Do you have a consuming desire for chocolate and spend many hours simply yearning for the taste and texture of chocolate? Do you keep eating it until every last chocolaty morsel has gone and then sit back afterwards and wish you hadn't given in to that chocolate eating urge? Are you a chocolate person who really enjoys every bite, or are you one of the many who don't even enjoy it that much? Because it's amazing how many people say afterwards that it was ok, it was nice enough, but it really wasn't THAT special.

So many people who crave chocolate wonder why they crave it so much. Many of us spend what seems to be the majority of our waking hours day-dreaming about white or milk chocolate, dark chocolate or varying combinations of candy bars. Some of us actually remember dreaming about chocolate confections or chocolate cakes! And yet, looking at chocolate cravings objectively, you know that you simply don't need chocolate and chocolate doesn't need you. How, one wonders, can you remain this objective? How can you step back and dissociate from the emotional connotations with chocolate and see this habit just as it is, as a habit?

The desire to eat it is not an addiction, it's a habit and habitual thought patterns can be easily broken, so long as you become aware of certain ways in which the human mind works. Walter Mischel, a professor at Stanford University reported on some experiments a couple of decades ago in which he noted certain characteristics in young children when confronted with something that they might very well crave.

These young children were asked to try out a simple task. They were to enter a room where they would see a nice piece of candy. They could eat it immediately and that would be all they would get, but if they were to delay gratification for a certain period of time they could have double the quantity. So what was observed? Some children ate the candy immediately; they could not stop themselves. (Just as many adults just cannot stop themselves eating gooey and delicious chocolate at every opportunity.) Others tried different tactics in their attempt to resist. Some children just stared at the candy, almost as if they were competing in a "stare off" competition, but this tactic didn't help for long; soon, they reached for that candy...

The successful candidates were observed to use strategies of distraction - they turned their backs, or started occupying themselves in doing something else until the time was up and they were rewarded with two candies instead of one. As with anything in life, if you want to achieve something, the way to success is easier if you imitate the strategies of others who have already succeeded in that task. These young children chose (either by random selection or some inner knowledge) a strategy which made it easier for them to succeed.

What we can learn from this is that the only way on which to stop the chocolate cravings is to dissociate yourself and distract yourself. The more you think about chocolate the more you will eat it. You may say that you already know this, that you just couldn't stop yourself from thinking about eating chocolate. Walter Mischel made a further observation which is the key here. When they showed the children who had previously used a technique like the "stare off" a better way of thinking and coping, they did so quite easily and succeeded in delaying their gratification.

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