I found this really cool store not far from where I live, where they sell pills that help you develop new taste buds.

If you want to start enjoying your vegetables, buy the “like vegetable pill” and in one hour, you will eat all the vegetables you can find. I WISHHHHH!!!! Honey, there is no such thing!

If I open my pretty mouth for you to peep in, you will notice all my cavities are filled. By the time I was 16, I had no hole to fill because all were already filled. I have no unfilled tooth, except for those that can’t be filled. I hated the dentist; it was torture but as you can tell, that never separated me from my love for sweets. I didn’t have a sweet tooth, I was a sweet mouth. Putting anything in my mouth that didn’t have sugar or didn’t taste sweet was revolting, so imagine me planning to lose weight…the things that went on in my mind.

I had to quit all the things I loved and had gotten used to all my life…just because I wanted to lose weight! Yes! It was enough reason. I wondered what I was going to be eating because when you have my kind of mouth, you get very difficult to please. I used to be the type who ate the rice and chicken and treated the salads as though they weren’t even on the plate. If I was in a place where I had to behave, I would swallow it and drink loads of water as quickly as possible so I didn’t have to deal with the experience. So I know that switching diets is usually a dilemma on its own. When I made a list of all the things I stopped eating, people ask, “So what do you now eat?” They made it sound as though there were no other meals apart from rice.

And when people email me, wanting to join the Total Makeover Program, they give me a list of things they don’t eat so I can accommodate them, hilarious. You cannot experience anything new by maintaining old habits.

The real question is, “how do I learn to eat these things?” The answer? Practice makes perfect. I didn’t just start enjoying the salads; I had to try different things before I found a way to enjoy it. At first, I started mixing it with eggs every day, 3 salads a day meant 3 to 5 eggs a day, only to find out that it was unhealthy to have that much and when I read that it was healthier without the egg yolk, I said “I’m not taking out the yolk, what is the point of having incomplete egg?” Then I had to stop the salad creams… hmmm! Okay… so I started trying out different things until I ended up discovering the best way to enjoy my plate was to make it colourful, cut the vegies into tiny bits, so tiny that I can chew quickly and get it over with. I used spices like black and white pepper to add some spunk and I decided to just chill out! In fact, I would eat my salads very slowly and when I was getting tired, I would drink water and pause. Now I enjoy my salads and I apply this technique to all healthy meals I once thought I would never enjoy. Now I even look forward to having and preparing such meals. Trust me, it took a bit but the key is to be positive and consistent. What also helped me was researching each ingredient and finding out its nutritional value to see what benefits it was adding so that if I ate it and it didn’t feel right in my mouth, I would tell myself, “it’s good for your eyes girl, eat!” The most interesting thing is, when I reached my fitness goal, I stopped eating perfectly healthy and started fooling around with my exes; ice cream, chocolate and soft drink. I was ill by the next morning,

constipated and I literally felt like I had defiled my body. I was amazed. How is it so that my body quickly noticed an alien in my system? The same things my body was once used to had now become strange. I had to detox to regain my sense of wellness and that’s not to say that I no longer eat those things, but I rarely do and when I do, I do them in moderation, just enough and most times that is simply a bite or two. I have learned to listen when my body says, you have had just enough. That is very key, pause and listen to your body not your habit.

HOME WORK

Pick a healthy meal that you currently can’t stand (not things you are allergic to or medically advised not to eat) Maybe its salad or seafood and work it up until you find it appealing enough to you to eat. Is it presentation, the seasoning or just your thinking? Train your taste bud to learn a different way to enjoy a meal and also, eat slowly and feel and taste every single thing in your mouth. You will discover that it really isn’t as bad as you imagined.