Imagine for a second all natural real foods being graded on a scale of 1 to 10 for flavour. Take an apple for example. If you had to score it out of ten for sweetness, what would you give it? A seven maybe? An eight? Now imagine rating processed foods on that same scale. Imagine swapping that apple for a toffee apple, the one’s with the stick in them and the hard toffee sugar coating. What would that rate for sweetness on the same scale? It would be SO FAR above a ten on that scale, that it’s ridiculous. It’d probably be like an 18, or more!! My point is, that processed foods are so far off the normal scale in the natural world that how can we be expected to enjoy natural whole foods once we regularly consume these artificial, highly sweetened, and favour enhanced “foods”.
If you truly want to cut the processed sugar and other crap out of your diet. If you really want to maximise your current health, energy levels and enhance your body shape. And if you want to be able to enjoy the natural flavours and countless benefits from eating a real food diet. Then you are going to need to take some drastic action.
Here’s my three step process to reset your tastebuds in 21 days.
STEP 1 – Cut all added sugars and sweet foods (natural or processed) for 21 days. This even includes sweeteners like stevia ( a herb based no -calorie sweetener) and all other natural or artificial sweeteners as well. The reason being is that we are trying to recalibrate your tastebuds to recognise subtle variations in sweetness. And the only way to do that is to avoid anything that will register even a moderate sweet sensation on your taste buds.
STEP 2 – Drink a green vegetable smoothy (fruitless) every day for the 21 days. The bitterness of green vegetables are well recognised in the natural health world for helping with sugar cravings and reseting your taste senses. The bitterness, which is a contrasting taste to sweetness, helps to sensitise the taste buds to subtle changes in sweetness. Not to mention that the large volume of green vegetables you get in one smoothy, together with their bulk of fibre, minerals, vitamins, enzymes, phyto-chemicals and other beneficial energy and health enhancing properties will remind your body to start craving for food rich in the stuff it actually needs to function optimally.
STEP 3 – Drink ONLY plain filtered water for 21 days, and lots of it! This too helps with your body's natural detoxification process to clean itself out, and rebalance your hormones, skin complexion, help get your bowels moving and fully hydrate and energise all the cells of your body.
Do all this for 21 days and by day 22 your taste senses for sweetness will be that sensitive that you’ll enjoy the natural sweetness of real food. You can even do a test before you start and the day you finish. Try eating a sweet of your preference and record your how it tastes and then compare it to after the 21 days. It will surely be drastically different. So at the end of the 21 days just eat real food from then on and avoid going back to the processed “foods” that stuffed up your taste senses in the first place:)