For most of us, it’s important to enjoy eating.
Flavor matters and we want to gain pleasure from eating.
We’re not going to get very far if we have to eat cardboard!
I remember looking at tofu and quinoa and kale other supposedly healthy foods and thinking they were kind of disgusting.
But, at this point, I thoroughly enjoy eating abundant nutritious foods 3 times every day.
Many of my clients are having the same breakthrough. I love hearing them say:
I love my colorful plates full of vegetables!
and
I never knew how much I enjoy fruit!
If you want to get breakthrough results for your health and your weight, you may have struggled with trying to shift away from eating too many of the highly processed non-nutritious foods and toward thoroughly enjoying highly nutritious foods like fruits and vegetables and beans and whole grains.
If you’re finding that difficult like I did, I want you to understand the trap you may be confronting.
It’s going to SEEM to us that the most densely calorie-packed foods, like those with sugar, are the best foods! That’s because we are wired to seek pleasure, and to seek to get it in the way that requires the least expenditure of energy.
In other words, the big motivators for our automatic behaviors are going to sound like this: “Give me the most pleasurable food that’s the easiest to get!”
This has been referred to as the Pleasure Trap.
It’s a trap because we find that eating those extra-pleasurable, extra efficient food-like substances can produce ill health, hormone dysregulation, and excess weight gain.
If only we could thoroughly enjoy the highly nutritious foods instead!
How can we do that? Here are 7 tips for thoroughly enjoying highly nutritious foods:
- Slow down. Recognize the trap of viewing the non-nutritious food like substances as best. Pause and think about what you truly want to feed your body.
- Food preparation. You’ve probably found that some foods you didn’t like in the past are actually really enjoyable when prepared differently. Make it a project to discover the ways to prepare highly nutritious foods to make them very tasty.
- Make flavor work in your favor. Flavor technology is tricking us into finding non-nutritious food like substances highly appealing. Intentionally move away from “natural” and “artificial flavors.” Eat real foods with rich flavor, and season with herbs and spices. Let your palate heal to enjoy the real foods.
- Reclaim your innate nutritional wisdom. Real, life-giving, nutritious foods trigger a deeper, more complete satiety. In fact, I suspect binge-eating is a signal that you’re eating something that lacks nutrition. Your body is telling you to keep eating because it hasn’t gotten any nutrition from that food!
- Put food in its place. I used to do this thing where I kept having a little more sweet, then a little more salty, then a little more wine, then a little more salty and on and on, way past when I had had plenty to eat. It’s like I was trying to attain some amazing culinary experience– every night. My mental and emotional energy was far too caught up with food. Eating has a place in my life that doesn’t involve thinking about it all the time and getting exceedingly excited about some highly tempting “treat.”
- Let appetite season the meal. You’re much more likely to have a healthy weight set point when you eat meals, not snacks. Give yourself time between meals to get a bit hungry, and that will make your meal more enjoyable.
- Use a gratitude practice. You can increase your enjoyment of your meal if you utilize a gratitude ritual, like some people say grace before their meal. This is such a simple and effective practice! When you offer true feelings of gratitude for the nutritious, life-giving foods you are eating, you will enjoy the food so much more. There’s even research suggesting that such an emotional state will allow you to glean more nutritional benefit from the food!
What about you? What has helped you more thoroughly ENJOY eating nutritious foods?
