Size My Habit

Chocolate & Candy: Ice-cream Scoop vs Soccer Balls (diameter)

See how your chocolate & candy habit scales when comparing ice-cream scoop to soccer balls (diameter). Turn your sweet tooth into a visual spectacle. Calculate your candy intake in stacked bananas, total calories, or mountains of equivalent sugar cubes.

Size My Chocolate & Candy

½ cup (66g): 137 kcal, 14g sugar (56% WHO RDA)

Your Habit Scale

See how your consumption adds up over time.
Time PeriodEquivalent in Soccer Balls (diameter)
1 Year14.2 soccer balls
5 Years70.9 soccer balls
25 Years354.5 soccer balls

How It's Calculated

  • 1. Your input: 3 Ice-cream Scoop per week.
  • 2. We assume each ice-cream scoop has a representative height of 2.0 cm.
  • 3. This results in a total stacked height of 0.01 meters per day.
  • 4. One soccer balls (diameter) is 0.22 meters (≈ 0.7 feet) tall.
  • 5. The final result is found by dividing your total stacked height over time by the height of one soccer balls (diameter).

Why It's Important

Time for a sweet stack! Your annual chocolate/candy consumption, when stacked, would reach the height of 14.2 Soccer Balls (diameter)(s). Imagine a tower of treats so high it could make a banana look short. It’s a delicious, and slightly dizzying, architectural feat!

This towering pile of sweetness is more than just a fun visual. It represents the sheer quantity of processed sugar and fats you consume over a year. Seeing it stacked this high provides a tangible perspective on your snacking habits and can be a sweet motivator for making more mindful dessert choices for your long-term health.

Do you need help with your habit? See our list of international helplines and resources.

The Science Behind It

Chocolate, derived from cocoa beans, offers more than just sensory pleasure—it also contains bioactive compounds with potential health benefits and drawbacks. SizeMyHabit’s Chocolate Calculator assesses your daily bar intake in calories, sugar content, and flavanol dosage, grounding its metrics in nutritional biochemistry and epidemiology.

1. Cocoa Flavanols & Cardiovascular Health

Cocoa is rich in flavanols (epicatechin, catechin), which exhibit antioxidant and vasodilatory properties. Randomized trials demonstrate that daily intake of 200 mg of cocoa flavanols can reduce blood pressure by 2–3 mmHg and improve endothelial function.

2. Sugar Balance & Metabolic Effects

Most commercial chocolate bars contain 30–50% added sugars. High sugar intake contributes to adverse metabolic profiles: impaired insulin sensitivity and elevated triglycerides. The calculator’s sugar-cube equivalent helps users visualize the extra sugar burden of their cocoa treat.

3. Energy Density & Satiety

Chocolate’s high fat and sugar content makes it energy-dense (~550–600 kcal per 100 g). However, the combination of fat and sugar also triggers strong satiety signals via gut hormones (CCK, GLP-1), which may explain why moderate chocolate consumption does not necessarily correlate with weight gain in observational studies.

4. Neurochemical Effects & Reward

Chocolate consumption releases endorphins and activates the brain’s reward circuitry through anandamide and phenylethylamine pathways, producing mild mood elevation. Tracking habitual chocolate intake can highlight patterns of emotional or stress-related eating.

5. Behavioral Implications

Interventions that prompt users to log daily treats can reduce impulsive snacking by bringing unconscious habits into conscious awareness. SizeMyHabit couples intake data with flavanol-benefit prompts—“you’ve met your 200 mg flavanol goal today”—to encourage mindful indulgence.

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