After my workout this morning I rushed home and was so hungry I was shaking as I pushed the ginger, cinnamon, lemon and apple into the blender. Multitasking like an octopus, my other arms were preparing the egg whites, salmon and beetroot for my first meal of the day.
I’ve heard it many times before, but noises like “eew! How can you eat that for breakfast?” is nothing new. As a nutritionist, I offer suggestion to clients for more fulfilling meals which are met with weird facial expressions as they try to conceal their utter disgust.
It all depends on your perception of satisfaction.
If you think that satisfaction means sugars and grease rolling over the tongue that results in a glow of bloated fullness, then obviously, the healthy option may seem a bit alien to you.
However, if your perception of satisfaction is within the nutrients that each ‘real’ food will nourish your good body with, you tend to ‘feel’ the goodness of the food, in an almost ‘trained’ understanding of how the goodness will come to you, how essential fats taste, the knowing of dark green and purple phytochemicals splashing into your digestive system. You know it makes you feel good, you feel light and energized. This is the satisfaction of healthy eating, knowing that you are refueling your body for a healthy life.
It’s a trained effect in a way that your taste starts to link feeling good with the habit loop, and this creates that desire or craving for that type of food. I remember back in the 70s when the milkman delivered milk in a bottle. Just milk. Skimmed & semi skimmed were unheard of, milk was milk, we put it on our cornflakes and in our tea and that was that. Now, as we re-trained our taste-buds to skimmed or progressing to green tea, the thought of guzzling full fat milk would feel like thick cream oozing down the throat. It’s just been re-trained. No different to when you trained your taste-buds to like beer as a young teenager. Come on! Any kid will tell you beer is disgusting, but enter teenage years and the peers of ‘men drink beer’, you force it down, feel all manly and it becomes something you crave.
Re-training your taste-buds with healthy foods may take some interesting reads in the benefits these foods can bring to your body. Cleansing, restructuring or rebuilding, immune boosting, intestinal health, blood health – there’s so much to enjoy.
You may also be able to peel yourself away from common belief structures that bond to words like, breakfast, lunch and dinner. Try just dealing with ‘meals’. You’re not bound to rules such as certain foods for certain meal times. Eat what you want when you want.
If you want a bowl of broccoli with salmon for meal 1 at 7am – why not?
If you’ve just said “eeeww!” don’t worry – that’s normal in your current state of perception.
You never know, one day someone will offer you a greasy bacon sandwich on white bread with a milky sugary tea; you will only picture empty nutrients, the demise of your cardio health and the expansion of your belly and think “eeeewwww!”
The satisfaction of eating is purely perceptional.
