Pleasing Tastes
You enjoy pleasing taste when you eat.
There are four different pleasing tastes: sweet, salt, fatty and umami.
Pleasing taste or eating is a source of happiness.
Although eating seems to feel good in your mouth, the pleasing taste is really in your head - just like the emotions of love or pride.
People may not explicitly consider pleasing taste to be a source of happiness, but they do implicitly. People routinely seek comfort foods to offset their negative emotions. For many people, eating and cooking are a central part of their recreational activities.
Pleasing taste or eating is overused as a source of happiness.
The growing problem of obesity and diabetes is evidence that we seek too much happiness from eating. It's not surprising. It's an immediate positive effect that does not require much work or other people - like the other positive emotions require. And we have come to believe that we are supposed to be happy. So if we are not happy, we feel compelled to correct the problem and eating solves the problem.
Even for those that can manage their weight, eating is overused. Fit people exercise more than necessary so they can eat more than necessary. Eventually the excess exercise results in chronic pain and early physical deterioration. The chronic pain reduces happiness more than overeating increased it.
Dieting requires replacing pleasing taste as a source of happiness.
Dieting will fail if you just eat less. Eating less will reduce your happiness - you'll enjoy less pleasing taste and feel more hunger. You will feel some pride when you see you a reduction in your weight or waistline. However, that feeling is not enough to offset the loss of pleasing taste and the arrival of hunger. You will stop dieting because you are less happy.
Dieting can only succeed if the loss of pleasing taste and arrival of hunger is offset with more of a different positive emotion. The best candidates are: affection and pleasing scenery. Simply put, instead of eating be with friends and go for walks.
Eating can be reduced by reducing food variety.
The pleasing taste that any one food makes you feel declines the more you eat it. If you stop eating it for a few days, it regains its full pleasing taste when you eat it again. So we eat a variety of foods - at any one meal and over the course of a week - so that everything we eat makes us feel the strongest pleasing tastes. The more pleasing food tastes, the more we eat. The constantly growing variety of foods in our supermarkets is contributing to our obesity problem.
If you eat the same foods every meal, you will not enjoy eating as much. If you don't enjoy eating as much, you will eat less.
There are four different pleasing tastes: sweet, salt, fatty and umami.
Pleasing taste or eating is a source of happiness.
Although eating seems to feel good in your mouth, the pleasing taste is really in your head - just like the emotions of love or pride.
People may not explicitly consider pleasing taste to be a source of happiness, but they do implicitly. People routinely seek comfort foods to offset their negative emotions. For many people, eating and cooking are a central part of their recreational activities.
Pleasing taste or eating is overused as a source of happiness.
The growing problem of obesity and diabetes is evidence that we seek too much happiness from eating. It's not surprising. It's an immediate positive effect that does not require much work or other people - like the other positive emotions require. And we have come to believe that we are supposed to be happy. So if we are not happy, we feel compelled to correct the problem and eating solves the problem.
Even for those that can manage their weight, eating is overused. Fit people exercise more than necessary so they can eat more than necessary. Eventually the excess exercise results in chronic pain and early physical deterioration. The chronic pain reduces happiness more than overeating increased it.
Dieting requires replacing pleasing taste as a source of happiness.
Dieting will fail if you just eat less. Eating less will reduce your happiness - you'll enjoy less pleasing taste and feel more hunger. You will feel some pride when you see you a reduction in your weight or waistline. However, that feeling is not enough to offset the loss of pleasing taste and the arrival of hunger. You will stop dieting because you are less happy.
Dieting can only succeed if the loss of pleasing taste and arrival of hunger is offset with more of a different positive emotion. The best candidates are: affection and pleasing scenery. Simply put, instead of eating be with friends and go for walks.
Eating can be reduced by reducing food variety.
The pleasing taste that any one food makes you feel declines the more you eat it. If you stop eating it for a few days, it regains its full pleasing taste when you eat it again. So we eat a variety of foods - at any one meal and over the course of a week - so that everything we eat makes us feel the strongest pleasing tastes. The more pleasing food tastes, the more we eat. The constantly growing variety of foods in our supermarkets is contributing to our obesity problem.
If you eat the same foods every meal, you will not enjoy eating as much. If you don't enjoy eating as much, you will eat less.
For more about emotions, visit: Happiness Dissected