How to enjoy eating again without gaining weight? Recover your threshold of sweetness

Why does our sweetness threshold change?

The truth is that from very small we are exposed to processed products in which the amount of added sugar is enormous: many of the food products for babies, such as formula milk or porridge, contain sugar added artificially among its ingredients.

How to enjoy eating again without gaining weight Recover your threshold of sweetnessBabies develop their taste buds between six and 24 months of age, and it is not recommended to introduce sugar in general until the first year. It is in these early months when we begin to appreciate the flavors of food, and introducing large amounts of refined sugar can negatively impact our sweetness threshold.

The processed products for children (yogurts, industrial cereal, biscuits, some of them even backed by companies scientific-) also usually contain a lot of added sugars : continue to perpetuate “hidden” sugar intake that detracts from the real taste of food that we eat.

What happens when we have spent so many years taking processed products high in sugars and try a natural food with its real flavor? It happens that, generally, it seems to us that it is bland and tasteless, and we feel the need to sweeten it ourselves by adding refined sugar or artificial sweeteners.

How can we recover our threshold of sweetness?

To stop taking refined sugar (the one we see and the one that is “hidden” in the processed products) is a very good idea, but to achieve it, it is best to do it gradually, as Lucia pointed out in the video. Learning how to read nutritional labels to reduce the processed products that go into our shopping cart and replace them with real food is a good start.

In addition, gradually reducing the sugar we can take, for example, to sweeten coffee, is also a good choice. If we now take a spoonful of sugar, we can reduce it little by little (take half for a week, then a quarter of a tablespoon and then nothing) until we come to appreciate the real flavor of this drink.

Sweetening our dishes with natural foods is another possibility: fruits and vegetables (such as bananas, carrots or dates), dried fruits consumed in moderation (such as raisins or dried apricots) or spices (vanilla, walnut nutmeg, cinnamon …) may have a place in our kitchen when it comes to sweetening naturally.

Can I opt for sweeteners to sweeten my dishes?

The artificial sweeteners bring us my sweet taste (in many cases more than the sugar itself) without giving us just calories (do not give us nutrients). But here we are not talking about calories, but to recover our threshold of sweetness.

The problem with artificial sweeteners is that they generate in our body a response similar to that which can produce sugar : they stimulate the secretion of insulin and cause an increase in blood glucose. What this achieves is that it can increase appetite, being counterproductive to consume them if our idea is to lose weight.

These artificial sweeteners, like sugar, help to keep our sweetness threshold high and to mask the original taste of food in some way. Instead of using artificial sweeteners, it is preferable to return to the original taste of food, making this process gradually to make it simpler.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.