Reclaim your tastebuds

Do you wonder how anyone can possibly stop drinking coffee, chocolate, chips, soft drinks, or other addictive foods, because they are how you get through the day? This is very common and probably why most people don’t eat well. Most people don’t eat enough vegetables for good health. When you walk into a supermarket, you can see what people eat, because if they didn’t eat it, they wouldn’t sell it. Whole aisles are devoted to food-like substances that do not provide nourishment to the body.

So why can some people enjoy eating “healthy” while others can’t? They either grew up that way, or, they trained themselves.

You can train yourself, gently, over time, to prefer to eat fresh fruit and vegetables and whole foods. You can actually live beautifully without caffeine (shock horror), and without soft drinks, snack bars, alcohol, shop-bought cakes and biscuits.

You can get to the point where those things hold no interest any more, but a piece of fruit or a salad excites you.

Modern food is designed to overstimulate the taste buds, and be addicting. We are being manipulated by food companies, by corporations, yet acting as if it is our free will that makes us apparently enjoy these foods.

Because historically food was more often in shortage than in glut, we learned to favour high-calorie foods when they came along, but they were rare. Now, they are in abundance, and you can see the mess that has made, with such high rates of obesity. Food corporations work hard to keep our taste buds overstimulated and reach for more. They even put things like ‘natural flavours’ in your orange juice- who needs that? But it gets you used to flavours stronger than normal.

Normal food, real food, fruit, vegetables, whole grains, beans, herbs and spices, nuts and seeds, wild foods, and occasional game meats…these are what we are built to live well on, because it was our food for a long time. But now those foods seem boring to most people.

You can retrain your taste buds. You can’t make yourself eat and enjoy foods you don’t enjoy. But you can nurture the seeds that are already there. What do you already love? Mangoes? Potato salad? Orange juice? Picking wild food? Fresh figs in autumn? Porridge on a winter’s morning?

I encourage you to start wherever you are and nurture the love of real food that is already there, even if it is somewhat buried. Bring in more and more unprocessed foods, and slowly change your taste buds to enjoy, and even prefer real, ordinary food. And notice when you eat the packaged foods, the takeaways, the soft drinks or crackers laced with MSG containing ‘natural flavours’, how you crave more and overeat them.

It can take years to retrain your taste buds. It’s not an overnight thing for most people. Some people do it because of a health diagnosis, often a serious one. And then they wonder what the heck they were doing eating the previous kind of food anyway. Because this makes you feel so much better, and you really do genuinely learn to love it, look forward to meals, savour your food.

Most people dont tend to overeat normal, unprocessed foods. The body seems to know when to stop. No chemicals are saying “eat more”.

It’s not about guilt. Please do not feel guilt over food.

Many people “mostly” eat well. And that’s fine, but surprisingly few realise that they are not really eating as well as they thought and that there are significant consequences, in future ill health, that they are not factoring in. Even people who think they are on a healthy diet. 5 proper servings of vegetables a day? Its not common, and that’s the minimum for health.

One of the great joys of life is eating delicious food. It is also natural to crave foods with hunger and certain tastes, textures or flavours, and to eat to satisfy those cravings. But people don’t realise how much they have been manipulated to crave foods that don’t serve them well, that don’t fully nourish them, that even make them sick….but make food corporations wealthy.

Its up to each of us as individuals to take back ownership of our taste buds, reclaim our right to enjoy wholesome food, and better health. One meal at a time.