How Can I Include More Nutritious Food in my Diet?

One of our problems in this junk food filled world is that our taste buds get distorted by those over-sugared, over-salted, over-fatted foods. Not only fast foods, but also most processed foods are loaded with these ‘extras’ to extend the food’s shelf life and to take a cattle prod to our taste buds.
Check out my post – A Love Letter to Hostess Ho Ho’s – NOT for more details on this.
Trying to get off these foods can be frustrating because unprocessed healthy foods don’t create the same reaction in our mouths. We bite into fresh fruit and it doesn’t explode on the palate like McDonald’s Frozen Strawberry Lemonade. We need to guard against the erroneous conclusion that the fresh fruit doesn’t have much taste. I don’t mean to single out Mickey D’s except that they are the biggest fast food chain and sell the most.

I wrote about why you shouldn’t drink their Frozen Strawberry Lemonade. You can click the link to read the entire post, but one main item is that the drink contains ” … 67 grams of sugar  … 15.95 teaspoonfuls. Are you ready for that? In terms of a cup, that amounts to 1/3 of an 8 ounce cup.” It’s hard to compete with that kind of taste jolt.

Green Tea looks beautiful and imparts wonderful benefits to the body. I just don’t care for the taste, but I find a way to include it in my daily diet.

Here is an example of how I consume daily a healthy food that doesn’t taste very good to me. (I make no claim to a sophisticated palate.) Green tea leaves me cold in the taste department. I can’t describe it, but it just seems flat to me. However, green tea is super nutritious. Type green tea in the search box at the right for several items on its food value including a recommendation by Dr. Oz to drink it. Anecdotally, I have recommended it to a number of people over the years and in every instance, they have become avid users of it and reported definite health benefits.

Despite the fact that I don’t like the taste of it, I include green tea in my morning smoothie along with my vitamin pills and fresh fruits, etc. In addition, I also include it in the energy drink I make to take along on my bike ride every day. So, despite the fact that I don’t like the taste of it, I still manage to get some into my system every day.

Maybe you can do something similar with a nutritious food that you don’t particularly like. Can you mix it into a salad, blend it into a smoothie, hide it in a bowl of soup or cereal. The list goes on. If Mr. Lazy Cook can do it, so can you.

Check out recipes for healthy foods and see if there isn’t a way that you can fix it that would appeal to your palate.

As I have written in some of my blog posts on the brain. It is our frontal lobes that separate us from the rest of the creatures on this earth. That’s where our conscience resides and our decision-making takes place – our impulse control. Use your imagination and come up with an interesting way to consume something that doesn’t presently taste spectacular to you. Your body will thank you.

Lastly, Rome wasn’t built in a day. You didn’t get hooked on junk foods overnight. So, don’t expect to kick the habit overnight, cold turkey. Eliminate one bad habit at a time and replace it with a good one. You can do it on a weekly or monthly basis, but eventually, you will have eliminated the junk and replaced it with healthy food. How does that appeal to your senses?

Tony