As the next 30 day challenge, I’m going to go the entire month of June without chocolate.

Following on from keeping track of what I eat over the course of an average week, which is what motivated me to cut down on my milk intake, it became clear that chocolate was another clear contributor to a poor diet.

Like most people, I like chocolate. Unlike most people, I treat chocolate as a food group and I’ve long realised I can’t be trusted around it.

Semi-regularly I used to buy a family block of chocolate from Woolworths when they were on special and demolish the majority of it in a single hit, maybe while watching a movie. In more recent times, I’ve stopped buying blocks of chocolate since they don’t last but every once in a while – one finds its way into the fridge. My chocolate habit doesn’t stop with blocks of chocolate though, it extends into anything with chocolate involved like chocolate chip cookies, Snickers, Crunchie and Cherry Ripe chocolate bars or chocolate coated sultanas.

The goal for the month is to basically ween myself off chocolate, with an end game of being able to eat it in moderation moving forward as a treat and less so as a food group.

Wish me luck, I think I’m going to need it!

March was my second 30 day challenge that I’ve attempted and my goal was to drink less cappuccino. Actually the goal wasn’t to reduce my consumption of cappuccino, that was a simple mechanism to reach the ultimate goal of drinking less milk.

I did a little digging into my diet a while ago and realised I was consuming over 1 litre of milk per day during the week. The Australian Government Department of Health & Ageing have recommended energy intake for males and females in different age bands and I fit within the 8900kJ per day bucket.

Dairy Farmers full cream milk has 266kJ of energy and 3.4g of fat per 100ml, so I am consuming at least 2500kJ of energy daily or at a minimum nearly 1/3 of my daily energy intake just from milk before I eat or drink anything else across the course of the day!

It had to change and I’m happy to report that I clobbered the challenge. During the week except for a couple blips I managed only one cappuccino per day. Most weekends over the month I didn’t have any cappuccino at all. If you’re wondering about the spike on the left, I forgot what the date was at work and chomped through five espresso coffees but pulled it back into line the following day.

I don’t want to do it but I think I might try a 30 day challenge without chocolate. I have a real sweet tooth and by normal measures I treat chocolate as a food group, so I think that’d be another easy way for me to tidy up my diet a little further.

As the next installment of my 30 day challenge, I’m going to cut down on the amount of espresso I drink.

Anyone that knows me will attest to my love of coffee, it doesn’t matter if it is straight espresso, cappuccino, filter coffee or even good quality instant coffee – say the word and I’m there.

Turns out that after spending about 3 seconds thinking about what I eat across the course of a week, coffee but more specifically milk plays a large role in my intake. Right now you’re probably thinking milk isn’t so bad, it is even good for your bones. When you eat cereal for breakfast, have 4-6 cups of cappuccino throughout a day during the week and then top that off with 2-3 cups of instant coffee in the evening – its a lot of milk; I’d estimate no less than one litre per day during the week.

So while the object of this 30 day challenge is to drink less cappuccino, that is really a means to an end of drinking less milk. I love coffee and don’t want to have to give it up entirely but I recognise that drinking that volume of milk per day certainly isn’t helping my slow & steady weight loss goals.

My goal is simple, no more than one cappuccino per day. I’m happy to replace any cappuccino that I don’t have with something that has no milk or vastly less milk but I’ve decided that drinking 200-250ml of milk per coffee isn’t helping me at all.