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Using Flavor to Retrain Palates and Fill Up on Less

People tend to eat what they like.   But what happens when what many people like represents a revolving door that circles around highly processed foods and an excess of salt, sugar, and fat?   America, and largely the world, is feeling the devastating effects that such a diet has on the body, with epidemic proportions of overweight and obesity and an overabundance of diabetes and heart disease.

Part of the problem lies in the following questions:   "Why don't people simply eat more fruits and vegetables?   Why is junk food so appealing?   Given that food is the fuel that the human body runs on, why doesn't the body just naturally crave the fuel that's best for it?"

Flavor, taste, and smell all play a part in what we choose to eat but availability, accessibility, parental and peer consumption, exposure to foods, and habit all play a role in what foods we enjoy.   For those accustomed to snacking on Doritos and heading to the local McDonald's for dinner, the natural sweetness in bananas can be hard to detect or even be unsatisfying.   People train themselves to eat certain foods and employing an elimination diet which removes highly processed foods and reintroduces foods in their most natural state can reverse the habit.   Fruit is naturally sweet but people often lose their appreciation for it's more natural, subtle sweetness because they are looking for that "hypersweet" taste they find in processed, refined, and artificial foods.

To begin retraining your taste palate, use the following three techniques:

1. Purchase more wholesome foods and keep them easy to grab,
2. Practice patience and persistence by repeating exposure to healthy foods daily, and
3. Try flavor-- flavor training by pairing unliked foods with liked flavors.

The more you eat something, the more you will want it.   So if you eat lots of fast-food hamburgers and fries, you will want more of them.   But on the other hand, it you begin to eat lots of salads, you will soon crave salads.   Your preferences will change and your cravings will also change with time.   The old cravings will never completely go away but people seem to be able to learn new cravings.   And with time, the frequency of the new cravings should increase and the frequency of the old ones should decrease as the old environmental cues go away.

Another dietary approach is sensory-specific satiety.   It contends that it is possible for clients to train themselves to fill up with fewer calories by focusing on flavor.   This theory argues that flavor variety within meals stimulates appetite, increasing the caloric count required to achieve fullness.   Variety is the spice of life but too much variety can spice things up too much, especially when it comes to the kind of variety being added to many processed foods.   Some breakfast cereals contain more salt than salty snacks and some pasta sauces have more added sugar than ice cream toppings.   When you put more varieties of flavor into food and conceal one with the other, you turn on more appetite, so people fill up slower and need to eat more to feel satisfied.

As always, the shorter the ingredient list the better.   The closer you get to nature, the fewer unnecessary flavor additions there will be in that food, the more wholesome it will be, and the fewer calories it should take to fill you up.

Portion control can be difficult if limiting how much you eat makes you hungry.   The real goal of lifelong weight control is to be able to eat until you are satisfied without taking in an excess of calories.   Retraining your palate takes work and there is no easy fix but it is possible and very necessary if you want to live