Chocolate Chex cereal
I'm not normally a huge fan of chocolate or red meat (I like red meat, I just don't crave it or miss it at any other time of month).
However, during PMS/TOM, I experience mad chocolate and beef cravings. As I'm on a carb-restricted plan, I can incorporate the beef easily enough, but not the chocolate, until I tried this cereal.
The cereal is NOT low-carb of course, but I follow a reduced carb exchange plan, not a traditional very low-carb plan, so I can have (and should have) fruit, milk, and carbohydrate/starch exchanges. I just have to budget carefully for them.
A chocolate bar "costs me" 3 fat exchanges, 2 carbohydrate exchanges and 210 calories (and leaves me wanting another candy bar, and if a second candy bar is in the house, that's going down too, probably).
2/3 of a cup of chocolate chex is a better bargain and more filling, at 2 carbohydrates and 130 calories (170 calories and an additional 1/2 dairy exchange if I eat the cereal with half a cup of skim milk)
I either eat it with milk poured in, or I eat it dry, like tiny cookies with a glass of milk.
It completely satisfies my chocolate craving, which is kind of surprising. When I eat chocolate at TOM, it's never enough and I just want more and more and more (we can't have chocolate bars in the house at all during TOM or I'll eat them til they're gone in an embarassingly short amount of time).
By my current standards, it's still "junk food" because of the refined grains and relatively high carb/GL count, but it's a saintly choice compared to my old favorite TOM chocolate fixes (obscene amounts of chocolate, chocolate lava cake or half a pan of chocolate brownies, or a thick slice of chocolate cheesecake).
The quality of chocolate flavor may leave a true connoisseur of chocolate disappointed, but for a TOM cocoa fix, not bad at all.
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