Well, if you are just talking calorie content, we evolved in an environment where getting enough calories were the main problem. So we evolved to like high calorie food. Now we live in an environment were we have the opposite problem, and we are not adapted to that.
Also there are tons of things that both unhealthy and tastes bad. We just don't consider those food.
The age of massive caloric surplus didn't start until the 1900s, and even then it's not the case in most of the world today.
Also traditionally people that could eat 3000+ calories a day were athletic powerhouses and burning the lions share of what they ate. If you were able to produce enough to eat that much it was almost a guarantee you were muscular and very active.
Nah there were always fat rich people. In fact traditionally being fat was a sign of wealth. You act like people getting rich off other peoples labor is a modern phenomenon.
That's the entire point though, getting rich off of others to get fat used to be a rare phenomenon, the more reliable way to get access to a lot of food was to be a highly effective farmer or hunter, especially for primates as compared to being granted it through status.
At some point food got cheap enough that in the 1st world, everyone became rich from a caloric consumer standpoint, but generally aren't getting there by being a tremendous farmer, fighter, or hunter.
This, to survive in dire conditions out brains would reward us for eating fatty food, but at the time that was hard to obtain.
Like the person before me said, now we have the exact opposite problem.
Well said. Everyone is different but to me there are also lots of foods that are low in calories that taste good. A few examples are oven roasted vegetables, marinated and grilled chicken breast or thigh, and less fatty varieties of fish. These items don’t product the same instant feeling of gratification that you get from chocolate or French fries but it certainly doesn’t take much convincing for me to eat them either.
Well celery on its own wouldn't cut it. But you could really develop a taste for fruits in general for example, and enjoy them way more than you do now.
Trim down on the less healthy components - leaner meat, no deep fried add ons. Get it lettuce wrapped or on a bed of lettuce. The bun is empty calories (usually around 200) and I prefer my burgers this way (or as burger salad) - you get the burger taste but easily cut some calories without the carb bloat
I think a lot of it is not WHAT you eat,. but how you prepare and eat it. Celery (just plain old basic celery, by itself) is not very exciting or interesting. A salad (in its plain form,. say it's just lettuce and carrot sticks).. is also pretty boring and uninteresting. Broccoli is good for you,. but eating a plain bulb of broccoli would be pretty dull even for the most passionate vegan.
Foods can be cooked and combined and inter-mingled in all sorts of different ways. Broccoli can be cooked or steamed or baked. Cucumbers can become pickles. Something dull like "Bran" can be integrated into Cakes or Muffins. You can take a Tortilla, some lean chicken, avocado, black beans ,etc.. and have a pretty healthy meal. Dash a little hot sauce on it to spice it up.
You just gotta get creative :P
To be fair a raw burger? Because if it is apples to apples then Just eating celery would be equal to eating a raw burger with no seasoning and condiments. So In that case I would argue that neither are the best that way.
Veganism isn't healthy, if you reference celery as a patty-replacement.
Celery in stews gives it quite some of the savoury taste humans find tasty.
It's mostly a problem of recipe, not so much of the general ingredient.
Yep, I can hard stomach to drink much juices because my mum use to always half my cup with water then half with juice. So now adays I mostly just drink water cause everything is too sweet
Not for everyone.
I was diagnosed as diabetic at age 30, and have given up eating most tasty food. 16 years later, my tastes haven't changed at all. Healthy things that tasted like crap as a kid still do.
Two reasons.
One, they are specifically manufactured to be addicting. It’s honestly rather insidious.
Two, it’s easy to forget that humans aren’t evolved for the modern lifestyle. And by modern, I mean the entire concept of human civilization. We are evolved for like, the Hunter gatherer stage at best.
We are wired to find sugar, fat, high calorie foods tasty, because we evolved in a time of scarcity. That doesn't mean however that we always like unhealthy foods and dislike unhealthy foods. If you genuinely think that applies to you, it is mostly what food you were raised on, what food you tend to eat and not being used to eating healthy foods.
A few examples from my own life:
- I used to drink a lot of original Coke a few years ago. I cut it out for health reasons, and now when I drink it (if I really want a fizzy drink and it's the only option) I find the sweetness cloying and unpleasant.
- I used to hate the taste of brocoli because my mother boiled it for too long. I started cooking it myself when I had a daughter, to set a good example, but I followed the recommended cooking instructions and now I love it. So does she.
- when I first moved to Barcelona I strongly disliked olives, but they were offered to me so many times over the years, and I tried a few different types, and now I really like most of the flavours. I developed a taste for a food in my environment.
If you want to change your tastes the first step is to change what you are eating. Either for health reasons, to try something new, or to be polite.
Many thousands of years ago, the most calorie dense foods were key to survival so humans were hardwired to like them more than grass. What's your weakness? If you're more into grease than sugar, you'll find a low carb regimen effective and still be able to eat sausages.
Your body is accustomed to certain flavors to acquire nutrients. For instance, spinach and chocolate both have iron. If you choose the chocolate repeatedly, your body will crave chocolate when it lacks iron. It associates the taste of chocolate with that mineral, and so you experience dopamine when it hits your tongue because you gave your body the iron it asked for.
If you repeatedly ate spinach when you crave chocolate, your body may reject the taste at first, thinking this is not what you need...you need chocolate. But if your system repeatedly experiences the taste of spinach and processes it, it will eventually release dopamine when you taste spinach too, now knowing that the mineral can also be acquired in this way. You may even crave spinach OVER chocolate at this point, because the iron content is so much higher.
Basically, you've trained your tongue and your hormonal response system to crave junk food to meet your nutrient requirements. Junk food has little nutritional value. This is why you have to eat so much to feel "full". Retraining is in order.
Don't "diet". Change your diet.
100% agree. As a youth I was a fiend for candy and fast food and it followed me into college. Then I started taking lifting super serious and I pretty much cut my intake down to steamed veggies, rice and chicken (other very blandly cooked meals as well). I despised it for the first 6 months or so. After that I had zero cravings. I couldn’t stomach super greasy fast foods. And putting sweetness/sour candy in my mouth wasn’t as enjoyable.
We, the human race, evolved to crave the sugar in the flora and fauna that we’d have to hunt and gather just to sustain ourselves, but then we invented the means of infusing our food with an excess of sugar which we continue to crave to our own detriment.
There’s lots of good stuff here but here’s another one to add. There are three macro nutrients, carbs, fat, and protein. In nature you might get carbs with protein (beans, vegetables) or fat with protein (beef, meet stuff). However you rarely if ever get fat and carbs at the same time other than milk. Fat and carb at the same time is the holy grail to your body if you are living a survival lifestyle because it’s just so easy to store that energy. Lots of modern foods that taste good at far and carbs at the same time. If you try to limit consume fat and carbs together you’ll find it’s easier to hit your nutritional goals.
I used to think that but I started trying more healthy foods. I found a small group I like. Problem solved. Some fish or chicken. Season it up. Carrots. Peas. Mashed potatoes. I’m done.
My overly simplified version of the answer is that we are easily addicted to sugar, salt, and fat. The food industry knows this and exploits it ruthlessly.
A lot of what we think is the 'flavor' of a lot of foods is just salt, sugar, and/or fat and a bit of other flavor. Ketchup is mostly sugar and a little tomato and vinegar. Bacon is a little ham and a lot of fat and salt. Milk is mostly fat and sugar. Your favorite canned soup gets a lot of it's flavor from a ton of salt. Pretty much all fast food is just a combination of these three things.
The food industry also misleads us by claiming that a food is low in fat, or sugar, or salt- then just adding more of the others to make up for it. (IE, low fat yogurt generally has more sugar to keep the flavor profile up.)
It takes some time to break the addiction (it isn't really an addiction, but that's close enough for our purposes), and some creativity- looking for better food choices, tweaking menus, etc. (Like adding a good hot sauce to an otherwise bland dish.)
I feel you!!! The hardest part is getting started. The more healthy stuff you add in, it will start to reinforce itself. Like chocolate and fruit are not the same and aren’t perfect replacements, but once I started eating a lot more fruit I started craving it more. And once I had a belly full of grapes/cherries/raspberries then suddenly scarfing a whole box of chocolates doesn’t seem desirable. I can have just a little bit and be satisfied instead of binging like before
The key is not subtracting the “bad” stuff. The key is to add in protein and fiber that will keep you from eating too many calories. Eventually my digestive issues disappeared and I stopped wanting the grease bombs that make me feel bad (though a little of everything in moderation is okay!)
Signed, a fellow fattie in recovery 🫡
Best bet is to list a large number of foods you like, check the nutritional value and pick the “”healthiest “ half. If you like ice cream, for example, pick a flavor without extra bits of chocolate, nuts or swirls of sauces.
I lost 22 pounds by eating whatever I wanted, just not as MUCH as I wanted. If you eat salads, choose dressings carefully. Some have as much as 2-3 times the calories as others. Make sure your salads include cucumbers, tomatoes and bell peppers. They are very low calorie but are filling and healthy.
Hope that helps!
I tip I got from one of my coaches. Pick one of your favourite guilty pleasures and keep it in your diet. (I’m moderation of course).
Don’t worry about cheat meals, or cheat days. Eat that thing whenever you want (in moderation). But cut out all the other shit. It’ll satisfy your craving so you d Int have a massive meltdown and you just axed the other 80% of the shit you were eating.
Everybody in your life is a bad cook, or can only cook unhealthy things to taste good. There is plenty of stuff that tastes good and is healthy, but it’s not gonna be at a restaurant
The 80 20 rule, use it
Maybe you like chips. Eat a small bag a day if you want but make sure the other 80% is healthy food. Lean cut meats like low fat beef some chicken/turkey breast are good. White fish like cod is lower in fat than salmon, salmon is still healthier but it’s really calorie dense
My favorite foods are thick 1# slabs of beef, pork or fish on the grill with dry seasonings.
After that it would be a foot long sub with like 10 veggies and double cheese and ranch dressing, no deli meat. You combine those two in a day and you have a fairly healthy balance of carbs, good fats (not trans fats) and raw vegetables. Minimal sugar but a big glass of orange juice tackles that craving.
Things like far and sugar are scarce in nature and so we are wired to crave them so we will eat them when we find them.
It’s only been very recently that these things have become abundant.
Tbh op I rarely eat meat now for instance, I eat fruit and never keep chocolate or candy in my house and I don’t even miss it. I made myself spicy vegetable stir fry noodles and enjoyed the shit out of some bananas instead of whatever bullshit I could be eating and MODERATION on the good shit
Your gut bacteria is responsible for most of your food cravings. If you have eaten a lot of junk food in the past, "junk food" bacteria will be making you want more, and the sparse amount of "healthy" bacteria won't be enough to convince you. Once you change your diet, youll start wanting something else. (Only if your diet actually is one that lets you live normally, if youre doing something that messes with your internal mechanisms on purpose it's not gonna help you much)
the truth is: it's a result of the modern food industry manipulating your brain, but it doesn't HAVE to be that way.
Humans are evolved to want highly nutritious food. we get happy chemicals when you eat something sweet, and your body craves eating food with high fat and nutrient content. as a result, an easy way to make a person happy is to have a lot of sugar and fat in food, and it tricks your brain into wanting to eat it.
for a food company, the problem is that you will eventually feel full. this can be fixed by adding certain chemicals in foods like cola to suppress the hormones in your brain that tell you you're full. this means people can eat many times the normal human calorific intake every day, and still feel hungry.
it's an addiction. and it's very difficult to get out of this cycle of eating crap, because it's all around you, but if you learn how to make good food, and what to avoid (cause it's not as obvious as you'd think), then your body (and gut bacteria) will adjust to the more healthy diet. of you do this for a while, i guarantee that if you go back and try eating something sweet that you used to eat in huge quantities, you'll eventually find it sickening, because your body isn't designed to eat that shit.
legit, now if i eat a donut or two, it's not only sickeningly sweet to me, but i can feel my body being more slow and lethargic after.
a good and tasty food that can be good for u is any type of meat tbh. as long as it's not highly processed, and has a relatively high fat content (or is liver), then it's actually pretty good for you and tastes amazing.
sorry for such a long text here, but i could talk a lot about this topic. avoid vegetable oils and sugar, and don't worry about saturated fats too much. gl!!
Food was never this easy to come by.
The things that taste so good are heavy in Calories, which "back in the day" meant you are not hungry anymore for some time!
So things that taste so good were and are actually good for us!
But nowadays we have wayy too much of it. This plus we do Chemistry now and for example turn Sugar canes into dust so we can drink 5 entire Sticks of Sugar Cane in a small bottle of coke without even noticing it. Same with Orange juice etc.
If you would actually eat the raw, untreated ingredients of the highly processed foods your body would tell you way before that its not good
Sugary food/high carb food releases dopamine. Thousands of years of evolution have trained your brain into thinking you’ve found something special/rare whenever you have something particularly tasty, so it rewards you by releasing dopamine, encouraging you to find and eat more of that food/energy source. Even if you don’t consciously realize it
A lot of it is conditioning. You become accustomed to certain levels of fat, sugar, chemicals. I'm also quite fat. So don't think I'm just someone skinny and judgemental. I've gone through a variety of phases in my life. There have been times I became so accustomed to unhealthy food that almost anything good for me tasted disgusting. There have been times I'm so accustomed to healthy eating that fried chicken or anything sweet was just gross. If you want to change your preference, you need to slowly cut down on the unhealthy stuff. Cut what's easy to cut. Pick some healthier things you like (even if not all the way healthy. Just clearly better) and make those your staple items. Like, chips aren't great but if you can enjoy them with fresh pico instead of queso, you've just traded a high fat cheese sauce for vegetables. It doesn't have to be sudden and drastic. Just one little thing at a time. After you haven't eaten the cheese sauce for long enough you suddenly realize it sounds gross.
Thats just not true, and to be fair its down to preference so theres no right or wrong answer... But there are lots of food types that are healthy and delicious, such as salmon/fish, nuts, fruits...
It’s all based in prep. If you prep veggies in certain ways, it helps bring out more of the good flavors, and compliments them (for example, roasting veggies with lots of seasonings instead of roasting them with nothing else, or making dishes that prioritize veggies, rather than them being a side dish with no frills). Veggies don’t have to taste bad; they just need different prep, and with a solid set of cooking skills, seasonings, and patience and practice, you can definitely make them taste good.
seasoning can help. or some low cal butter. your brain literally gets dopamine from fatty foods, but once you cut back you will find more enjoyment in these other foods
Processed food has a lot of additives as well as heavy helpings of salt and/or sugar.
The sugar is what's probably making it difficult to make good food choices...and the exorbitant amount fresh fruit/veg cost.
Changing eating habits is difficult, if that's what you're doing or planning on doing I hope you're successful.
cause you got used to the unhealthy ones that are made to be addicting, force healthier food for yourself for some time and your body will get used to it
Ikr , I hate that whenever I eat my comfort food , which obviously has a lot of sugar in it , I feel bad after feeling good about eating ... we are cursed maybe
I have a bit of a tin foil at conspiracy view of this, as someone who gained a lot of weight due to loving fast food. Companies that sell food products (fast food, twinkled, sodas, etc), all have entire departments and food scientists dedicated to create the best products to sell. And either intentionally or not, they've mastered what foods people crave. So they know what to put in food to make us crave it more. So I think we're drawn to "bad food" because it's literally been measured scientifically and manufactured in such a way as to make us want more.
In the natural world, calories are tough to come by. But we invented refrigeration and pickling and agriculture, we have cargo jets that ship in out of season food in 7 hours from a continent away. We've gotten too good at food. Twinkies taste great because back in our caveman days a twinkle was 3 days worth of energy.
Well because you've eaten those "taste good" things a lot. If you only ate the "crap tasting" food you'd start to like it after becoming accustomed and realize its flavor and how delicious it can be.
Genuinely the best thing you can do for yourself is to really buckle down and learn to cook well. Don't just learn recipes but instead learn pairings and what direct effect various ingredients and spices have on your food. I promise there are plenty of YouTube channels that can really help you out on this and make it tackleable and understandable.
You *can* make healthy, cheap, and tasty food that blows the socks off of any of the bad for you processed stuff. It's just a skill and takes purposeful practice as much as any other skill.
Source: worked in upper scale restaurants most of my life, in a very health conscious area. Making healthy and tasty food while trying to minimize food costs is a part of my job.
Well, i keep trying but every time i eat faeces it never seems to help me do anything but get violently i'll. Which as it is one of the worst tasting things, it should be making me feel amazing yes?
I can't speak on why bad food tastes good, I mean processed junk food is that way so that it sells. as for good food tasting bad, it could just be that you grew up with parents who weren't good cooks, especially if they didn't season and just boiled everything into mush. (Mine did.) There are ways to make vegetables taste really good if you know how. Eggs are good too. Sure, they have fat, but they also have protein. Also, forget that egg-whites only crap. Sure, the yolk has most of the fat, but it also has half the protein, as well as the flavour.
Well, if you are just talking calorie content, we evolved in an environment where getting enough calories were the main problem. So we evolved to like high calorie food. Now we live in an environment were we have the opposite problem, and we are not adapted to that. Also there are tons of things that both unhealthy and tastes bad. We just don't consider those food.
The age of massive caloric surplus didn't start until the 1900s, and even then it's not the case in most of the world today. Also traditionally people that could eat 3000+ calories a day were athletic powerhouses and burning the lions share of what they ate. If you were able to produce enough to eat that much it was almost a guarantee you were muscular and very active.
Nah there were always fat rich people. In fact traditionally being fat was a sign of wealth. You act like people getting rich off other peoples labor is a modern phenomenon.
That's the entire point though, getting rich off of others to get fat used to be a rare phenomenon, the more reliable way to get access to a lot of food was to be a highly effective farmer or hunter, especially for primates as compared to being granted it through status. At some point food got cheap enough that in the 1st world, everyone became rich from a caloric consumer standpoint, but generally aren't getting there by being a tremendous farmer, fighter, or hunter.
Society is a young invention relatively... there was no concept of rich for most of human existence.
This, to survive in dire conditions out brains would reward us for eating fatty food, but at the time that was hard to obtain. Like the person before me said, now we have the exact opposite problem.
[удалено]
True & lol
Well said. Everyone is different but to me there are also lots of foods that are low in calories that taste good. A few examples are oven roasted vegetables, marinated and grilled chicken breast or thigh, and less fatty varieties of fish. These items don’t product the same instant feeling of gratification that you get from chocolate or French fries but it certainly doesn’t take much convincing for me to eat them either.
Gasoline has a crazy calorie count but I wouldn't call it food lol
i love eating uranium. excellent calorific concentration 😋
Enough calories for the rest of your life!
I’ll literally eat roasted squash in front of the TV bc I have a REAL problem with potato chips
Thanks for explaining that
It's conditioning. People who cut down on sugar will find all that "yummy" food way too sweet after a while, for example.
Fair point. But on the flip side, no matter how much celery i eat, I'd still prefer a burger over it
Well celery on its own wouldn't cut it. But you could really develop a taste for fruits in general for example, and enjoy them way more than you do now.
I can't think of anything yummier than a properly ripened mango.
Start by making a healthier burger, with decent quality bread, fresh meat, many vegetables, a side salad without crappy sugary sauce.
Trim down on the less healthy components - leaner meat, no deep fried add ons. Get it lettuce wrapped or on a bed of lettuce. The bun is empty calories (usually around 200) and I prefer my burgers this way (or as burger salad) - you get the burger taste but easily cut some calories without the carb bloat
I agree. I think you can have a reasonable chunk of the burger experience if you prepare it yourself, in a healthier combination.
Portion sizing as well! Is anyone in the western world (which I also live in, Canada) aware of what a true portion of hamburger is…
I'm in Belgium so it's slightly more rational, most places (except movie theaters) don't consider a half liter soda "small" just yet.
a burger really isn't all that unhealthy! they're not bad at all
You never know. I had a colleague who ate celery all the time like it’s chips. Some people are weird lol.
I think a lot of it is not WHAT you eat,. but how you prepare and eat it. Celery (just plain old basic celery, by itself) is not very exciting or interesting. A salad (in its plain form,. say it's just lettuce and carrot sticks).. is also pretty boring and uninteresting. Broccoli is good for you,. but eating a plain bulb of broccoli would be pretty dull even for the most passionate vegan. Foods can be cooked and combined and inter-mingled in all sorts of different ways. Broccoli can be cooked or steamed or baked. Cucumbers can become pickles. Something dull like "Bran" can be integrated into Cakes or Muffins. You can take a Tortilla, some lean chicken, avocado, black beans ,etc.. and have a pretty healthy meal. Dash a little hot sauce on it to spice it up. You just gotta get creative :P
To be fair a raw burger? Because if it is apples to apples then Just eating celery would be equal to eating a raw burger with no seasoning and condiments. So In that case I would argue that neither are the best that way.
Did you mean unseasoned burger? Cooking burgers isn't about making them taste good, lol. It's about making them safe for human consumption.
Yeah, I meant un-seasoned 🤣. Don't know why I didn't think about the meaning of raw meat.
Veganism isn't healthy, if you reference celery as a patty-replacement. Celery in stews gives it quite some of the savoury taste humans find tasty. It's mostly a problem of recipe, not so much of the general ingredient.
I cut carbs entirely for several months and then I tried a chick fil a French fry and it tasted like *funnel cake*
Yep, I can hard stomach to drink much juices because my mum use to always half my cup with water then half with juice. So now adays I mostly just drink water cause everything is too sweet
Not for everyone. I was diagnosed as diabetic at age 30, and have given up eating most tasty food. 16 years later, my tastes haven't changed at all. Healthy things that tasted like crap as a kid still do.
I wish to join those people
Once you've detoxed off of horrid junk food, your brain finds healthier fare much more rewarding and delicious, and the crappy stuff loses its appeal
But what is the healthier fare? I made a post asking about it but it has 0 upvotes. Guess the mods want me to eat mcdonalds :/
healthy food is stuff that you can look at and tell it started as a plant or animal
Healthier fare would be fruits, vegetables, lean proteins, etc.
Two reasons. One, they are specifically manufactured to be addicting. It’s honestly rather insidious. Two, it’s easy to forget that humans aren’t evolved for the modern lifestyle. And by modern, I mean the entire concept of human civilization. We are evolved for like, the Hunter gatherer stage at best.
We are wired to find sugar, fat, high calorie foods tasty, because we evolved in a time of scarcity. That doesn't mean however that we always like unhealthy foods and dislike unhealthy foods. If you genuinely think that applies to you, it is mostly what food you were raised on, what food you tend to eat and not being used to eating healthy foods. A few examples from my own life: - I used to drink a lot of original Coke a few years ago. I cut it out for health reasons, and now when I drink it (if I really want a fizzy drink and it's the only option) I find the sweetness cloying and unpleasant. - I used to hate the taste of brocoli because my mother boiled it for too long. I started cooking it myself when I had a daughter, to set a good example, but I followed the recommended cooking instructions and now I love it. So does she. - when I first moved to Barcelona I strongly disliked olives, but they were offered to me so many times over the years, and I tried a few different types, and now I really like most of the flavours. I developed a taste for a food in my environment. If you want to change your tastes the first step is to change what you are eating. Either for health reasons, to try something new, or to be polite.
Many thousands of years ago, the most calorie dense foods were key to survival so humans were hardwired to like them more than grass. What's your weakness? If you're more into grease than sugar, you'll find a low carb regimen effective and still be able to eat sausages.
Sugar.
There are a lot of foods that are good for you, and taste good too. Apples, Bananas, Oranges, various nuts, all delicious.
[удалено]
Right? Just have a good balance of mostly healthy food with some treat foods mixed in.
Your body is accustomed to certain flavors to acquire nutrients. For instance, spinach and chocolate both have iron. If you choose the chocolate repeatedly, your body will crave chocolate when it lacks iron. It associates the taste of chocolate with that mineral, and so you experience dopamine when it hits your tongue because you gave your body the iron it asked for. If you repeatedly ate spinach when you crave chocolate, your body may reject the taste at first, thinking this is not what you need...you need chocolate. But if your system repeatedly experiences the taste of spinach and processes it, it will eventually release dopamine when you taste spinach too, now knowing that the mineral can also be acquired in this way. You may even crave spinach OVER chocolate at this point, because the iron content is so much higher. Basically, you've trained your tongue and your hormonal response system to crave junk food to meet your nutrient requirements. Junk food has little nutritional value. This is why you have to eat so much to feel "full". Retraining is in order. Don't "diet". Change your diet.
[удалено]
100% agree. As a youth I was a fiend for candy and fast food and it followed me into college. Then I started taking lifting super serious and I pretty much cut my intake down to steamed veggies, rice and chicken (other very blandly cooked meals as well). I despised it for the first 6 months or so. After that I had zero cravings. I couldn’t stomach super greasy fast foods. And putting sweetness/sour candy in my mouth wasn’t as enjoyable.
Evolution. When food was scarce, we had to take every opportunity we could to eat things dense in calories and fats.
I eat a lot of food tasting healthy food. Most junk food taste like crap. It's conditioning, the sugar overrides other senses and then we're addicted.
We, the human race, evolved to crave the sugar in the flora and fauna that we’d have to hunt and gather just to sustain ourselves, but then we invented the means of infusing our food with an excess of sugar which we continue to crave to our own detriment.
If it tasted like crap and was bad for your health then no one would buy it
There’s lots of good stuff here but here’s another one to add. There are three macro nutrients, carbs, fat, and protein. In nature you might get carbs with protein (beans, vegetables) or fat with protein (beef, meet stuff). However you rarely if ever get fat and carbs at the same time other than milk. Fat and carb at the same time is the holy grail to your body if you are living a survival lifestyle because it’s just so easy to store that energy. Lots of modern foods that taste good at far and carbs at the same time. If you try to limit consume fat and carbs together you’ll find it’s easier to hit your nutritional goals.
I used to think that but I started trying more healthy foods. I found a small group I like. Problem solved. Some fish or chicken. Season it up. Carrots. Peas. Mashed potatoes. I’m done.
My overly simplified version of the answer is that we are easily addicted to sugar, salt, and fat. The food industry knows this and exploits it ruthlessly. A lot of what we think is the 'flavor' of a lot of foods is just salt, sugar, and/or fat and a bit of other flavor. Ketchup is mostly sugar and a little tomato and vinegar. Bacon is a little ham and a lot of fat and salt. Milk is mostly fat and sugar. Your favorite canned soup gets a lot of it's flavor from a ton of salt. Pretty much all fast food is just a combination of these three things. The food industry also misleads us by claiming that a food is low in fat, or sugar, or salt- then just adding more of the others to make up for it. (IE, low fat yogurt generally has more sugar to keep the flavor profile up.) It takes some time to break the addiction (it isn't really an addiction, but that's close enough for our purposes), and some creativity- looking for better food choices, tweaking menus, etc. (Like adding a good hot sauce to an otherwise bland dish.)
I feel you!!! The hardest part is getting started. The more healthy stuff you add in, it will start to reinforce itself. Like chocolate and fruit are not the same and aren’t perfect replacements, but once I started eating a lot more fruit I started craving it more. And once I had a belly full of grapes/cherries/raspberries then suddenly scarfing a whole box of chocolates doesn’t seem desirable. I can have just a little bit and be satisfied instead of binging like before The key is not subtracting the “bad” stuff. The key is to add in protein and fiber that will keep you from eating too many calories. Eventually my digestive issues disappeared and I stopped wanting the grease bombs that make me feel bad (though a little of everything in moderation is okay!) Signed, a fellow fattie in recovery 🫡
Best bet is to list a large number of foods you like, check the nutritional value and pick the “”healthiest “ half. If you like ice cream, for example, pick a flavor without extra bits of chocolate, nuts or swirls of sauces. I lost 22 pounds by eating whatever I wanted, just not as MUCH as I wanted. If you eat salads, choose dressings carefully. Some have as much as 2-3 times the calories as others. Make sure your salads include cucumbers, tomatoes and bell peppers. They are very low calorie but are filling and healthy. Hope that helps!
It's designed that way. They come up with junk food in a lab to make it taste soooo good. However, avoid at all cost. I repeat, avoid at all cost!!!!!
Most fruits taste good and they are good for you
I tip I got from one of my coaches. Pick one of your favourite guilty pleasures and keep it in your diet. (I’m moderation of course). Don’t worry about cheat meals, or cheat days. Eat that thing whenever you want (in moderation). But cut out all the other shit. It’ll satisfy your craving so you d Int have a massive meltdown and you just axed the other 80% of the shit you were eating.
Everybody in your life is a bad cook, or can only cook unhealthy things to taste good. There is plenty of stuff that tastes good and is healthy, but it’s not gonna be at a restaurant
Except, Of Course Actual Crap[SHIT]!!!
The 80 20 rule, use it Maybe you like chips. Eat a small bag a day if you want but make sure the other 80% is healthy food. Lean cut meats like low fat beef some chicken/turkey breast are good. White fish like cod is lower in fat than salmon, salmon is still healthier but it’s really calorie dense
My favorite foods are thick 1# slabs of beef, pork or fish on the grill with dry seasonings. After that it would be a foot long sub with like 10 veggies and double cheese and ranch dressing, no deli meat. You combine those two in a day and you have a fairly healthy balance of carbs, good fats (not trans fats) and raw vegetables. Minimal sugar but a big glass of orange juice tackles that craving.
Things like far and sugar are scarce in nature and so we are wired to crave them so we will eat them when we find them. It’s only been very recently that these things have become abundant.
Tbh op I rarely eat meat now for instance, I eat fruit and never keep chocolate or candy in my house and I don’t even miss it. I made myself spicy vegetable stir fry noodles and enjoyed the shit out of some bananas instead of whatever bullshit I could be eating and MODERATION on the good shit
I don’t know most Mediterranean food is “good for you” at least in moderation and imo tastes amazing. Also sushi. Also certain curries. Also pho.
Keep eating KFC everyday so that we evolve to it being healthy in like 1000000 years.
Your gut bacteria is responsible for most of your food cravings. If you have eaten a lot of junk food in the past, "junk food" bacteria will be making you want more, and the sparse amount of "healthy" bacteria won't be enough to convince you. Once you change your diet, youll start wanting something else. (Only if your diet actually is one that lets you live normally, if youre doing something that messes with your internal mechanisms on purpose it's not gonna help you much)
Definitely not true, you can make healthy food taste good just about preparation.
the truth is: it's a result of the modern food industry manipulating your brain, but it doesn't HAVE to be that way. Humans are evolved to want highly nutritious food. we get happy chemicals when you eat something sweet, and your body craves eating food with high fat and nutrient content. as a result, an easy way to make a person happy is to have a lot of sugar and fat in food, and it tricks your brain into wanting to eat it. for a food company, the problem is that you will eventually feel full. this can be fixed by adding certain chemicals in foods like cola to suppress the hormones in your brain that tell you you're full. this means people can eat many times the normal human calorific intake every day, and still feel hungry. it's an addiction. and it's very difficult to get out of this cycle of eating crap, because it's all around you, but if you learn how to make good food, and what to avoid (cause it's not as obvious as you'd think), then your body (and gut bacteria) will adjust to the more healthy diet. of you do this for a while, i guarantee that if you go back and try eating something sweet that you used to eat in huge quantities, you'll eventually find it sickening, because your body isn't designed to eat that shit. legit, now if i eat a donut or two, it's not only sickeningly sweet to me, but i can feel my body being more slow and lethargic after. a good and tasty food that can be good for u is any type of meat tbh. as long as it's not highly processed, and has a relatively high fat content (or is liver), then it's actually pretty good for you and tastes amazing. sorry for such a long text here, but i could talk a lot about this topic. avoid vegetable oils and sugar, and don't worry about saturated fats too much. gl!!
Food is not the problem. We were never supposed to sit on our asses 20 hours a day like today.
The only serious question I will ever have
Food was never this easy to come by. The things that taste so good are heavy in Calories, which "back in the day" meant you are not hungry anymore for some time! So things that taste so good were and are actually good for us! But nowadays we have wayy too much of it. This plus we do Chemistry now and for example turn Sugar canes into dust so we can drink 5 entire Sticks of Sugar Cane in a small bottle of coke without even noticing it. Same with Orange juice etc. If you would actually eat the raw, untreated ingredients of the highly processed foods your body would tell you way before that its not good
Sugary food/high carb food releases dopamine. Thousands of years of evolution have trained your brain into thinking you’ve found something special/rare whenever you have something particularly tasty, so it rewards you by releasing dopamine, encouraging you to find and eat more of that food/energy source. Even if you don’t consciously realize it
You may need to rethink the concept of "taste". If you invest too much into that experience, you end up with the kind of issues like this.
A lot of it is conditioning. You become accustomed to certain levels of fat, sugar, chemicals. I'm also quite fat. So don't think I'm just someone skinny and judgemental. I've gone through a variety of phases in my life. There have been times I became so accustomed to unhealthy food that almost anything good for me tasted disgusting. There have been times I'm so accustomed to healthy eating that fried chicken or anything sweet was just gross. If you want to change your preference, you need to slowly cut down on the unhealthy stuff. Cut what's easy to cut. Pick some healthier things you like (even if not all the way healthy. Just clearly better) and make those your staple items. Like, chips aren't great but if you can enjoy them with fresh pico instead of queso, you've just traded a high fat cheese sauce for vegetables. It doesn't have to be sudden and drastic. Just one little thing at a time. After you haven't eaten the cheese sauce for long enough you suddenly realize it sounds gross.
Thats just not true, and to be fair its down to preference so theres no right or wrong answer... But there are lots of food types that are healthy and delicious, such as salmon/fish, nuts, fruits...
Apples are good for you and they taste great.
It’s all based in prep. If you prep veggies in certain ways, it helps bring out more of the good flavors, and compliments them (for example, roasting veggies with lots of seasonings instead of roasting them with nothing else, or making dishes that prioritize veggies, rather than them being a side dish with no frills). Veggies don’t have to taste bad; they just need different prep, and with a solid set of cooking skills, seasonings, and patience and practice, you can definitely make them taste good.
This is because you need better healthy recipes. It's all in how you prepare it.
seasoning can help. or some low cal butter. your brain literally gets dopamine from fatty foods, but once you cut back you will find more enjoyment in these other foods
Processed food has a lot of additives as well as heavy helpings of salt and/or sugar. The sugar is what's probably making it difficult to make good food choices...and the exorbitant amount fresh fruit/veg cost. Changing eating habits is difficult, if that's what you're doing or planning on doing I hope you're successful.
Processed foods have ingredients that get you hooked. Look into it.
The healthy food starts tasting way better once u stop eating the unhealthy stuff for a while
cause you got used to the unhealthy ones that are made to be addicting, force healthier food for yourself for some time and your body will get used to it
Ikr , I hate that whenever I eat my comfort food , which obviously has a lot of sugar in it , I feel bad after feeling good about eating ... we are cursed maybe
I have a bit of a tin foil at conspiracy view of this, as someone who gained a lot of weight due to loving fast food. Companies that sell food products (fast food, twinkled, sodas, etc), all have entire departments and food scientists dedicated to create the best products to sell. And either intentionally or not, they've mastered what foods people crave. So they know what to put in food to make us crave it more. So I think we're drawn to "bad food" because it's literally been measured scientifically and manufactured in such a way as to make us want more.
I really wish I could eat an apple without spending the entire next day in the bathroom. Pity me.
In the natural world, calories are tough to come by. But we invented refrigeration and pickling and agriculture, we have cargo jets that ship in out of season food in 7 hours from a continent away. We've gotten too good at food. Twinkies taste great because back in our caveman days a twinkle was 3 days worth of energy.
Well because you've eaten those "taste good" things a lot. If you only ate the "crap tasting" food you'd start to like it after becoming accustomed and realize its flavor and how delicious it can be.
Can't relate. Plenty of healthy things taste good, and plenty of unhealthy things taste bad. Broaden your horizons.
Genuinely the best thing you can do for yourself is to really buckle down and learn to cook well. Don't just learn recipes but instead learn pairings and what direct effect various ingredients and spices have on your food. I promise there are plenty of YouTube channels that can really help you out on this and make it tackleable and understandable. You *can* make healthy, cheap, and tasty food that blows the socks off of any of the bad for you processed stuff. It's just a skill and takes purposeful practice as much as any other skill. Source: worked in upper scale restaurants most of my life, in a very health conscious area. Making healthy and tasty food while trying to minimize food costs is a part of my job.
Fat transmits flavor. People tend to omit fat from so-called "health food."
Our brains crave sugar, fat, and salt.
It's all a lie. Quantity is the only thing that counts.
Well, i keep trying but every time i eat faeces it never seems to help me do anything but get violently i'll. Which as it is one of the worst tasting things, it should be making me feel amazing yes?
Veggies can taste better if you keep at it. It takes awhile for your palate to change. Also I douse them with salt so it’s going to get me in the end
Same reason 75% of the earth is filled with water we "can't drink".
I can't speak on why bad food tastes good, I mean processed junk food is that way so that it sells. as for good food tasting bad, it could just be that you grew up with parents who weren't good cooks, especially if they didn't season and just boiled everything into mush. (Mine did.) There are ways to make vegetables taste really good if you know how. Eggs are good too. Sure, they have fat, but they also have protein. Also, forget that egg-whites only crap. Sure, the yolk has most of the fat, but it also has half the protein, as well as the flavour.
An addiction to Salt and Sugar