Who could resist? Almost as soon as we arrived Down East (that's what they call the northern coast of Maine) my Aunt Barbara invited us over for haddock chowder and a walk across the bridge from her home in Calais to Canada for a tour of the Ganong chocolate factory.

While there, we ducked into this place, a chocolate museum! The best part?

Plates of chocolate placed all around the exhibits. When we paid the $5 entry fee, the young man at the counter said to eat as much chocolate we liked. The baby girl and I high-fived it and went right on in.

Back home, the scale doesn’t say that I require bariatric surgery, just a few days of austere eating and a week of punishing workouts as penance.

Now a great thing about being a food writer (aka staff epicure), is that I get all sorts of foodstuffs in the mail. Why, when I got back to my desk, there was a sturdy box of beer (which I promptly dispatched to the LINK beer writer). There was also a box of FullBars, developed by a bariatric doc. He calls them “bariatric surgery in a bar.”

Could their timing be any better?

Basically, the directions say to eat a FullBar and drink a glass of water 30 minutes before a meal and you will eat less. They cite a clinical trial where participants lost an average of nearly 12 pounds over a three-month period. They simply ate less because they were full when they bellied up to the table.

So did it work? Absolutely. The bars are pretty big, about the size of three or four granola type bars, and you know how we Americans like big. I tore into the Cocoa Chip bar, which has 170 calories, 3 grams of fat, 4 grams of fiber and 5 grams of protein. It tasted sort of like Cocoa Puffs studded with chocolate shavings. Pretty satisfying, and I wasn’t even hungry for lunch.

I’ll be eating another one and downing a big glass of water tonight at 6 p.m., 30 minutes before the third and final round of The Pilot’s “Dream Team” cake competition. We are expecting about 30 cakes tonight – chocolate-iced cakes, German chocolate cakes, angel food cakes.

If the doc is right, I’ll only want a nibble.