Personal Transformation, Self Help, Body Image
Date Published: 06-21-2022
A book where readers delight in both an “infectious storyline”
and simultaneously a unique venture into their own personal
development… including handfuls of interviews and excerpts featuring
significantly impactful teachers, mentors and healing, therapeutic
guides.
EXCERPT
Chocolate, I know you sound clichéd. For years you’ve been
associated with making up for love lost, poetically punctuating
rom-com breakup scenes or presented as a prop in illicit affairs: a
declarative symbol of substitution. Forgive me, my beloved, where
words might fail me; I’ve picked up a drugstore satiny-red
box of liquor-filled chocolate for you. Chocolate has a history
through the ages, long before Hershey’s confectionary affair gained
speed at the end of the 1800s.
Anthropologists deem we’ve associated the chocolate bean with love
for more than five thousand years, which means that chocolate might
be, to speak in broad sweeps, our longest romanticized relationship.
Our chocolate devotion, however, is definitely not just fluff; it
certainly stands scientifically solid, whether in the formation of a
solid dark or a solid milk flavor. Ancient cultures prescribed raw
chocolate medicinally as a means to activate powerful heart-opening
energy, and today, the latest laboratory research reveals that the
ingredients in chocolate possess properties that support heart
health.
Of course, I would never dismiss any elements considered divine in
sacred ceremonies, and I will absolutely agree that chocolate, in its
purest form, is a potent substance. But what I’m investigating here
when it comes to craving is surely not about gorging on bags
of raw, unsweetened, hard, whole cacao beans from the Theobroma tree
of the flowering Malvaceae plant family. I’m talking about
teeth-sinkable, caramel-centered, sugar-laden, chewy,
melt-in-your-mouth, candy-corporate chocolate—the kind that is
first and foremostly a globbity-glunk of vegetable fat and
high-fructose corn syrup, factory designed to dissolve within two to
five seconds of making contact with your tongue. I’m talking about
the kind of chocolate you can rake up in your top teeth, scraping the
northmost side of a covered brick of vanilla wafer, which dissolves
just moments after the chocolate-like topping evaporates into that
savory-sweet pocket of the mouth just near the back molars. What I’m
describing is the type of chocolate bar you can accidentally pack
into your oversized purse, wrapped in bright packaging, which comes
conveniently in countable squares; one square, two, five, ten—all
fractional justifications of one wholly complete serving.
Finger-licking chocolate, shirt-collar, car-seat, luggage-staining
chocolate; the kind of chocolate that, just like it fills every
commercial, can fill in all the gaps in our regularly programmed
schedules.
Wake up, get to work, chocolate, meeting, chocolate, drive home,
chocolate, dinner, After Eight chocolate. And, most of all, my
favorite kind of chocolate: chocolate that makes us forget what we
might have started to long for. Nostalgic peanut-butter cups, fudge-
flavored toffee, the sticky sweetness of candies kept from my sticky
fingers with just one thin wax paper: oh, how I’ve known you. Mint-
thin chocolate layers to support my own tendency to hide out in
layers, in a cool refuge away from the hot, grilling mess of
intensity that is the rest of the racket-filled world: how you
momentarily silence mayhem.
And while I, too, have romanticized you, chocolate, leaving
scandalous trails of wrappers from freezer to carpet-covered basement
staircase, I have no clue why the heck I’ve gone through such war
fighting against you while simultaneously keeping the intensity of
your ammunition alive. Twinkle, twinkle little bar (of
chocolate), how I wonder what you are (or what you stand for). Up
above my fridge, so high, (to ignore that cupboard how I’ll
try—yet, next at market, again I buy). Yes, it’s a nursery
rhyme for the girl who’s lived a life lassoed again and again by
foods that trap her in a self-deserting scene, forever deploying
dessert as distraction from despair. Oh, chocolate, what do you mean
to me?
Here’s the truth: while I’d explored a multitude of modalities in
the past to heal my affliction—my damaged relationship to my body
and self-nourishment—when it came to developing a healthier
relationship to eating, I’d actually never sought the most obvious
type of specialist: a certified and registered dietician. I wasn’t
sure exactly why I’d avoided someone who might make me stare in a
cognizant fashion right down at the nose of my fork. Why would I be
turned off by someone like a dietician, who might expect that I
actually put in the time, make the conscious effort during my living
daylight hours to positively review and shift my eating habits—to
be truly self- accountable?
When it came to dietary choices, I’d lived under a spell that
supposed I was a victim of compulsive eating, like an innocent Giana
character going about my day when I was suddenly seized by a
tumultuous weather pattern, teleported to the eye of a tornado, for
example. I felt that this storm pattern rendered me incapable of any
option other than heading, frayed and frenzied, into a
food-consumptive hell that, really, I had nothing to do with. I
believed I was bullied by an energy, and I’d share this condition
with any genre of specialist except those who would mandate that I
take the role as my own healer. I chose to go through hypnotisms,
rebirths, clearings, cleansings, ceremonies, and cosmic voyages,
rather than decide I had the power to sort my patterns out. I’d
prefer to have crystals, energetic hands or tarot cards read my
energy, but that was my history—and I didn’t have to repeat it. I
could believe in myself to liberate my fortune and fate.
I’d been ready for the last months, and was even more ready now, to
look at my relationship to nourishment head-on. I wasn’t just
craving chocolate, in fact, when I reached for something that felt
opulent and alluring; I was reaching to recognize qualities about
myself that possessed such prowess.
Perhaps I was ready to seek a well-schooled yet holistically informed
nutritionist specializing in complex, disorganized or disordered
eating styles. After all, these were the experts specifically geared
up to help people gain clarity about nourishment itself. I’d seek
the wisdom to help me reach within to access inner wealth, rather
than reach deeper into a decadent box of Pepperidge Farm
chocolate-chunk cookies.
I determined that, to get to the crux of how behaviors are changed
around something as substantial, universal, and essential as eating,
I’d go into hard-core research mode. I’d put on more than a
thinking cap, darn it—I’d put on a hard hat, because I had to be
willing to go deep underground to find how behavioral transformation
can successfully take place. I hoped I’d discover some epiphanies
in my research, not only for myself but for all the people I
encounter who, like me, have struggled with the behavioral ABCs of
eating.
I’d read the stats: the US diet and weight-loss industry was worth
71 billion dollars, with the alternative-therapies industry coming in
at around the same and the addiction-behavior therapy industry raking
in 40 billion. Obviously, I wasn’t alone: all this rigmarole
constituted a whole culture crying out for ways to get a grip on its
food behaviors. I wanted to understand, from the leaders who’d been
able to impactfully support healing in this area, what the process of
remediating self- sabotaging behaviors might look like, and what
someone who is truly ready for transformation in this capacity can
expect.
REVIEW PENDING
About the Author
Isabel Chiara, creator of “The Life Actualization Process,” has
been a guide, mentor, and leader throughout her entire life. Over the last
thirty years, she has honed her expertise in extensive studies and practices
of transformational energy modalities. As a professional intuitive guide,
Isabel activates unlimited potential for her clients, helping them to ignite
their most liberated, passionate and empowered life path, full of
prosperity, miracles, and magic. For more information about Isabel’s
“Life Actualization” processes, as well as her previous
top-selling book, Eat Your Words, visit her website below!
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