Do You Eat Like Bear Grylls or Matt Preston?

Do you evaluate your food choices more for nutrition or taste?

Hopefully you’ll never be in a situation where you’ll have to eat one of those disgusting high protein survival grubs that Bear ate. When he’s out in the wild, he eats for nutrition alone, whatever it takes to survive. And recently Masterchef’s Matt Preston has embarked on a health and weight loss program with trainer Amelia Burton because his taste for delicious food was affecting his health. These are two very different people who evaluate food in different ways.

So, when you look in the fridge, shop at the supermarket, or plan your weeks menu’s how do you evaluate and plan your choices? Are you more Grylls or Preston? Have you ever thought about it? My challenge to you in this post is to work out your own criteria or values for how you choose food and post it in the comments below.

Consciously knowing your food evaluation criteria will make ordering from menu’s, shopping and planning dinner a breeze!  And, you’ll be able to notice if some of your criteria is not serving you in your weight loss efforts.

The truth is, if you’re eating more for taste alone, you may struggle with your weight, if you don’t have an active lifestyle and a natural taste for healthy foods.

Now this is a continuum of choice from Taste to Nutrition. It’s not strictly either / or. You probably fall somewhere in the middle, or tend slightly more to one side or the other. Find out where you fall with the answer to this question: Would you choose to regularly eat / drink something that tasted bad if you knew it was really good for you?

Here’s my own personal criteria for my food. More Nutrition-y…

• Each meal contains 3 or more vegetables or fruits of different colours, raw, lightly steamed, or stir fried
• Limited portion sizes 1-3 fistfuls maximum. (1 for a snack, 2 for a meal)
• Produce is organic where possible
• Contains at least 30% protein: tofu, egg, lean meat, legumes etc
• Any meat is free range, ethically farmed and lean.
• Contains 20 – 30% good fats like avocado, olive oil, nuts
• Only complex carbs, no simple, refined and processed carbs.
• Seasoned with herbs, for taste.
• Limited salt & sugar, and fat.
• Contains some healthy additives like flaxseed oil, Spirulina, Chia Seeds,  LSA
• (P.S I am not a nutritionist, this is just how I do it!)

I had never really thought about this before writing this post and now realise 90% of my meals follow this criteria; To the point where I will make weird salads and odd combinations of mush bowls (like a tin of salmon, corn, beans, mashed sweet potato and avocado) when I am eating for myself. The other 10% of the time accounts for some cookies, chocolate or a creamy gourmet pasta my husband makes for dinner.

This whole idea is underpinned by that old commonly held belief that healthy food is not tasty and unhealthy food is. (I’m hearing Homer Simpson singing: “You don’t make friends with Sal-Ad!”)

“Au contraire” I say!

Healthy food can be very tasty. And lots of unhealthy food tastes like crap. Which is a matter of opinion, of course. (That was mine.)

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Make Healthy Food Taste Better

The thing is, your tastebuds are very obedient. They will adapt to like whatever food you give them consistently.  They will also adapt  according to the thoughts you choose to think about the food you are eating. You have the power to make your food more or less “tasty” by imbuing it with mental and emotional meaning.

Here’s some examples:

To make vegetables or fruit more tasty you can imagine you are eating the pure energy of the sun and it’s filling up your body with light.

Or to make meat less tasty you could think about the slaughter process, or animal cruelty.

To make doughnuts less tasty you could think about how it clogs your artery veins, how the sugar is like poison in your body making you age faster, giving you wrinkles and the white flour causing constipation. Ick.

If you invest some time learning about nutrition and the effect that different foods have on your body you will begin to shift your perceptions toward nutrition and improving health. There is loads of nutritional information online, in books  and magazines about the essential nutrients in certain fruits and vegetables. Learn a little bit about it, and your body will thank you.

Discover Your Food Evaluation Criteria.

• Think about your meals, What you choose to eat and like to eat.
• What are the consistent characteristics of those meals?
• When you are making food just for yourself, what do you choose to eat?
• How do you choose the ingredients?
• How do you choose to cook it?
• How many vegetables?
• What approximate ratio of Protein, Carbohydrate, and Fat?
• Is it salty, sweet, creamy, crunchy, natural? Does that not matter?
• What matters to you most to you about your food?
• What matters least?
• Write down everything you can think of and then put them in a hierarchy, ordered from most important to least.
• Then assess your criteria.
• Does this serve you?
• Are you happy with it?
• Would you like to change it?
• What would you like to add?
• What would you like to take away?
• Imagine going out into the future with this new way of choosing food, and making meals for yourself, does this work for you and serve you better?
• Let that new criteria lock into place.

Join the conversation.

What’s your food criteria?  More taste, or more nutrition?
Do you disagree with me? I’d love to hear your thoughts…