Last week I gave a presentation on wholefood plant-based eating at an employee wellness event. After describing all the health benefits of a way of eating based on minimally processed plant foods, a man in the audience raised his hand and asked
“Does this diet allow for cheat days?”
I explained that he was free to eat whatever he wanted because this is a way of eating, not a ‘diet’, but he will probably find that the more healthfully he eats, the less appealing his current ‘treat foods’ taste, and the worse he feels after eating them.
Not only has this phenomenon been my personal experience, it has also been reported to me by client after client: After a couple of weeks of eating only fruit, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds, all in a whole or minimally processed form, your palate is transformed. Chips taste greasy and offensively salty. Cupcakes are nauseatingly sweet. Take-away and restaurant food upsets your stomach. And on the other hand you find yourself craving salad – yes, really!
After the presentation, I realised there was so much more than I wanted to say in response to the man’s question – isn’t it always the way? Because on reflection, it struck me that his question arose from an underlying belief system that is terribly common, and probably does more to stop people from making health-promoting lifestyle changes than any other factor.
The belief system gives rise to a cost-benefit analysis that runs like this:
Food is a major source of pleasure for me.
The foods that I currently find enjoyable are the only foods I could ever enjoy.
I could never come to enjoy eating foods that I currently don’t enjoy.
Therefore, giving up the foods that I like now and replacing them with other foods would diminish my pleasure.
Nothing could compensate me for that loss of pleasure.
Therefore, changing my way of eating is not worth the effort because the costs outweigh the benefits.
Of course, there are two factors that are completely missing from this cost-benefit analysis, which in most cases is running at a thoroughly unconscious level.
The first is that, as mentioned above, our taste preferences not only can, but do change when we change our way of eating. I’m sure this has already happened to you at some point in your life. I never enjoyed green vegetables when I was a child (could that have anything to do with the way my mother cooked them? ;-)), and I developed a pathological aversion to pumpkin in my teens. But now, broccoli and kale are among my favourite foods, and I could happily live on a diet of baked pumpkin and pumpkin soup for weeks at a stretch.
As Doug Lisle and Alan Goldhamer explain in their book The Pleasure Trap, the human brain is wired to derive pleasure from eating. If we eat a diet of whole natural foods, we get a moderate pleasure response from eating. If we amplify the pleasure-provoking components of food (sugar, salt and fat) by processing and refining food – say, turning a fresh apple into an apple pie – at first we’ll get a heightened pleasure response from our artificially sweet, salty, fatty food.
But after a short while, the brain cells that are being overstimulated by all that pleasure signalling start to go ‘deaf’, the brain’s pleasure centre recalibrates, and we end up back where we started – deriving a moderate amount of pleasure from our food.
It’s called ‘tolerance’, and it’s the same phenomenon that occurs in illicit drug use: over time, larger and larger doses of the drug are required to get the same ‘high’ that users got with a low dose when they first tried the drug.
And as with drugs, when people first quit eating processed foods, they have withdrawal symptoms – one of which is the inability to derive pleasure from eating whole natural foods, which taste bland in comparison to their accustomed diet.
Fortunately, the brain’s pleasure centre once again recalibrates, and before long, unprocessed foods taste good again, and you’re back to deriving a moderate, evolutionarily normal amount of pleasure from your food. In other words, just as much pleasure as you got from the processed food that you thought was so wonderful. And as mentioned above, after eating healthfully for a while, that processed food simply doesn’t taste good anymore and you notice how bad you feel after eating it.
That brings me to the second factor that’s missing from the cost-benefit analysis. This may shock you, but food is not the only pleasure in life. Read that again – I want it to sink in.
Having worked with thousands of people in over 20 years of clinical practice, I can confidently say that there are many other sources of pleasure that you can experience after you start building health-supporting habits. Here are some that my clients commonly report:
- Feeling comfortable in your body, and in tune with its needs.
- Noticing that you’re getting stronger and fitter, and that it’s actually enjoyable to move your body around.
- Having the energy to play with children or grandchildren.
- Enjoying travel more, because you’re not exhausted at the end of the day.
- Being able to wear clothes that you like, rather than clothes that cover you up.
- Having a brighter mood.
- And last but definitely not least, enjoying sex more – partly because you have more energy and body confidence, and partly because of better blood flow to those crucial parts of your anatomy!
I guess you can sum it all up with the saying
“Nothing tastes as good as being healthy feels.”
… although that said, healthy food does taste delicious!
So here’s what I’d like to say to the man who asked me if this way of eating allows cheat days:
The person you’re cheating when you have a cheat day is yourself. Cheat days keep you stuck in the Pleasure Trap, because when you keep ‘teasing’ your taste buds with highly processed foods, you stall your brain’s ability to recalibrate its pleasure response so that you can enjoy healthy food.
And cheat days keep you stuck in the diet mentality – the notion that you have to deprive yourself of dietary pleasure in order to achieve your weight loss goal. How about figuring out new ways to experience pleasure in your life, not just from adapting to healthy food, but from all the positive consequences that flow from this adaptation?
Leave A Response