Junk food is delicious. Apple pie a la mode. Brownies. Cookies. All taste bud orgasms. (I love sweet things, if you couldn’t tell.) I’ve tried to hide these feelings. Tried to be like people that I look up to that have found a way to never sweat mortal guilty pleasures. But the inner skinny-fat kid [...]
Junk food is delicious. Apple pie a la mode. Brownies. Cookies. All taste bud orgasms. (I love sweet things, if you couldn’t tell.) I’ve tried to hide these feelings. Tried to be like people that I look up to that have found a way to never sweat mortal guilty pleasures. But the inner skinny-fat kid sticks around.
So I’ll be the first to admit: junk food tastes better than the food I eat 90% of the time. But I don’t dread the 90% of my meals. I eat raw cabbage. Raw carrots. I don’t need a pound of brown sugar on my sweet potato.
Muggles often say I have no taste buds.They might be right. My response after eating raw ginger: not bad. It’s on video at 5:50 in this Chicago Gathering Sampler.
But my lust for peanut butter says otherwise.
But there was a time when I absolutely hated raw cabbage, raw carrots, and a lot of the things I eat now. Just like muscles are trained, tastes buds are trained. Unless a grandpa guru showed you the light when you were a kid, chances are your tastes aren’t used to “health” food.
Your first reversal step: find something you hate that’s also good for you. Your second step: eat it every day.
There was a time when I hated raw carrots. I vowed to put a raw carrot on my plate every day. I doused it with red pepper flakes to make it somewhat palatable. But I showed up. Every day. What used to be a potential puke fest is now a pleasure. I don’t dread raw carrots, and I actually enjoy them. My taste buds probe for their inherent sweetness now instead of gouging for my gag reflex.
So find one food. That’s all. One at a time. Get it down any way you can. It’s going to suck at first, but extract more flavor every day. Is it sweeter? Maybe saltier? More bitter? What about the texture. Appreciate some aspect of the food, even if it’s the fact that you have food to eat in the first place.
Something is making you not like the food. Find out what it is and then blow through the plateau or overshadow it. Just as you use progressive overload and level up your lifts, you need to progressively overload your taste buds. Build taste. And do it by running head first into your weaknesses.