Taste buds can be manipulated so that you will crave and want foods that are not healthy for you! Paying attention to other signs can help you learn to love foods that are truly health promoting!!

Hi there, it’s Elaine Gardner, the founder of DesignYourHealthyLife.com. While I believe that taste buds should be our friends, and were designed to help us navigate the natural world and the potential food that was available to us many, many years ago, if you rely only on your taste buds in this day and age, you could get yourself into some serious trouble.

There’s a whole branch of science that is designed to manipulate and play with, or take advantage of your taste buds and get you addicted to foods that taste good but aren’t good for your body. So they are overriding what the natural process of the taste buds is supposed to be, to help us determine which foods are good for us and which foods aren’t. So if you eat any processed foods, anything packaged, boxed… even things like organic foods with natural flavors can be a problem. So I’m really going to encourage you to consider what you’re eating, as always, and to try to develop some other senses besides just relying on your taste buds so you don’t get locked into or stuck in that, “I’m only gonna eat this because it tastes good”, whether or not you realize it’s good or not good for your body.

I think we also have this idea that healthy food doesn’t taste good, and I completely disagree with that. Healthy food should taste phenomenal, and when you get used to eating healthy food, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how wonderful really healthy food can taste. And you want to feel good. You want it to make your body feel good. And if you eat packaged and processed and frozen foods, (and not that all of those things are bad, because you can find healthy things within those categories), but for the most part if you’re going to eat any processed food, you could get yourself in some serious trouble.

So you want to enjoy the food that you’re eating and have it be really, really healthy food that also is feeding your body and making you feel really good. Feeling good is so important. So instead of just relying on your taste buds, you also want to consider how that’s making you feel. And not just immediately when you’re eating that food, but days later, because reactions to food can take days. Food can be really tricky, to understand what your body is and isn’t reacting to or responding positively over negatively to, from a food perspective. But it’s really worth your time and effort to pay attention to how your body’s feeling, and think back about the foods that you’ve been eating and see if there’s something that you’re eating that’s doing really good things for your body, or vice versa, if it’s not making your body feel so good.

I also feel like over the years of healthy eating, for me , I’ve developed this kind of sixth sense that I can immediately feel. And I don’t know if it’s an energetic thing, I can’t put a name to it, but I can feel when I’m eating something good, how it’s energizing my body. It’s like it lights me up, adds energy to my system. It’s hard to describe because it’s not like within the five senses, it’s not something I’m tasting or feeling, it’s just an inner knowing. Kind of like an intuition type of feeling. Just something that my body feels inside and it feels so good when I start to put good food into my mouth and I start to feel that energy just kind of lighting me up, and that inner voice going “oh, this is really good… this is really healthy… this is gonna make my body feel really good”.

And I don’t remember like a specific moment when that started happening, if I’ve been doing that for years or if it’s something new to me, but it is something that I really recognize, and that really helps me choose good healthy foods and really enjoy the good healthy foods that I’m eating. Because I know almost instantly that it’s doing such a great job for my body. And even if it’s something that doesn’t taste so good, because the taste of a vegetable is going to vary crop to crop, season to season, how long it’s been sitting in your refrigerator, and on and on and on. So about a month or so ago I was eating broccoli and it wasn’t the best tasting broccoli that I’ve ever had, but as I’m eating it and putting it into my mouth, I can feel that sixth sense just kicking in, and my body’s going “yeah, this is really good, this is what we need.”

So I love just having that sixth sense and knowing. It’s just further encouragement for me when I’m choosing good foods, which I do almost all the time, that I’m doing a really good job and it’s not only tasting good and I’m enjoying it, but I’m going to achieve the goal that I want, and that’s to have a strong, healthy body.

And be careful when you’re out and about. I don’t want you to live in a box, I don’t want you to live in fear, I certainly don’t do that. I do eat out; I eat at other people’s houses. Certainly I don’t have control over the food in a lot of those situations. If I’m eating out, I am going to make healthy choices, but who knows what’s going to be in there, if there’s a non-healthy oil or a preservative or something like MSG that’s not healthy for my body, and I try not to worry about these things. I don’t eat out a lot, I would much rather have more control over my food, but I do like to travel and I do eat out when I travel. So this isn’t to encourage fear or to be an all or nothing type of thing, just really to encourage you to pay attention to that because I think it’s an incredible tool.