Jens Berges' blog part 4

How to reduce and keep your weight with chocolate

Even though I have been diagnosed with (presumed) tuberculosis, based on a chest x-ray, I do not have many of the normal clinical features of that disease.

For example, I do not lose weight. The opposite is the case: if I do not restrict my eating, and swallow food according to my appetite, I will gain weight, as much as 1 kg per week... in spite of my (presumed) tuberculosis.

Here is my chest x-ray.

It looks terrible.

Sometimes I have a cough, sometimes I don't. This has been going on for some four years.

Since my chest x-ray, I have gained 12 kg (26 pounds) from not putting any restrictions on my diet for just three months. Now I am 81 kg (179 pounds), for a height of 180 cm (5.9 feet). I am a Scandinavian male, living in Southeast Asia. At the time of my diagnosis, it was 69 kg (152 pounds).

I have been fighting excessive bodyweight for most of my life. My highest weight was 130 kg (287 pounds). That was 30 years ago.

Here is my trick for lowering my weight, and keeping it down, without restricting the pleasure I get from food:

I don't swallow everything that I put into my mouth.

I got the idea when reading about wine tasting. At wine tasting events, it is common practice to spit wine into a bucket after tasting it.

The purpose is not to get embarrassingly drunk from consuming too much alcohol.

And in order not to become embarrassingly obese, I do the same thing that wine tasters do. I let the chocolate melt in my mouth, enjoy the flavor, and then spit it into a bucket.

I can do this with a few other foods, like cheese which, once in the mouth, is enzymatically converted into milk that is easy to spit.

This is my recipe for not gaining weight. Because when I melt chocolate in my mouth, and then spit it out, I satisfy my appetite, or graving, without the burden of many calories.

I drink warm water between consuming pieces of chocolate. It fills my stomach and makes me satiated, and apart from that, drinking a lot of water is healthy.

Some of the chocolate slides down the esophagus, of course, but it's much less than in full swallowing.

For me, this has worked for decades, for maintaining my weight, and even for reducing it.