let the good tastes roll

How many diets have failed because a plain chicken breast and some steamed broccoli are just soooooo unsatisfying? 

The flavors and fats listed below not only add taste, some border on being medicinal. What a joyful alignment; using lots of tasty herbs, spices and good fats makes food taste amazing plus they heal and protect your body at the same time. The fats and oils listed are the best of the bunch and actually critical to good health and maintaining optimal weight.

The sweets listed below are sugar, plain and simple. They are subject to all the bad press sugar richly deserves and gets these days. They are however the best of the bunch and used judiciously these should be your first choices for your limited daily allotment of added sugar.  

Extra Credit - another article below the 3 lists…

Spice it Up
There is a good reason why the spice trade built empires and drove international commerce for centuries - we humans crave flavor, novelty and variety. Herbs and spices really are the spice of life or at least cooking.

They are also medicinal in so many cases. Look no further than turmeric - just Google its list of health benefits and you'll be reading for a while. Add herbs and spices, fresh if you can find the, dry if not and savor the applause. 

The lazy chefs short cut? Buy premixed spice blends! Feel like Italian, Turkish or indian? Just pop open a spice blend and transform that pile of meat and vegetables into a Mediterranean delight. 

Cooking Oils - The Dynamic Duo
Cooking with good traditional fats adds flavor and satiety which is a fancy word for the satisfaction one receives from a good meal. Lots of choices with cooking oils, many of them man-made and quite unhealthy.

Thankfully the solution is super simple - olive oil and coconut oil - both cold pressed extra virgin. Olive oil is great for salad dressings and other low temp applications. For baking or frying coconut oil holds up well to higher heats. 

Avoid factory fats and manmade oils - they set off a chain reaction of deadly free radicals. Never eat fried food out. At home toss the Crisco and Mazola.

Fake Sweets
Along with fake fats Food Inc wants you to try the fake sweeteners they concocted to help you with the pounds they added to your waistline by adding sugar to all their offerings. Nice.

Skip the diet soda and all the other chemicals - they and being linked to health issues big and small, from cancer concerns to killing off important strains of healthy bacteria in our guts that we need to keep us well.

No NutraSweet, Splenda, sweet n Low etc. If the label says "Diet" walk away. Even current fave Stevia may some day soon fall down. Best to avoid them all.

Sweet Tooth Solution
About 50% of us have a sweet tooth, we crave carbs, the sweeter the better. ( the other half crave fatty salty foods ) but for us "carbo-holics" that craving can be pretty intense at times. 

This may sound crazy but it's a simple 2 step process that absolutely works - add sugar to cut sugar. 

After dinner when that sweet tooth kicks in - go ahead and have a small but very sweet treat. 3 Hershey's Kisses for example. Delicious, but not many calories or fat, no glycemic spike because it's after a meal.

Then shut it down, go for a walk, brush your teeth, get a good night's sleep. That's step one.

Now step two; starting the next day become absolutely ruthless in uncovering added sugar that Food Inc creeps into your diet - find it and cut it out. Sodas, cookies, crappy breakfast cereal - that's obvious. But it's in ketchup, salad dressing and most all processed store bought pre made food - and that especially includes restaurant food. Eliminate it all.

Do this for just 3 weeks and your taste buds will radically recalibrate back to their factory default setting. A red bell pepper, sliced and dipped in hummus with burst in your mouth with sweet satisfaction. Fresh berries covered in plain yogurt sprinkled with pecans will taste like an ice cream sundae. 

Sweeten the Deal
The experts now all agree - added sugar is a huge contributor to the mess we are in. If there is a public enemy #1, sugar is pretty much it.

Foods with added sugar send our bodies into a panic and it has only two options - if we are engaged in or have just finished intense physical activity our body will burn the sugar as fuel or replenish muscle stores. If however, we are sitting - at our desk, in a car, on the sofa - our bodies have no option but to store those sweet calories as fat - ugh.

And where does the body store this sugar driven fat? Around our belly adding a "spare tire" / "muffin top" look, not real fashionable. Of far more importance though, the belly also turns out to be the most unhealthy place to accumulate fat. It globs onto our vital organs and it actively starts messing with our metabolism. Deadly stuff.

Thankfully once you have cut all the evil added sugar out of your diet a miraculous thing happens, within a few weeks your taste buds revert back to normal and all of a sudden fruit, berries, everything really, starts tasting a whole lot better plus you feel way better too.