Taste & Texture
& Weight Loss
Introduction

The Food Sensations:  How Do They Relate to Weight Loss?

In this section, we discuss the various sensations that come from food, and how they may affect your diet.

The reasons why certain sensations are important in dieting are very speculative.

But there is little doubt of the fact that they are important. A large body of replicated research has demonstrated this conclusively.

Fortunately, both modern and traditional food techniques make managing these sensations a simple process.

We discuss which sensations that are important; why they may be important; and how you can use food to include them and make your diet more satisfying..

Main Discussion:
Is Sweet Food Important?  Emphatically Yes! -- But That's Not All

Serious dieters have long known that certain food sensations are important to successful weight loss. For example, an intense craving for sweet food is almost inevitable at some point on a diet.

The importance of food is not just due to nutrition. Several sensations that food provides the body are also important. This means that using food to manage these sensations is important for diet success.

Science is not sure why certain sensations are important, but a large number of replicated mainstream experiments over the last two decades confirm that they are important and that this importance is at least semi-independent of the nutritional value of the food.

There are three sensations that most need to be managed.

The sweet sensation is one of these. Dieters who try to do without anything sweet for long periods of time usually experience intense sweet cravings and this makes it very difficult for them to stay on their diets long enough to lose much weight.

The occasional feeling of having a full stomach is also important. This sensation of a large quantity of food in the stomach is created by a combination of the volume and weight of the food eaten. People who eat nothing but tiny quantities of food  to try to lose fat almost always have difficulty because of this need.

The desire for a variety of different foods also seems "built-in" to the human makeup. People who try to lose weight simply by eating the same bland "diet stuff" day after day usually run into trouble. This sensation of variety has been found to be controlled by a combination of food flavor, texture, "chewiness", "crunchiness", "mouth feel" and so forth.

Experience shows that the desires for these sensations never goes away entirely, although these desires are much less intense when dieters manage the purely nutritional food factors properly.

This means that successful dieters must know how to use food to manage these sensations in addition to managing nutrition.

Fortunately, there are many easy ways to manage each of these sensations.

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