Our Morning Ritual

by Caroline Wesley
(Canada)

My boyfriend is really sensitive to caffeine, and if he has any after 4 in the afternoon, he won't sleep well at all. After dinner some nights, as any woman does, I would have a craving for chocolate.

I always felt so bad eating it in front of my boyfriend because he likes chocolate even more than I do. Sometimes he would just throw caution to the wind and have some anyway, but he would always spend the following night in bed tossing and turning because he couldn't fall asleep.

Because of this, we started a tradition of always having chocolate at breakfast together before we went to work. This way, I could eat chocolate in front of him without feeling bad that he couldn't have any. It’s such a nice day to start of the day, with a little treat.

After a while, though, we realized that splitting a chocolate bar every morning was fun, but it probably wasn’t the best thing for either of us. We spent the rest of the day feeling like we couldn’t indulge in anything else because we had already had something bad for us to start off the day, in addition to our usual healthy grapefruit, yogurt and granola.

My boyfriend had pretty much decided that we should get rid of the morning chocolate ritual, and he would just have to learn to sneak in a treat every now and then at lunch. The first morning we skipped the chocolate, I was so depressed all morning at work.

At lunch I stopped into the health food store near my office to get a salad for lunch- when Xocai individual chocolate nuggets caught my eye- I read the package and realized that there was a guilt free way to indulge in our morning ritual! The small bite size serving, plus the health benefits of the acai berries combined into a powerful argument for preserving our morning ritual that we could also do any time during the day or evening!