Simple as that, being confrtoned with this idea is blowing my mind, do people think healthy food can never taste good? Is enjoying a poptart a sign of an eating disorder? Personally I think theres nothing wrong with deriving happiness from food, and never in my life would I ever think I’d have to specify that.
Edit-Thanks for the replies everyone, while I wasn’t asking for advice on dieting but rather a general consensus, I do appreciate it nonetheless and appreciate the replies as well.
Spices and sauces can elevate anything, while retaining it’s base nutrition. Enjoying food shouldn’t be an either or proposition. It should be a mindful exercise: is what i’m choosing to put in by system supporting or hurting me. How is it hurting me and am I ok with that. (High sugar/glycemic foods are the ones I ask this question of. They have an impact on mood/brain/energy).
Yes, I believe that is what many people think: that healthy food can’t be tasty. There’s even people who refuse to eat vegetarian/vegan food because “it’s just can’t taste good”.
But I do also believe that if your pallet is used to overly sweet or processed food, it can take a while to get used to the taste for greens and less processed foods.
Remember that some food scientist at Doritos put his kids through college coming up with the most addictive recipe for the chips. It’s not that we should not enjoy the food we eat, it’s that we are surrounded by food that was engineered to addict us into eating too much. Even salt can do this to an extent. Someone on this thread mentioned Pistachios are their junk food. Try eating unsalted pistachios and magically you can portion control much better.
I think we can enjoy good but if it becomes your number 1 source of joy or happiness, if you think about it all the time, if the thought of NOT having a certain food makes you depressed….that signifies a problem.
I would argue that an attitude to food which is obsessed with it’s role as “fuel” and has distain for all other aspects of food and food culture is actually an eating disorder.
I’m not here to tell people how they should or should not eat, but I do believe that disordered eating is a far greater threat to health and wellbeing than intuitive eating.
Imo food is meant to be pleasurable. Even from the very get go, with infancy and breast feeding people derive pleasure from the experience of eating. It is not simply fuel. There’s nothing wrong with this. But food science has allowed us to “hack” this trait for the sake of profits and we have a problem with processed foods. People know this and so associate pleasure and eating with junk food. Truth is, healthy food can and should be a pleasurable experience. Most of us just never learned how to cook or don’t have access to quality ingredients, or the time to prepare meals.
Intuitive eating has always worked best for me, because it let’s me have the space to desire all types of food. When I have that freedom, I actually lose my taste for most junk food that I used to put on a pedestal, but when I do indulge, it tastes great. Lately it’s been looking like a few bites of cake after Christmas dinner, with a midnight snack of kale and a bagel with cream cheese. Good nutrition is essential to my well being, but I’ve been almost dysmorphic with nutrients in the past and that kind of stress negated any benefit that I was gaining from good nutrition.
I think healthy food tastes great. I think you need to find a new way to enjoy food or change your relationship with food and nutritio. That or you’re just starting off. It takes time for your body to adapt to eating healthy when there is so much crap laced in the crap you see on shelves at gasstations and groceries stores. I think you should start educating your self on eat is in some foods and how it messes with your body. When I eat some spinach I don’t care what I have to do to eat it. Mark Sisson says do what you need to do. Slather your Vegis with butter put dressings on them. Do what ya gotta do. But your life is worth far more than the garbage that the food companies out there are brain washing you to believe is good just because it tastes good.
At the end of the day it’s about what you do consistently. If you eat healthy for 6 days a week and have a weekly cheat day that is totally fine. I mean that’s how the rock does it and has done it. A lot of body builders do cheat days too. There is so much crap out there for information too. My suggestion would be find someone for exercise and someone for nutrition and stick with them. For my it’s Ryan Hamiston for work outs and Thomas delauer for nutrition. I like some of the primal blue print for references and I take information from other sources but for the most part I don’t let other opinions pull me from what eat.
It’s extremely possible to enjoy the food you eat!! If you cook your food, you can control the amount of fat, sugar, etc that goes in it. You can also control the flavor!! Use lots of herbs and spices :)
There is nothing wrong with deriving happiness from good food. There is something wrong with thinking that there is only joy to be had from unhealthy foods in unhealthy portions and every single time you eat it has to be an experience.
Trying eating no sugar for a month or more and then eat some lucky charms.
I remember as a kid having my sugar intake limited and we were staying over at a relatives and in the morning I had lucky charms for breakfast I could not eat them they were so sweet. They in fact tasted bad but once that dopamine kicked in and my taste buds adjusted it was pure crack.
Point is our tastebuds can be manipulated(by processed food manufactures) and adjust to our diets overtime, so if someone doesn’t like eating any kind of vegetable or anything considered healthy its probably because they don’t and whatever they’re primarily eating, fried food, high salt/fat/sugar, processed, etc. that’s having an effect on their tastebuds.
It’s like people who can’t drink water in the morning and have to have/must have orange juice or coffee with tons of sugar in it, you’re training your brain/tastebuds to never like anything else.
Bad food habits are one of the worst addictions ever and companies knowingly use this to their advantage to push sales of their products.
You can eat healthy AND tasty AND enjoy your food.A pop tard is a processed piece of crap, it doesn’t even taste good, your taste bud are sort of damaged.
A homemade cheesecake or some protein ice cream or anything from scratch is healthy if eaten moderately and way more tasty.
A salad, another example, could be the most boring dish or the most amazing one if you combine correctly the ingredients and season properly.
I enjoy a nicely seared piece of salmon more than almost anything else in the world. Pistachios are my junk food.
That said, I have indulged in some cookies and other garbage over the past few days, and derived the predictable enjoyment from that indulgence… at the expense of feeling pretty nasty today.
If we never enjoyed the food that we ate, we would not have survived as a species. Our taste buds help tell us what has nutritional value. Sugar tastes great because there’s a survival benefit to it’s quick absorption and conversation into energy.
It’s not a crime to enjoy your food, but if you tend to eat too much of any one item you don’t feel well, that’s your body telling you to eat something else. And sometimes a bowl of spinach or a leaf of cabbage or a fresh red pepper will taste amazing compared to treats because our body craves it.
In my opinion it just depends on who you are.
Me? I don’t care too much about being the healthiest person. I just care about being healthy, and you can be healthy while still indulging in (and enjoying) the bad food from time to time.
If you want to be as healthy as possible then probably not.
I am a certified nutrition coach. While I don’t think its realist to be totally in love with every food we eat, we shouldn’t dread it. For general health, find foods that are palpable and if you want to enjoy a treat once in a while, do it!
Late to the game. I’m an RD and my job is to do nutrition counseling/motivational interviewing. About 85% of the time people view adhering to a healthy eating lifestyle as a punishment. It’s not my job to be the “food police” however, I’ve been told this from my patients so often.
Everyone should derive pleasure from food. We are not machines devoid of emotion. Viewing food as fuel only is detrimental to solidifying positive lifestyle habits.
More than half the battle with my patients is rewiring their beliefs/attitudes towards meal time. No food is bad or good. I absolutely hate when someone says something is a “cheat food” or a “super food.” It’s all just food that we need to find an appropriate balance for. There is room for all of it.
Our relationship with what’s on our plates can be the most “unhealthy” aspect of our diets.
I sincerely believe that any of us can look good and feel great while eating anything we like. You can’t get there by eating everything you like, but the journey doesn’t have to be unenjoyable. In fact I would suggest that it needs to be enjoyable, or it will fail.
In the Mediterranean, food is very important culturally and many people take it quite serious. It’s mostly healthy and very tasty. Not sure I really understand the question…no one wants to eat food that doesn’t taste good. But then I have no idea how people enjoy typical American fast food…
Attitudes to food and eating tend to be quite an individual thing but yes I do think we should enjoy food to a certain extent at least. No one has to include a poptart in their diet for that to happen however, lol. I have found that since switching over to a wholefood diet I am put off when I eat anything that is processed or synthetic in any way because it just doesn’t taste good in comparison to real food. Even highstreet chocolate and cake I don’t like. The diet has completely reprogrammed my sense of taste.
With regard the idea of deriving happiness from food there are schools of thought that would advise against looking towards food as providing any emotion. This is because it has potential to lead to what’s known as emotional eating. The opposite end of that scale would be the idea that food is simply fuel and needs to be palatable enough that the consumer can consume but nothing further. My personal opinion is somewhere in between. I believe that cooking, sharing, and eating are all great enjoyments but that happiness is best derived from situations where there are other factors that are supporting that positive feeling. It is not just the food alone, as that can lead to isolated binging etc. Enjoying cooking and sharing food with family or a significant other however, is one of the greatest joys I think.
It’s an interesting topic. A few years ago I read a study that purported that greater nutrient absorption takes place during human digestion when the consumer enjoyed the food they ate.
For the most part, no individual food is unhealthy, including pop-tarts. However, many of us have lost the ability to enjoy simple things like a boiled potato. One thing that you realize if you switch from processed foods to unprocessed foods is that whole foods are very tasty, and if remove the processed stuff, your palate adjusts and you enjoy eating simple, well prepared foods. Of course, Doritos can still give you that super dopamine kick but if you are eating good food, you crave Poptarts and Doritos less and less.
Keep in mind that some foods, such as a pop tart, are chemically designed to contain artificial flavours and excessive amounts of sugar for them to be ultra-tasty, unlike any other food you will find in nature. This will over time alter your taste buds and make all other foods taste bland in comparison.
If I start doing Heroin every day I will soon find myself not enjoying smaller pleasures such as a cup of coffee or drinking alcohol, but does that mean I should not enjoy what I consume and go for Heroin every day?
Personally if you are forcing yourself to eat food you hate all the time, you’re either on your way to disordered eating or you’re not gonna last through your healthy eating goals.
Now as to why that healthy food doesn’t taste good to you is a different matter with different solutions depending on the real issue at hand.
Diet change, if you are transitioning from an American high processed, high salt, heavy frozen food, lack of flavor restraint diet to a healthy one… You need let you’re taste buds adjust and transition in small increments. Going from McDonald’s and dairy Queen to salads, and fruits for dessert is not going to go over well in heartbeat.
Another big one is cooking. Healthy eating is not making salads for every meal… You’ll get bored. You need to discover healthy foods you like and go from there and create meals based on that. Maybe start off small and make hamburgers like you enjoyed before but with grass fed beef and a healthier bun. Or just throw some tomatoes on if you never get it with veggies. Start small.
Add in things you don’t enjoy one and a time. I hate sweet potatoes. But I try to make baked sweet potatoes or sweet potato fries every once in a while in hopes I’ll eventually like then and if not I can handle one food item I don’t like with a bunch I do. I also put sour cream on them to drown out the flavor a bit.
I’ve read somewhere: we are so used to eating junk food that we call eating normal fresh food « dieting ». Yep. Sad but true. I actually tremendously enjoy my eggs and fruit and salmon etc thank you very much
I do think there’s several issues that are going on.
If the food you eat and enjoy is protein and fat, then yes… Absolutely enjoy it. If the food you eat to enjoy is carb or sugar based then no, because what you enjoy is actually just an audition. I understand what you are saying, but you can’t escape the reality that what you enjoy is truthfully and scientifically just an addiction. Your body should not be having carbs nor sugar in it at all. That’s just a fact. Sure, you can have some carbs (minimal) and have the occasional sugar. The reality is that once you have broken the addiction you have to carbs and sugar you will no longer ask the question you asked. I used to have a sweet tooth. I don’t anymore. Now I really do enjoy my food, but there no more psychological pull to eat. You are essentially asking yourself to allow yourself to have what’s bad for you under the guise of enjoying. In truth you are an addict, like billions of others, looking to justify in any way you can to do something that is not good for you. Take the red pill, leave the matrix, realise what you’ve been taught about food and eating is a complete lie and start living your best, healthiest life free from the addiction that is modern day ‘food’.