Health
One Hack To Kickstart Your Weight Loss
Whether you know it or not, those bumps covering your tongue have a larger-than-life effect on your length of life. If they’re hardwired to crave sweet treats and junk food, they will have a massive impact on your willingness to eat for a healthy bodyweight. Don’t blame your genetics. You were not born to love the sweet stuff. Well, you were. Mothers milk is sweet. However, it’s not mom’s fault, you should have grown out of it. If you can’t stop craving poor food choices, and are eating like a toddler, then you’ve trained your mind to develop a hankering for them. It’s not just the physical. You’ve possibly coupled emotional rewards with certain tastes, and this can give the positive feelings that fortify habit loops when it comes to certain foods. Sadly, good feelings don’t always create good health. Fortunately, like all habits, they don’t have to be broken, they can be hacked. Adapted. Turned to your advantage. You just have to learn how and why you should do it.
Is Taste Controlling You?
No food is ever going to sell if it doesn’t sit well with your taste buds. They’re the god particle of all successful products. Why else would you ever eat anything that was remotely bad for you? You wouldn’t. It’s this phenomenon that research in the journal Nature Human Behavior wanted to figure out. To do this, they looked at why you might grab a low-quality snack when you pop into the convenience store. It’s these little habits when applied over time that can really derail your health ambitions. Poor self-control wasn’t the root cause. You are stronger than you think. Instead, people are more focused on taste than they are on health. So, if your hunger plane was crashing, your taste buds would get the oxygen mask long before your health considerations ever did. How a meal factors into your long- and short-term health takes your brain longer to process and requires far more resources. Your brain doesn’t like to devote too much energy to simple tasks like choosing a snack. Instead, it likes to defer the responsibility to faster decisions makers. Your tastebuds. They know what they like and tell you right away. Snap judgements are a snack judgement’s best friend. The solution? The researchers suggest allotting yourself a little more time to make decisions about your snacks. Give yourself a minute to decide. Your brain’s cogs will whirrs slowly then grind to a half on a healthy option. That’s just one plan of attack for when you eat out. However, it’s worth keeping in mind that you don’t always eat from the local store.
Home Hacks
Where do you eat most? At home. That’s where you keep all the food you own. Despite home eating’s convenience, you can still be prone to make bad decisions under your own roof. To circumvent this, you need foods that tick the taste and health boxes. Put them in a convenient to reach place and you’ll be more likely to grab them when you’re in need of a swift snack. Peanut butter might be one such item, but if it’s not setting your cerebral cortex on fire with pleasure like it did when you were nine years old, then you should look to make it more attractive. Try a flavored nut butter, such as SINFIT’s chocolate craze peanut butter or their almond spread. Two tablespoons will give you 12g or protein and just 4g of sugars. Okay, so those are added sugars you don’t need but they pale in comparison to many alternatives out there. Slap these spreads on a piece of fruit or vegetable stick and you’ve got something that your tastebuds will make a snap decision on. When your brain finally has a chance to catch up, it’ll note that a source of health is on offer that supports leaner body fat levels, more muscle and better odds of forming the right kind of health winning habits.
STUDY REFERENCE:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01154-0
Photo by i yunmai on Unsplash.
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