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10 easy ways to avoid excess chocolate at easter

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Foil covered chocolate easter egg FoodTalk

 

The Easter Bunny and his Bilby mate are arriving very soon. Or maybe they’ve already leapt into your house and deposited their chocolates, buns and other ‘goodies’ into your pantry?

Get ready to face the little critters’ tricks and avoid their traps with these 10 fast tips and easy diet swaps:

 

  1. Hide the easter eggs as soon as you’ve brought them home. Hide them for the kids’ easter hunt. And then hide them once again after they’ve been ‘found’ at easter. The old saying ‘out of sight, out of mind’ really does work to reduce your intake of hazardous foods. By hiding the eggs in dark boxes, at the back of cupboards or deep in the freezer, you will eat less. The opposite is also true – ‘see eat, eat it’. If you can’t trust yourself to hide them from your mind, then get someone else to do the hiding for you. Keep them out of sight and you may even forget they’re even there.
  2. Give away what you don’t need. This is one for anyone who gets given too many chocolates and easter treats – teachers and nurses are particularly vulnerable to overload. Ah ha. Yes, you can do it if you really want success. Give the chocolates away today.
  3. Swap your usual breakfast or lunch routine and enjoy hot cross fruit buns instead. Freshen them up in the microwave and they’ll be delicious to eat without butter or margarine. But if you do insist on a spread, keep it very, very thin.
  4. Pop your hot cross bun supply into the freezer so you’re not tempted to pop one too many into your mouth in a single sitting. Try making French toast with slices of hot cross buns for a more substantial breakfast or lunch.
  5. Instead of celebrating with too many chocolate eggs, spend a few more dollars to buy some genuine free-range home-grown chicken’s eggs (and not the supermarket ‘free-range’ variety). The flavour is so much better. There is no going back to shop-bought eggs once you’ve tasted fresh home-grown eggs. The yolks are almost orange in colour and the whites are strong with a beautiful shine.
  6. Give real ‘home-grown’ eggs away to friends who really don’t need the chocolate variety. If chicken eggs seem a little too ordinary as an Easter gift, then consider the novelty of bantam eggs or quail eggs instead.
  7. Fill a basket for the garden for the gardening enthusiast. Seeds, seedlings and established potted plants are an excellent Easter swap to replace chocolate. Drop the hint to our friends and family that this is what you want. Give garden goodies instead of chocolate away to others.
  8. For the parent or friend who is always ‘watching their weight’, a bunch of flowers is the perfect swap. Once again, drop the hint if you’d prefer flowers to chocolate at any time of the year.
  9. Spend more time playing with the kids than feeding them more chocolate easter eggs and commercial fruit buns. Create coloured hardboiled eggs and paper rabbit ear.
  10. Don’t add to the damage by buying more marked-down Easter chocolates at the shops once easter has gone. And rather than feeling guilty or regretting the ton of chocolate and truckload of hot cross buns that you devoured, think ahead for next year. In next year’s diary, ‘make a note to self’ on around the same day you started to lose control this year:

Save the Easter eggs and hot-cross buns until Easter Sunday and then enjoy them on that special day only. There’s no need to buy up big before or after Easter.

What do you do to avoid the excesses that tempt you at Easter?

Add your thoughts, tips and comments about easy Easter diet swaps.

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