How to Eat Chocolate

This idea once changed my life: three bites of a dessert is all you need.

Do I always live by this? Of course not. Three isn't a magic number or anything. But honestly? Rare is the dessert that requires more than a few bites to be fully enjoyed. After those first bites your palate has acclimated to it and the pleasure of it drops off dramatically. Suddenly you're eating it for other reasons than taste, often social reasons ("who stops after just three bites?") or inertia ("well, I'm already eating this and the path of least resistance is to keep going until I run out.") Those might be okay reasons for some people, but I'm personally in the camp of "work smarter, not harder." I like to maximize things (aka responsibly cut corners) as much as life allows. In my uphill battle to cut out sugar as much as I can (she says as she just got back from eating ice cream), I want to get as much bang for my sugar buck as possible. An unfortunate way sugar sneaks into my life is those "other reasons than taste." I want to squeeze every drop of enjoyment out of a dessert, and honestly, the best way I've found to do that is to eat less dessert.

Twice recently I've struck this deal with myself: "you can have a little of that sugary thing if you only have a little." In general, I intend to eat one piece of chocolate and end up telling myself "just one more," two, three, four or more times in a row. For some reason, this new phrasing helps: the condition upon which I can indulge is that I savor it. That actually makes sense. I'm not eating dessert for nourishment; why should I eat a lot of it? And what's the point of having it at all if I don't savor?

The surprising outcome both times: the less I eat, the more I enjoy. When I know I will only be having one or two pieces of chocolate, my perspective is vastly different. I want to be there while I'm eating it. The forced pause makes me remember: oh, right, I like chocolate and it's a big deal! Suddenly instead of just kind of enjoying the treat while distracted by other things, I find that I am all about it. When I sit down on the couch, close my eyes and really taste it, eating two pieces of chocolate is vastly more satisfying than several handfuls. I'm not sure how to quantify pleasure, but it's at least two or three times as good, which is crazy since I'm eating less than half of what I would normally.

Isn't this, like, the trick of life? I guess it's famous and its name is "less is more." I think having too much undercuts pleasure and appreciation by overloading and deadening our senses. As humans, there's only so much we can handle at once, including good feelings and physical enjoyment. Here's another cliche: "the best things in life are free." Like eating less candy.