Saturday, December 16, 2006
CHOCOTHERAPY
Sorry that I've not been posting to the blogs of late. I've been busy burning the candles at both ends and that doesn't leave much time for blogging. Even now, I'm leaving you with a recent entry into the Macmillan dictionary rather than my own words of wisdom. Is the Christmas rush leaving you feeling a little stressed? Here's the perfect therapy:
‘Lavinia lies before us, naked but for a liberal smearing of chocolate. She looks a little like Shirley Eaton as the golden corpse in Goldfinger, only browner and almost edible. This is not a scene from a fetish movie. This is a treatment room in Kensington, west London, and we are watching chocotherapy, in which a gooey mousse is smoothed all over the body …’
‘…Once our volunteer has stripped off, she is offered a piece of chocolate to eat. It’s a tough call, but it’s only polite to accept. “We want to treat the inside as well,” says the chocotherapist, referring to an “internal natural boost of essential minerals and vitamins”.’
The Telegraph 4th March 2006
With the Christmas holidays almost here, many of us will be indulging in our favourite treats – roast turkey, Christmas pudding, mince pies … all washed down with plenty of wine, and topped off with coffee and chocolates. And more chocolates. Chocolate coins. Chocolate Santas. Chocolate tree decorations. And ‘fancy a chocolate?’. If you love to eat chocolate but dread the consequences – i.e. you finish the holiday considerably heavier than you started it – chocotherapy could be just the answer.
For many of us, one of the pitfalls of eating chocolate is that it makes us break out in spots. But believe it or not, chocotherapy is a beauty treatment which, far from causing spots, aims to detoxify the skin. A chocotherapy treatment involves a chocolatey mousse being applied all over the body. The mousse is made from a high-quality cocoa powder which contains vitamins and antioxidants to fight ageing and rehydrate the skin. It also provides mineral salts to combat cellulite, and caffeine to help reduce excess weight. Yes, lying wrapped in foil much like a gigantic Quality Street, a patient can breathe in a mouth-watering, chocolatey aroma, but at the same time have their skin cleansed and potentially lose weight – it seems like the chocoholic’s dream, apart from the fact that the treatment mousse isn’t edible!
The ‘delicious’ concept of chocotherapy has spawned a derived noun chocotherapist, though there is as yet no substantial evidence for a related adjective chocotherapeutic.
Background
The concept of chocotherapy is promoted in the UK by “skinfood” company ISHI, who market what they describe as ‘luxurious gourmet’ skin treatments. Another treatment that the company specialises in is vinotherapy (sometimes called wine therapy), which involves being massaged with the seeds, skins and stalks of organically grown grapes – also thought to be rich in antioxidants.
Chocotherapy and vinotherapy are two recent additions to an explosion of different kinds of ‘therapies’ which people can indulge in in the noughties. Others include apitherapy, the use of bee venom and bee products for healing and therapeutic purposes (from Latin apis, meaning ‘bee’), fangotherapy, based on mud products (from the Italian word fango, meaning ‘mud’) and algotherapy, a treatment involving a warm seaweed paste.
Somehow chocotherapy and vinotherapy seem much more appealing … so here’s to a choccy and a glass or two – Happy Christmas!
Weight last time I checked was 78.4 kg but that was before I ate out every night for a week and held cakefests with my class during the day.
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Sorry that I've not been posting to the blogs of late. I've been busy burning the candles at both ends and that doesn't leave much time for blogging. Even now, I'm leaving you with a recent entry into the Macmillan dictionary rather than my own words of wisdom. Is the Christmas rush leaving you feeling a little stressed? Here's the perfect therapy:
‘Lavinia lies before us, naked but for a liberal smearing of chocolate. She looks a little like Shirley Eaton as the golden corpse in Goldfinger, only browner and almost edible. This is not a scene from a fetish movie. This is a treatment room in Kensington, west London, and we are watching chocotherapy, in which a gooey mousse is smoothed all over the body …’
‘…Once our volunteer has stripped off, she is offered a piece of chocolate to eat. It’s a tough call, but it’s only polite to accept. “We want to treat the inside as well,” says the chocotherapist, referring to an “internal natural boost of essential minerals and vitamins”.’
The Telegraph 4th March 2006
With the Christmas holidays almost here, many of us will be indulging in our favourite treats – roast turkey, Christmas pudding, mince pies … all washed down with plenty of wine, and topped off with coffee and chocolates. And more chocolates. Chocolate coins. Chocolate Santas. Chocolate tree decorations. And ‘fancy a chocolate?’. If you love to eat chocolate but dread the consequences – i.e. you finish the holiday considerably heavier than you started it – chocotherapy could be just the answer.
For many of us, one of the pitfalls of eating chocolate is that it makes us break out in spots. But believe it or not, chocotherapy is a beauty treatment which, far from causing spots, aims to detoxify the skin. A chocotherapy treatment involves a chocolatey mousse being applied all over the body. The mousse is made from a high-quality cocoa powder which contains vitamins and antioxidants to fight ageing and rehydrate the skin. It also provides mineral salts to combat cellulite, and caffeine to help reduce excess weight. Yes, lying wrapped in foil much like a gigantic Quality Street, a patient can breathe in a mouth-watering, chocolatey aroma, but at the same time have their skin cleansed and potentially lose weight – it seems like the chocoholic’s dream, apart from the fact that the treatment mousse isn’t edible!
The ‘delicious’ concept of chocotherapy has spawned a derived noun chocotherapist, though there is as yet no substantial evidence for a related adjective chocotherapeutic.
Background
The concept of chocotherapy is promoted in the UK by “skinfood” company ISHI, who market what they describe as ‘luxurious gourmet’ skin treatments. Another treatment that the company specialises in is vinotherapy (sometimes called wine therapy), which involves being massaged with the seeds, skins and stalks of organically grown grapes – also thought to be rich in antioxidants.
Chocotherapy and vinotherapy are two recent additions to an explosion of different kinds of ‘therapies’ which people can indulge in in the noughties. Others include apitherapy, the use of bee venom and bee products for healing and therapeutic purposes (from Latin apis, meaning ‘bee’), fangotherapy, based on mud products (from the Italian word fango, meaning ‘mud’) and algotherapy, a treatment involving a warm seaweed paste.
Somehow chocotherapy and vinotherapy seem much more appealing … so here’s to a choccy and a glass or two – Happy Christmas!
Weight last time I checked was 78.4 kg but that was before I ate out every night for a week and held cakefests with my class during the day.
