Perhaps the most difficult time of year for me when it comes to my diet is winter. While it may not be that time of year yet, it is the latter part of fall and the cold weather is beginning to set in. Generally speaking, summer time tends to be easier for me in controlling my food intake, especially since I enjoy doing a lot of outdoor exercise at that time of year. I know one can easily stock up on calorie-packed barbecue foods and sweets, but I have generally been able to overcome these desires and it hasn’t generally been that big of a deal since I got through the difficult first part of my diet. But now that winter is looming, the urge to stock up on warm food and drink to combat the colder temperatures is all too alluring.

For example, I am a chocoholic and one thing that I absolutely love is a cup of hot chocolate. On a cold day, nothing beats a cup of hot chocolate when visiting Peet’s Coffee with my office mates to start off the day. During the summer I always bought a cup of sugarless iced-tea, which certainly helped in my daily caloric intake. But a cup of hot chocolate can certainly pack a number of calories unless one is careful in how they order it.

What I do is I order a small hot chocolate with no whipped cream. According to the data I have been able to find, a small cup of hot chocolate is 200 calories.  On a 1,200 daily calorie diet, that leaves me with 1,000 calories left to consume for the day. If I decide to order a small hot chocolate, I am sure to add a fast paced walk during my work day, a route that is just over 1 mile in distance and takes just under 15 minutes to walk, a nice 4 mph walking speed. And according to my diet/exercise database of calorie numbers, a 15 minute walk at 4 mph is 76 calories. If I do this twice in my work day, that adds up to just over 150 calories, leaving just 50 calories of that hot chocolate drink.

Adding in exercise routines to counterbalance calories that I have eaten or drank during the day is what I do on a regular basis to try an end up at the daily 1,200 calorie mark. And just to be sure, I add an additional workout at the gym in the evening.

Swedish researchers recently conducted a study that suggests eating more chocolate increases the survival rate of those who suffer heart attacks. The study wasn’t the most scientific, and it seems that most of the subjects were living in Sweden, which is hardly a reliable result for people everywhere. But since I’m Swedish and I like chocolate, this news certainly stuck out for me. The national chocolate of Sweden is Marabou which produces milk chocolate much more than it does dark chocolate, at least based on my visits there and the chocolate that I see on sale here in this country. And since dark chocolate is much healthier than milk chocolate, I would think that some other force is at work here than making the blanket suggestion that eating chocolate will reduce your chances of dying from a heart attack.

“…scientists followed 1,169 nondiabetic men and women who had been hospitalized for a first heart attack. Each filled out a standardized health questionnaire that included a question about chocolate consumption over the past 12 months. Chocolate contains flavonoid antioxidants that are widely believed to have beneficial cardiovascular effects.

The patients had a health examination three months after their discharge from the hospital, and researchers followed them for the next eight years using Swedish national registries of hospitalizations and deaths. After controlling for age, sex, obesity, physical inactivity, smoking, education and other factors, they found that the more chocolate people consumed, the more likely they were to survive.”

In my ideal world, this would be true all the time.

Read more about the study.