Diet Rehab: 28 Days to Finally Stop Craving the Foods That Make You Fat (25 page)

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Authors: Mike Dow,Antonia Blyth

BOOK: Diet Rehab: 28 Days to Finally Stop Craving the Foods That Make You Fat
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Natural Flavors
 
Whenever I lose interest in a food that I once used to crave, I remember that we were actually designed to eat what’s good for us—we simply need reminding of what that tastes like. Our current taste buds are a mix of both inherited preferences and learned tastes—a combination of what ancient humans learned to prefer and what our high-fat, high-sugar diet has taught our taste buds to desire.
Interestingly, ancient humans developed flavor preferences as a means of survival, and we still share some of their tastes. Sweetness was appealing because ripe fruit was rich in vitamins. As our bodies learned it was safe and good to eat nourishing berries, apples, mangos, and pears, we learned to like those tastes. Similarly, we developed a dislike for bitterness, since that is the flavor of most natural poisons and food that has turned rancid. Pregnant women have a heightened ability to detect bitterness, which might have been a defense against exposing the unborn child to possible toxins.
Our early ancestors also contributed to our current taste for fatty foods, since in a world of scarcity, fat was a vital source of energy and a way to store calories when food was hard to find. Our current food supply not only is more readily available but also is littered with options that are far sweeter and richer in fat than the provisions our ancestors were eating. But we were never meant to be so overexposed to them. As a result, we no longer need to listen to our hardwired impulses to seek out sweet, fatty foods and to eat as much as possible whenever we can.
If you’re reading these words before adding any boosters to your life, they may have the cold, ominous ring of a prison sentence. You may feel that I’m condemning you to a miserable, constricted life of either bland, uninteresting food or overwhelming, bitter, too-intense food. Or you may fear that I’m trying to deprive you of some of the few comforts left to you in a stressful, challenging time.
Believe me, I know what that feels like! But for the moment, please take it on faith that you
can
recalibrate your palate, just as I did, and it won’t be either dreary or unpleasant—it will ultimately be both delicious and fun. We won’t be eating exactly as our ancestors have programmed us to, but we won’t be completely prey to modern fast-food and processed-food supplies either. Instead, we’ll be making healthy choices that satisfy our ancient tastes while intelligently responding to our modern circumstances.
Are You a Supertaster?
 
Roughly one quarter of all humans are born with extra taste buds, a category known in nutritional science as “supertasters.” Supertasters experience flavors more intensely—coffee is more bitter, sugar is intensely sweeter, chile is hotter.
Supertasters may love food more than most—Rachael Ray, for example, is a supertaster, but she also gradually recalibrated her taste buds over years growing up in a Sicilian family that cooked with lots of booster foods. However, most supertasters tend to have trouble with such strong, bitter flavors as grapefruit, green tea, coffee, many vegetables, and some spices. As a group, they are incredibly sensitive to bitterness and taste it where others cannot. We don’t know why some people are born supertasters and others are not, but being one affects the way you eat and can prove to be a challenge for those who want to change their diet.
Supertasters usually find the bland foods they feel comfortable with and stick with them, often choosing an “all-beige” diet of potatoes, pasta, fries, and bread. Supertasters like salt, too, since saltiness is one flavor that can counteract bitterness. If you’re a supertaster who didn’t grow up eating strong-flavored fresh fruits and vegetables, you may have some difficulty getting used to these new tastes. The solution for supertasters is the same as the rest of us: recalibrating taste buds by adding more and more booster foods to your everyday life. Knowing you’re a supertaster helps you to understand why you have avoided healthier foods and gravitated toward an “all-beige” diet. For parents of children and teens who are picky eaters, it can help you to understand your child may have a genetic condition which may make it harder for him or her to accept new foods; it is not simply an act of rebellion or being stubborn. Supertasters will need to be particularly diligent and patient in recalibrating their taste buds. They will also benefit from the recalibration tools that follow.
To test whether you are, in fact, a supertaster, you can order a test on my website,
www.drmikedow.com
.
 
How to Transform Your Palate: Recalibration Made Easy
 
•
Mix a new food with a favorite one.
Try mixing some steamed broccoli into mac and cheese, or throw some lightly sautéed onions and peppers onto your burger. If you hate the idea of the new food, start with a tiny portion and gradually increase it. With bitter-flavored veggies, start by drizzling them with a honey-sweetened dressing that you gradually cut back or dipping them in ranch dressing, again reducing the amounts over time. Start with a dessert-spoonful per half-plate of veggies or salad, and work your way down from there. If you’re not a cook, you can start with frozen, microwaveable packs of broccoli and cheese, Brussels sprouts, corn, or peas in butter sauce. Another useful trick is to chop or grate your vegetables very fine and stir them into a tomato-based sauce. It’ll still taste like your favorite sauce and resemble it in texture. Gradually increase the size of the veggie pieces as you reduce the amount of sauce.
•
Think about the 4 Ts: taste, temperature, tint, and texture.
When my patients persistently have trouble trying something new, I talk them through the four Ts. If we separate the more daunting foods into these manageable categories, we can begin to approach them without fear. The key is to take the Ts one at a time. Going from sweet, hot, beige, chewy pizza to bitter, cold, green, and crisp salad may prove to be overwhelming, and then you may proclaim that you just don’t like salads! Let’s say you’re struggling with taking even a bite of broccoli because the crunch and texture make you cringe. Start with a pureed broccoli soup (preferably low-salt or homemade), so that you don’t have to deal with the new taste and the new texture at the same time. Once you’ve adjusted to the flavor, you can try eating the vegetable whole. If you struggle more with tint and temperature and don’t like cold, green vegetables, grate or puree one or two stalks of broccoli into a hot marinara sauce. As you become used to a little bit of the taste, you can then change the temperature and try a small bite of broccoli in a cold pasta salad.
•
Use the Oreo technique.
Create a “sandwich” around your challenge food by taking a bite of a favorite food, then a bite of the new food, and then once again a bite of the first. Beginning and ending with a familiar food will help you to associate the challenge food with something delicious and comforting.
Take Your Time!
 
Remember, it usually takes at least ten exposures to a new food before you start to enjoy it and experience it as comfort food, so be patient with yourself. For supertasters, this number may be closer to thirty or forty.
 
Feeling Full: The Science of Satiety
 
Satiety is the quality of feeling full, or sated. The word “satisfied” comes from the same root and means essentially the same thing. By this point it probably won’t surprise you to learn that satiety is both an emotional and biological function. In other words, we may feel hungry until we get the taste, the texture, or the eating experience that reminds us of our childhood or that somehow creates comfort for us. But we may also feel hungry—or dissatisfied—for biological reasons.
People who have food addictions or who are overweight often don’t
feel
full even when they’ve eaten plenty of food. They feel driven to keep eating, usually to get the serotonin or dopamine boosters that are lacking in their diets and their lives. One of our goals with Diet Rehab is to keep you feeling satisfied all the time, so that emotional hunger and brain chemistry deprivation don’t have to drive you to eat.
Now, here’s a fact that will probably surprise you. I know I was astonished when I discovered it: High-fat and high-sugar food has what food scientists call a
low satiety
value. That is, your stomach gets almost no physical feeling of satisfaction and a very fleeting sense of fullness when you eat it. High-fat, high-sugar foods actually leave your stomach more quickly than booster foods, and the portions are smaller than the equivalent number of calories of booster foods. That means that all calories are
not
created equal, and figuring out how to feel satisfied and nourished is
not
a simple equation of just measuring how many calories you intake per day. The dark-chocolate-chip granola bar or baked sweet potato fries will actually leave you feeling full for longer than the candy bar or bag of chips—even if the caloric contents of the two foods are the same.
Significantly, the more a food tends to tap into your addiction, flooding your brain with neurochemicals and burning out your receptors, the lower satiety value it is likely to have. The reverse is also true: The more stable a source of brain-balancing neurochemicals a food is, the more likely it is to be of high-satiety value.
 
As we have seen, some pitfall foods give you a quick burst of dopamine, the pleasure chemical that is produced by a jolt of cocaine as well as by sex, desire, gambling, and physical thrills. For food companies, this is great news, since the consumer comes back consistently to the addictive sodas, chips, candies, and pastries that are sold by the millions and billions, not to mention the addictive—and profit-making—appeal of all those foods loaded with “stealth” sugar and high-fructose corn syrup.
Luckily for Diet Rehab, booster foods have a high-satiety value. You’ll be less likely to experience cravings if you can tune in to that feeling of fullness in your stomach—which becomes possible once your brain chemistry has been supported with adequate serotonin and dopamine.
Kitchen Kindness: Rehabbing Your Home
 
I think we’ve already established that I eat cookies, chips, ice cream, and cake, not to mention the occasional bowl of mac and cheese. I eat them, I enjoy them, and I don’t plan to give them up.
However, I don’t keep them in my kitchen. I want to keep my sugary, starchy treats as enjoyable “food vacations”—not as daily staples. So instead of pitfalls, I stock lots of booster foods! Apples, grapes, bananas, baby carrots, and frozen berries can be found in my kitchen at all times. Buy some incredibly simple kitchen tools—for example, a mister that you can fill with extra-virgin olive oil. If there’s no butter in the fridge, the whole family will start to spray this flavorful booster food to moisten whole-wheat bread or even popcorn. Invest in a capsule-based espresso machine for $99 (if you’re like me, you will recoup your investment in just a few months by cutting back on your $4 lattes). I always keep decaf vanilla-flavored espresso capsules stocked. Or try some flavored decaf coffee or teas. They make for a delicious dessert while telling your body that the eating for the day has come to an end.
While you’re stocking up on all these booster foods, set yourself up for success by doing a pitfall food raid on your kitchen. There’s no sense in derailing your new plan with unnecessary temptation. Not having pitfall foods around all the time means they’ll be even more special if you decide to treat yourself. All these kitchen fixes are simple to make and will boost not only your own health but the health of those in your household.
Once you’ve pitfall-proofed your kitchen, making positive choices in your own home will be much easier. But eating in a restaurant can be much trickier. The key is to be mindful of your options and to decrease the number of temptations. For example, I try to send back the basket of bread that is often brought to the table. I don’t want to mindlessly reach for this treat food, and I don’t want to feel compelled to eat it. Not having it easily available is part of my strategy for not relapsing into food addiction. When at buffets, I scope the entire selection before putting any food on my plate. And now that I’ve recalibrated my taste buds, there’s nothing I crave more than a black decaf Ameri-cano to end a great meal. If I want a sweet treat, I have a frozen banana when I get home!

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