Chocolate Chocolate CHOCOLATE AAAAGH!

While my birthday was last Wednesday I did not really celebrate it at all.  My husband was sick that day and I had too much going on with kids to do much for myself.  Then Saturday I thought I had caught a break.  My older 2 kids were at their dad's, Kris went to work, and Autumn got invited to a friend's house for a couple of hours.  I was going to be......................ALONE!  I could do a few things around the house that I had wanted to get to, or I could sit on my butt and do nothing, or I could go for a walk, who knows!

Well that lasted for a very, very, VERY short time.  It was warm yet rainy.  Very rainy.  And because of the extreme cold we have had here over the past few weeks we had nothing but ice for that rain to fall upon.  Our basement, which is not finished off, got overwhelmed like everyone else's basement did during the flooding of 2011 that saw underground water tables rise to flood stage throughout Vermont.  Click HERE to view an album of photos from this historic and horrible event!  The water came up underneath my house and in through cracks in the floor of the basement.  We also had a time where it rained so hard in the winter that it came in through our large well window down there, breaking the seal of concrete.  That is easily remedied by sand bags.  This time the water was funneling off the road because of how the ice had formed and under my front porch, where there exists another smaller window.  That window could not take the ridiculous amount of water pressing into it and the seal broke and we had waterfalls. There goes my gym and photography studio. At least I found this incredible energy within myself and did things I did not know I could do, like practically heave a twin box spring up 14 stairs.  UP.

What does all this have to do with chocolate, you ask?  Well, because my husband and I had to spend all Saturday afternoon and evening trying desperately to save our basement and stop it from flooding worse than it already was, he was unable to calmly and slowly make me a cake that fit into my new dietary guidelines.  So instead he decided to make a from scratch chocolate cake, dubbed "The Best Chocolate Cake Ever" and found on addapinch.com  He did keep it mostly dairy free (although I learned after he put chocolate chips into the frosting), but in no universe was it SUGAR free.  Or even reduced.

We took it to my parents' house on the same day that he made it: yesterday.  The frosting was made with Coconut Milk instead of regular milk (it was supposed to have been made with coconut cream....) but was too runny so instead of frosting the cake with it I had the brilliant idea to pour it into dishes and we could dip the cake in.  Very fancy and decadent-like.  And easy to over eat the frosting.   I had already eaten probably 2 cups of Chex Mix which I did not realize had a stick of butter in it until I had gotten going on it.  Oh well, I just kept going.  Then we had the cake.  It really was THE BEST CHOCOLATE CAKE EVER, and the frosting "dip" was coconut-chocolate flavored which is one of my favorite things.  MY LORD.  I ate a very large piece.  And then had a tiny slice to help finish off the frosting.  Then I didn't eat dinner, but instead had another good sized piece about 4 hours after the first one.  SO GOOD.

However, even though it was so TASTY good I started feeling not so good.  After I had eaten the Chex Mix and first piece of cake my mom remarked on how tired I looked.  That's when I noticed I had started slumping and spacing out.  I felt very...blah.  I hadn't felt like that in 2 straight days which is a lot for me.  Then when I got home I entered the entire cake recipe into the MyFitnessPal recipe builder to find out just how badly I had hurt myself.  It was bad.  Real bad.  As demonstrated here in my sugar report:

My.  God.


MFP has this cute little button at the end of each day that you get to push that tells you how much you would weigh if you ate like that every day for 5 weeks.  Mine had me gaining just about 20 lb.  And that was without having any soda, ice cream, bread, dinner, etc.  In face I was only at about 17 g sugar until I ate that cake.  It really is eye opening.

Today I had a hard time getting out of bed.  I got dizzy when I woke up like before, and my stomach is not happy with me.  I'm also finding myself much hungrier than I have been.  I'm sticking with my dairy free today and as you can see above I have gone over my daily sugar goal and its only 3pm.  I will not be having any sweets for the rest of the day and hopefully dinner will be something like brown rice with tuna and black beans or something.

This really is a struggle.  All of our holidays and celebrations seem to rely heavily on sugar and it is considered rude and a bummer if you don't participate, especially in your own birthday party.  It was bad enough I had to turn down the Blue Bunny Birthday Ice Cream, which looked delicious.