Remember the other day how I was guilt-tripping myself over eating a homemade gourmet chocolate bar with my coffee for breakfast. I started thinking about it. What is so bad about eating chocolate for breakfast?
It's got a tremendous antioxidant count, it jumpstarts your colon in the morning (especially if you combine it with coffee), and the combination gets me feeling kind of zippy. It's a great way to ingest my daily two tablespoons of virgin coconut oil. I slightly warm my coconut oil in a pan just until it begins to melt, then I stir in several tablespoons of cocoa powder (I prefer raw organic cacao powder)with some raw organic cane sugar. Let it chill in a mold (or on a plate) and when it hardens, you've got a relatively healthy dark chocolate bar.
Well, what is bad about it is the sugar. I use organic cane sugar--which really makes a huge difference compared to non-organic GMO beet sugar when measuring my blood sugars--but still, sugar is not good for diabetics. Even better sugars like maple syrup and raw honey should be ingested in small, amounts and only occasionally by diabetics.
But today I thought of something...how to make my chocolate sweet without sweetening it!
I'm trying to eat more papaya and pineapple because of the papain and bromelain content...improving my healthy enzymes and my digestion is one major key to restoring my health and triggering weight loss. I love papaya, but I'm not real crazy about pineapple. It's so sweet and sour at the same time, and I don't really like eating chunks of pineapple by themselves. Pineapple, though, and especially the core, is so full of bromelain which is so good for me. Check out my post The Powerful Pineapple if you've forgotten our discussion of this.
How to incorporate more pineapple into my diet...hmmm? How to incorporate chocolate and coconut oil without sugar...hmmm? Wait! How about if I make my chocolate with coconut oil and cocoa and drizzle unsweetened, still melted chocolate onto my pineapple chunks in the bowl (like a fondue in reverse but with unsweetened chocolate)? What would that taste like?
It was divine.
The sweetness in the pineapple was just enough to "sweeten" the unsweetened chocolate. It is a way to get your pineapple in, along with your chocolate and your coconut oil in a tasty breakfast treat. I ground up some flaxseeds and sprinkled the flax meal on top of the chocolate-drizzled pineapple and that was even better. Think chocolate almond flavor.
I've read that we should have high-protein breakfasts, but in defense of chocolate, it has 1 gram of protein in every tablespoon of cocoa powder. And the flaxseed is high-protein. There you go! Raw cacoa powder has almost 2 grams of protein per tablespoon. And I love this quote from www.livestrong.com: "cocoa powder could help reduce the risk of obesity and fatty liver disease."
Oh, yeah. I'm finding more and more evidence in support of my chocolate breakfasts.
*sourcing a high-quality cocoa or raw organic cacao powder is essential to ensure you are actually getting the life-giving flavanols you hear about
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