Have you always struggled to fight sweet or salty food cravings? Healthy Food Guide nutritionist and Lose Weight for Life author Claire Turnbull explains how working to change your taste buds may be the answer to help break those cravings you’ve had since you were a kid.
Does your love for sweet or salty foods lead you away from eating well sometimes? I have the answer… Apart from the odd blue cheese and crackers moment and a delicious piece of my Mum’s Christmas cake over the festive season, what I eat day in day and day out is real healthy food that nourishes me from the inside out.
Like most people though, I have grown up with a weak spot for sweet things, it has never been cakes or biscuits – but given the choice if I didn’t have my nutritionist hat on, I used to opt for a flavoured yoghurt over plain, I would definitely go for jam over marmite (unless the marmite was with avocado of course – how good is that combo?!) and I would have a drizzle of maple syrup wherever possible!
Anyway, even though my diet is very good (without being some kind of obsessive freak which is not healthy in my view), over the last year or so I have been on a mini mission myself to move away from sweetened foods as much as possible – with fruit and the odd squeeze of honey being the exception. I have just really made an effort to remove added sugars and artificially sweetened foods – purely with the goal of changing my taste buds and breaking the lifelong cycle.
There were lots of things I was already doing – I have made my own muesli for years – the only sweetness in that is a small amount of dried fruit. I make virtually all of my meals and snacks from scratch (I can’t stand how sweet and artificial some cooking sauces are) and I have been getting into green smoothies and juices too.
A few other changes I made were things like moving to low fat unsweetened yoghurt (and resisting the urge to smother it in honey), trading diet drinks for soda water, sparkling water or spicy tomato juice and really overall making an effort to clean up my palate. It was hard at first and things tasted really tart – but in a few weeks, I got used to it and didn’t even notice!
To read the rest of this article and to find out how to reconfigure your taste buds, see Claire’s blog.
Image / FreeDigitalPhotos.net – marin