One thing that I’ve noticed, in my conversations with coaching clients and Dessert Club folks, is a tendency to treat indulgent food like…like it’s not actually Real Food.
When we eat food that’s Real Food, we eat it because we’re hungry, and we’d like some energy or sustenance from that food. When we eat food that isn’t Real Food, we don’t have those requirements.
(And, for the record, I know that the phrase “Real Food” is often a euphemism for “healthy food” — somehow celery is more “real” than more processed food, for example. That’s not the sense in which I’m talking about it here; I’m just trying to make a contrast between food that we expect to give nourishment — e.g., Real Food — versus food that we treat as caloric entertainment.)
Our problematic relationship with non-Real Foods manifests in two, opposing ways:
We eat it even though we’re not hungry
Even at the end of a large, satisfying meal, many of us can still “find room” for a full dessert. Would we have “found room” for the same quantity of turkey sandwich, or some meatloaf and potatoes, at that point?We don’t eat it when we are hungry
Most of us have some special, indulgent food that we absolutely love…and that we’d absolutely never conceive of eating the same way we’d eat Real Food. But if you love Oreo cheesecake, why not have it for breakfast? Or lunch? Or dinner?
I’m not claiming that Oreo cheesecake is as nutrient dense as, say, turkey sandwiches or kale salads. But I am claiming that Oreo cheesecake is food, and that it will give you energy and contribute to a lessening of your hunger, if you let it.
Most of us, most of the time, don’t actually want our entire lunch to be Oreo cheesecake. But if you start with that food, and if you treat it like a Real Food, then you allow it to contribute to your feeling of fullness, rather than just being a form of caloric entertainment that is completely detached from your physical needs.
In the end, you’ll probably eat less, and feel better, than if you ate an entire “normal” meal, and then just ate cheesecake at the end, when you weren’t even hungry.