Cathy Bouchard knows chocolate. Owner of Le Chocolat Bar in Naperville, she has traveled to South America to learn how Mayan cultures used the so-clled food of the gods. Bouchard said that eating an ounce of dark chocolate a day has cured her of fibromyalgia.
Chocolate is more than a confection to Cathy Bouchard. It is a miracle drug.The 54-year-old Naperville woman suffered from debilitating fibromyalgia for five years when she began eating an ounce of quality dark chocolate every morning. Less than two months later, her symptoms vanished.
Now she is spreading the word about the health benefits of dark chocolate in the seminars she holds as well as at her shop, Le Chocolat Bar, located at 408 W. Fifth Ave. Some of her customers say dark chocolate also has reduced symptoms of such chronic conditions as arthritis and migraines.
Bouchard grew up in La Grange and attended Northern Illinois University. She was a professional watercolor artist for 15 years. While living in Denver for seven years, she owned an art gallery in a mall and had a studio at Stapleton International Airport.
Forty-seven of her landscape paintings were published beginning in the early 1980s and she has sold more than 1 million limited edition and open edition prints in 45 countries. Her work has hung in galleries around the world and she was the best-selling female artist in the United States and eight other countries, she said.
Coming back to Illinois in the early 1980s, she and her second husband settled in Bloomingdale. In 1983, she entered, and won, the Mrs. Illinois Pageant and was third runner-up in the Mrs. America Pageant.
Her world changed when her husband died in 1984. Grief-stricken, she stopped painting. A few years later, heavy rain storms flooded her basement, destroying the majority of her artwork and other important possessions.
Bouchard went on to open a women's boutique in Bloomingdale and later, in Schaumburg. She married Martin Lillig 19 years ago and moved to Naperville. She sold her business and later opened Bouchard Limited, a bridal keepsake company in Naperville, which she ran for 14 years. In 2004, she opened Perfect Details, a women's boutique, and expanded it last fall to include chocolates. Now, operating under the Le Chocolat Bar name, the business will move to downtown Naperville later this summer.
Bouchard is the mother of three daughters.
1. How did you cure yourself of fibromyalgia?
There's a formula, a way that I've come up with, based on all the studies that I did and the research. . . . I came up with something where I tracked down high cacao content, not cocoa content, but cacao. All chocolate is made from cacao which is the bean which is actually the seed. ... I take one ounce a day of dark chocolate, very dark chocolate, 70 percent cacao content, every morning on an empty stomach. That's my theory. I figured it out based on the fact that through thousands of years, mankind has always treated it as a medicine, an elixir, a tonic. ... The conquistadors, the Mayans, the Aztecs after them, all knew that it was a sacred drink. It was always called food of the gods. It was a sacred drink. It was a man's drink. It was used for all kinds of not only religious ceremonies, but for health purposes. ... It was always a drink. It only became a bar in 1870.
2. What makes dark chocolate so good for you?
There are between five and 60 compounds, complex compounds in every food we eat. Broccoli has always topped the charts, tops out at 60. At the discovery of DNA they were able to analyze the foods better and now we've found that cacao has more than 512 and counting. ... Because it's loaded with these 512 complex compounds, it has got just about every good thing coming out of the soil that you need. I'm not a doctor. I'm not even a nutritionist. I just know what happened to me so I just started telling people my story. Then, as I opened the store I would have them buy some of the chocolate and eat it and enjoy it and (told them) here's how much I take and they'd say, I wonder if it will work for me? I said report back to me. ... By now I've got a study a mile long of people who have come back to me with results.
3. What is your biggest challenge as a businesswoman?
The only time I come up frustrated is women dealing in, quote, a man's world. I know it sounds archaic but it's still happening today. I talk to other female entrepreneurs who have the same frustration. It is still a man's world. ... We still have to deal with bankers and businessmen and vendors that don't give you the time of day because they don't really believe you are as big or as good as you say you are. They tend to want to work and deal with men. I had to overcome that and now I'm pretty confident anytime I walk into a trade show that I can command respect immediately.
4. Who inspires you?
I do sort of like watching how Hillary Clinton has commanded respect, gone through what she did and has still come out on top.
5. What is your favorite pastime?
I read approximately 150 books a year (about) the world around us, the pyramids. I'm not an expert on Egyptology, but I do have millions of useless facts, as my husband refers to. I find it fascinating. This is a whole world and when you go and see this King Tut stuff that they've brought up, and everything that I've read and know, I feel like I've been in the pyramids or been in these sacred places. I started studying it all because I thought I'd never be able to travel. So I traveled in my mind. Every night it was my ritual. And to this day, I still read no less than two hours a day and some days I'll read as much as three-and-a-half, four hours every night.
If you would like to see a particular Naperville resident profiled for a future 5 Questions, contact Kathy Millen at (630) 416-5204 or kmillen@scn1.com.
