Chocolate Cake and the Gym
By Bernadette A. Moyer

Chocolate cake and the gym is pretty much my life where I enjoy moving from the sweet melty chocolate cake experience to the hot sweaty and salty work out experience at the gym. It is one extreme to the other and plenty of good and bad stuff in the middle.

Like life it can be sweet and easy or hard and rough. But it is also a testament to a rich and full life filled with a variety of experiences. Maybe the chocolate cake makes the gym more tolerable? Or does the gym make the chocolate cake more worthy of consumption?

Yesterday I literally baked a pumpkin pie and chocolate chip/walnut cookies before I headed out to the gym for an hour swim and a 15-minute sauna. I met my steps goal with more than 10,000 steps and I enjoyed two cookies! It felt great! It felt like balance! It felt rich!

In the deeper sense when life is tough and we are experiencing a rough patch we need to remind ourselves that whatever it is, it is only one part of the total picture. Nothing is all good or all bad.

“The very purpose of life is happiness, which is sustained by hope. We have no guarantee about the future, but we exist in the hope of something better. Hope means keeping going, thinking “I can do this.” It brings inner strength, self-confidence, the ability to do whatever we do honestly, truthfully and transparently.” – Dalai Lama

More and more I try to enjoy the extremes in life the rich experience of a really fierce workout at the gym along with that full sensory experience of enjoying a piece of homemade chocolate cake.

Now for the really serious stuff, the best chocolate cake by far is the Classic Hershey cocoa cake. It includes 11 ingredients and certainly is a lot more work than a box cake but it stays moist long and is so good it really does not need any icing. Powdered sugar on top looks great; add some sliced berries and if that cake isn’t enough chocolate for you, the Hershey cocoa cans also include their chocolate icing recipe too. It’s really good and really rich.

What does a rich life look like for you?
What does it include?
Where do you draw a balance?
What do you work toward?

How do you treat yourself?

“None of us are getting out of here alive, so please stop treating yourself like an after- thought. Eat the delicious food. Walk in the sunshine. Jump in the ocean. Say the truth that you’re carrying around in your heart like a hidden treasure. Be silly. Be kind. Be weird. There’s no time for anything else.” Richard Gere

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