If the thought of making over recipes scares you, odds are you are not alone. Buying ingredients, putting in the time and ending up with something no one wants to eat is not something anyone wants to do. But what if the change you are trying to make could have an impact on your health? What if reducing the amount of salt in your diet could mean reducing your dependence on blood pressure medication? How do you balance that with worrying that your food will be bland, tasteless and not worth eating? We tend to think that only big things or big changes are worth doing, but when it comes to food, that is not always the case. Little tweaks and small changes can add up to big results.
Tastes change and develop over time
We have taste buds those are subject to habits too (okay that is a gross oversimplification of the processes involved but the idea is basically correct). Certain things look like they should taste a certain way. Those expectations are based on life experiences. Visual cues, smells and tastes go hand in hand. A cupcake is expected to be sweet. A quick bread, slightly less so. The devil is in the details however. Those sweet and salty receptors (taste buds) have limits and can be overwhelmed. We can tease out small amounts of flavors, but when those amounts are large it becomes harder to figure out just how much there is. Making it even more complicated, our brains have expectations for flavor based on what we see, not just what you taste. Acceptable levels of certain flavors are often based on past experiences with those flavors (in other words habits).
Those habits are developed over time and solidify with use. Let me give you some examples. Most banana bread recipes call for 3 very ripe bananas and a cup of sugar. I have often wondered why. Very ripe bananas are very sweet. The ripening process converts most of the starch in the banana into sugar. 3 bananas amount to over a cup by volume. A very sweet cup. Add a cup of sugar and your recipe has the same, if not more sugar than flour (by volume). Fine for a brownie, but in a banana bread all it does is completely obscure the banana taste.
Small variations in taste are easy to miss and ignore
In fact, the end result is so sweet that if you were to remove a quarter cup of the sugar from the recipe, and bake it again, your taste buds would most likely not even notice. Your taste buds are so overwhelmed by the incoming sugar that a certain amount of the input is ignored. You could go up or down (by small amounts of sugar) and not even notice.
Small changes in the quantity of ingredients (like sugar) are easy to ignore. If the structure and texture are not affected, the taste difference is often too small to notice. If they are noticed at all, they are rarely noticeable enough to make us stop eating. In other words, we will eat it and enjoy it even if we notice a tiny amount of change in taste.
Taste buds adapt to change
If you normally put 2 teaspoons of sugar in your tea or coffee, a quarter teaspoon less may go unnoticed because the difference in taste is not that great. You would notice a 1 teaspoon shift and it might affect your enjoyment. A quarter teaspoon out of eight quarter teaspoons is hard to notice. Do it enough times and it will become the new normal. There are no limits how many times you can make that small change. Keep at it long enough and eventually a dash of sugar will be all you need. You may be thinking what does it matter? It’s only a quarter teaspoon of sugar. Let’s do some quick math.
Even tiny changes add up over time
A quarter teaspoon of sugar (1 gram) amounts to 4 calories. A cup of tea a day means 28 calories saved per week and 1456 in a year. If you drink 2 cups a day that is 2912 calories. If you take another ¼ teaspoon drop that adds up to 5824 and so on. It’s easy to dismiss small changes because they are small at the moment, but over time those little changes can add up to significant calories. Sugar is just one example. You can retrain your taste buds to be less dependent on salt just as easily. Add a little less to recipes and over time you will discover that other components have taste too.
It does not have to be huge or instantly noticeable for the change to make a lasting difference in your life. Make a little tweak today and see just how big an impact it can have on your life. “How to eat Mindfully and Mindlessly lose weight” breaks down our food relationships and provides practical ideas you can implement in your life to eat healthy while enjoying a delicious life. “Your food life” helps you dig deeper into your personal relationship with food so you can design your own unique plan for weight loss and healthy living. Get your copies today from your favorite online bookseller.