What Is The Sensory Factor?
The Multi-Diet Sensory Factor (like the Exercise Factor) is a non-nutritional
factor that nonetheless strongly affects both hunger and eating. This means it must
be both understood and managed if you intend to succeed in staying on your diet long
enough to lose much weight. Fortunately, the techniques are easy to master once you
understand the issues.
What I call the Sensory Factor in dieting involves three different “sensations”.
Each of these sensations strongly influences eating in a different way. These
sensations are the sensation of “quantity”, the sensation of “variety”, and
the sensation of “sweet”. Extensive research over the past 20 years has
demonstrated that human beings have consistent innate responses to these sensations
and these responses in turn have strong effects on both hunger and eating.
The easiest way to explain what I mean by the Sensory Factor is to say that the
primitive sub-mind I have irreverently labeled “The Beast” has certain “expectations”
about food that have been “built in” to its makeup by evolution over the last 500
million years (give or take a fewJ). Since they are built-in, you can't ignore or
change them—you must learn instead to manage the factors that control them. These
expectations do relate to physical nutrition, but only indirectly.
Why Is There A Sensory Factor?
The theory behind the Sensory Factor takes a step beyond simple physical nutrition
by stating the following:
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Your body needs the vital chemicals it gets from food (i.e. vitamins,
minerals, protein, EFAs, etc.), because without them… you’ll die.
-
In 500 million years of evolution, your body has also learned to use certain
of the “sensations” naturally associated with foods—such as their
flavor, texture, sweet, weight, volume, etc.—as cues to help it
properly manage your intake of these vital chemicals.
Research has found that certain food-related sensations have consistent effects
and may therefore be used for very specific purposes. We can speculate that the body
“expects” to be able to use these sensations for certain purposes and tends to
get “confused” or feel “deprived” if you continually eat food which doesn’t
satisfy them properly—as is often the case on simpleminded weight-loss diets.
Of course, the actual physiologic mechanisms by which your body “expects”
these sensations, feels “deprived” without them, and then “stimulates” The
Beast into action to get them, are completely obscure (certainly to me), and I’m
sure many Nobel prizes are waiting for those who can do the “heavy-lifting” in
researching this.
But basic facts which are undeniable are that humans like the sweet flavor;
that they like the sensation of having eaten “enough” food; that they like eating
a variety of foods—and that they will eventually break off a diet in order
to get these sensations.
Of course, as a practical matter, once you get the purely physical nutritional
factors under proper control, you will find that The Beast will be much less “fussy”
about the Sensory Factor. But experience shows that it won't ever let you totally
ignore the sensory qualities of food. If you try to do so, you’re likely to wake up
one day finding yourself gobbling handfuls of “sugar-coated red-pepper pickle chips”
or some other strange food item that you don’t need. 
All the recommendations in this chapter assume that you have already mastered The
Multi-Diet’s physical nutrition factors and that The Beast is therefore not making
you hungry in order to get some specific nutrient. All of the Sensory Factor needs
are really very simple to manage—if they are not being stimulated by true
nutritional insufficiencies.
What are these Beastly sensations and how do we handle them to help ourselves lose
weight?
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