Authors: Sophie Boss and Audrey Boss

ISBN: 0-7499-2708-9

Publisher: Piatkus

The following review was contributed by:  Andrea Wren:  CLICK TO VIEW Andrea Wren's Reviews

I wouldn’t normally fill my fridge with the LARGEST box of expensive ‘tasting’ chocolates and three family-sized egg custard pies, nor chuck out the scales that I’ve clung onto dearly for most of my adult life, but I’ve just read Beyond Chocolate, and the time has come to alter my ways. By that, I mean the ways that have kept me ‘ruled’ by food ever since I can remember.

Beyond Chocolate has been pivotal though only three days have passed since I opened the book and hurriedly devoured its contents (excuse the connotations). I feel sure it can change my life. Easy to get to grips with, generous helpings of empathy and understanding, and mercifully lacking in any patronising self-help gobbledegook, it explores the alternative to a life of being a yo-yo dieter, aiming to help women break the weight-loss/weight-gain cycle.

Authors Sophie and Audrey Boss are two sisters and both women have written this book from a culmination of personal and wider experience (Sophie is also a trained psychotherapist). They have spent many of their years battling with weight gain, loss, purging, guilt and a life that revolved around food; what they should or shouldn’t be eating, and whether or not they should or shouldn’t have been eating it. Sound familiar?

If it does, then this book could be for you. Thankfully Audrey and Sophie got utterly fed up of living constantly under the control of food and looked for ways of ending the cycle, which they share with the rest of us in Beyond Chocolate. Through experimentation and letting go of old habits they developed a way of life that’s free of planning around food and much more focused on giving your body what it needs, and about tuning in and eating intuitively.

Some of the principles seem revolutionary, but when you consider them carefully, they just make simple sense. It’s only because those of us who have found ourselves on the weight-loss treadmill have become so trained to think that we need to obsess about every morsel that goes into our mouths, in terms of how it will affect our weight, that we’ve stopped doing what comes naturally. It’s time to take stock – do you really want to be unhealthily fixated with food for the rest of your life? If the answer is no, then Beyond Chocolate might be able to offer you something else.

It’s not a diet, it’s a concept, but if you allow yourself to break free from the old rules and ditch your plans (along with your scales) and train yourself to think differently, you might lose the weight for good. An extremely accessible book, interesting even if you don’t want to consider a life free of dieting, and packed with resources (UK based) to help you along the way (as well as details of where to get delicious chocolate!).