Healthy Eating for Women

Your body doesn’t long for potato chips; your taste buds do. New innovations in “fake fats” such as olestra, introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1996, or in reduced-fat ice creams seemed like the answer to dieters’ prayers. All taste and hardly any calories. But they had no effect whatsoever on the epidemic of obesity. What these products really do, besides displacing healthy foods and adding unwanted chemicals, is keep your desire for fat turned up high. The more fat—or foods that taste like it—you eat all week, the more you’ll want tomorrow.

A better approach and a worthwhile experiment is to readjust your taste preferences by eliminating the ones that have you captivated. You’ll soon see that your preferences are actually determined by what you’ve eaten in the past three weeks.

Just as a person’s desire for coffee diminishes after the caffeine addiction is broken, so the desire for fatty, sweet, or, salty foods will lessen—if you give yourself the opportunity. By eating new foods and trying new dishes, you’ll awaken your tastes to entirely new flavors. And by consistently reducing the amount of salt and fatty toppings you put on your favorite healthy foods, you’ll reeducate your taste buds so that you come to prefer lighter, healthier meals. So skip the “low fat” cheese or “fake fat” potato chips. These foods keep your preferences for fatty foods going strong instead of redirecting them toward more nutritious selections.

Making a clean break of it works best. You can start by mimicking what scientists in Philadelphia discovered: By simply eliminating fatty toppings such as mayonnaise, butter, margarine, and salad dressing, study participants reduced their preference for these condiments. You can, too.

Instead of teasing yourself with unbearably small portions of turkey or chicken, or eating fat-free cheese when you still long for the fat-filled variety, it pays to make a more thorough diet change. In a study by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and Georgetown University Medical Center, designed to compare various nutritional approaches to controlling diabetes, participants were asked to engage in a total diet makeover. They eliminated all animal products from their diets and used no more than minimal amounts of oil, but ate unlimited amounts of whole grains, fruits, bean and lentil dishes, and vegetables. Most reduced their need for diabetes medications or eliminated them altogether. The average participant lost sixteen pounds over twelve weeks. But a very crucial change came in their feelings about food and eating. Food was no longer the enemy. There was no need to agonize over every bite and calorie, because the food itself had changed. The pleasure of eating returned as weight continued to melt away—every dieter’s dream come true.

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