Learn to love Healthy Foods to Lose Weight

Do you know how your ethnic friends may love pickles, strongly sour foods, or rare seafoods that make your skin crawl just to think of them? Sometimes it is because the food is genuinely weird and divisive, such as salmiakki, or marmite, where only a few people, even in their own culture, like it.
But sometimes it is because the food is just not culturally ours. Our palate adapts to the foods of our culture, the foods we grew up on. This is why our mother’s and grandmothers’ cooking tastes so good, and why food from other cultures can be so shocking to our palates.

These tastes start developing even as we are in the womb, and become pretty established as we enter our twenties. It’s not clear why this is the case, as in theory humans have a very varied palate, which is crucial to our survival. But perhaps it is because of our varied palate that we need to develop cultural tastes. In the wild we would learn to detect our family’s safe foods by smell alone, letting us tell the difference between safe and poisonous foods. So perhaps our cultural palate is an extension of this, designed to tell us what foods are “safe” and which are not.

So what happens when as a generation we grow up on junk food? Quite simply: junk food become a part of our cultural palate. This isn’t too difficult, as junk foods are specially designed to hit all our taste buds just right. These foods are full of salt, sugar, and fat, the three rarest ingredients for our ancestors, and therefore the three ingredients we have an almost unlimited taste for.

But all this doesn’t mean that retraining our palate is a lost cause. Take, for example, sour and pickled foods. Very few people like these foods the first time they taste them. But they are a rich source of minerals, so the more you have them, the more your body says “this is good”, and the more you grow to like the taste.

This means that if you eat enough of a food that is actually really good for you, eventually your body will learn to enjoy it, just because it’s good. They say it takes eating a food 5-12 times to like it, but that is more a rule for children. As an adult it could take you upwards of twenty times eating a food before you start to like it.

Another important step is to not eat empty calories. Empty calories like soft drinks or chips taste really good, and they can even mask our actual cravings for nutrients. But that’s just that: a mask. You are still deficient in magnesium or vitamin C, but you just don’t notice it because you are essentially high on sugar.

There are two ways you can adapt this craving for fat, salt, and sugar to help you enjoy healthy foods. You could simply avoid separated fats, salts, and sugars entirely, and make sure you get enough fat, salt, and sugar from whole foods instead.

This could stop you from craving as much. Or you could add a little fat, salt, or sugar to your healthy foods, to get a taste for them, and then slowly cut back the fat, salt, and sugar until you are left with just the healthy food. Either way, the end goal is to stop having as much of the highly processed foods and to develop a taste for things that are milder, more bitter, or more sour, which are actually good for us.

That said, there will always be some foods you never develop a taste for, and that’s OK. You don’t have to enjoy kale, lemons, liver, strawberries, onions, eggs, or melons. If there are foods you simply hate the taste of, that is probably down to you as an individual, not all because of your taste buds and upbringing. So if you only dislike a few specific foods, you can probably get by just fine if you avoid them and focus on the food you like instead.