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Furthermore, The Beast knows that you can poison yourself with certain otherwise
vital nutrients if you eat too much of one food or eat it too often. The desire for
variety therefore probably evolved to stimulate primitive creatures to move on and
find something else to eat instead of just staying in one place and eating whatever
food is there until it’s gone (which would always be easier and usually safer). How
then does The Beast “motivate” you to move on to eat something different?
Sensory-Specific Satiety
I have said previously that The Beast makes you hungry whenever you “run low”
on any nutrient you need to stay healthy. However, merely being hungry doesn’t
necessarily mean you’ll eat the right thing to get the nutrient you need—particularly
if you happen to be a primitive human creature with little reasoning ability. But
eating a lot of different things increases your chances that at least one of them
will have some of what you need.
Here is another example to try to make the point clearer. Let’s say you’re a
primitive creature who’s camped out under an apple tree eating apples. After a day
or so your primitive sub-mind makes you hungry because you’ve run low on some
nutrient you need. But it’s not likely that eating more apples will give you much
of whatever you’ve run low on, because if it would, you’d never have run low on
that thing while eating apples in the first place.
So there’s no survival value in wasting time or energy filling yourself up with
more apples even though they are readily available. (As we saw above, this would shut
off hunger temporarily but would not get you whatever nutrient you needed.) So how
does the primitive Beast-mind stimulate you to move on to find something else?
Since at least 1934, researchers have noticed and extensively investigated a
phenomenon they have named “sensory-specific satiety”. This is a descriptive
term that simply means that as you eat one particular food, you very quickly (within
about two minutes) begin to stop liking that particular food as much as you normally
do. This effect is only temporary. It lasts about an hour.
But sensory-specific satiety only affects the food you are eating at the moment.
You continue to like other foods just as much as normal. So the practical effect of
sensory-specific satiety tends to be that you stop eating the food you’re eating
and instead go on to try other foods (if they are available).
In other words this is a major inborn mechanism to unconsciously stimulate you to
eat the variety of foods that you normally need in order to stay healthy.
The Beast’s Learning Capacity
“Sensory-specific satiety” can be viewed as The Beast’s way of telling you
what foods you probably don’t need to eat any more of. But how does The Beast guide
you more precisely toward what you do need to eat? This is where we begin to reach
the “modern-day” limits of The Beast’s capabilities.
There is a large amount of research demonstrating that when we are deficient in a
given nutrient we quickly and unconsciously learn to like the flavor of any food we
happen to eat that has this nutrient in it.
This “learning to like it” reaction has been shown to take place a few hours
after eating the food. Using our Multi-Diet terminology, we can say that The Beast is
smart enough to notice that what you ate several hours ago gave it the nutrients that
it actually wanted at that time. So it turns on your “liking” for that food. This
“liking” very probably helps you select that food again whenever you need some of
those nutrients. Thus The Beast does have a certain very rudimentary “learning
capacity”.
However, please note that this can create a potential problem for. Dieters.
Suppose your Beast has learned to associate (e.g.) potato chips with satisfying a
need for more sodium (salt). Is eating salty potato chips a good way to get sodium?
It sure is! Is it a good way to stay slim? Not hardly!J
In other words, left to itself, your Beast will often learn to “like” a lot of
things that not only have the nutrients it needs but also lots and lots (and lots) of
Calories that it doesn’t need.
The Beast isn’t much concerned about getting too many Calories because it has an
almost unlimited storage capacity for them—in that ample adipose reserve you’re
already carrying around! It also knows that you’re certain to need those stored
calories during “the next scheduled famine”.J However, in modern societies,
famines aren’t scheduled that often anymore, so the Calories just keep
accumulating.
This is the reason a higher-level mind (you) needs to consciously enter the
picture and become a “Beast Trainer”. Using Multi-Diet principles, you can
deliberately introduce The Beast to foods that you know have lots of nutrients but
very few Calories. It will quickly learn to like these foods just as much as the
foods with all the Calories. It doesn’t really care that these new foods don’t
have many Calories because it knows you have a several months supply of calories that
it can use for your energy needs.J
It is interesting to note that The Beast is a true “idiot savant” Within
its own very limited area of competence—the monitoring of your internal nutrition
status—it far surpasses you. Outside of that area of competance, it badly needs
your guidance. The Multi-Diet teaches you how to give it the right kind of guidance.
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