiating our desires isn't easy because advertisements want us to believe otherwise.  We are constantly being exposed to marketing that wants us to consume more and more. The next time you feel like having a favorite food, but you find you're feeling a little hesitant, go ahead and eat it. Find the variety of your favorite food that has the highest quality and freshest ingredients and think about the flavors, the smells and the whole experience.

In the end, there's nothing sinful about pleasure. Experiencing life to its fullest extent and doing so with a calm pensiveness--not a neurotic greediness--can only be considered, at least in my book, a virtue.