I once did a survey about whether or not people thought they would eat more or less if they couldn’t smell their food. The overwhelming majority responded that they would eat less.
“It’s because food tastes so good that I eat so much of it, so not being able to taste my food would be great for my waistline.”
Which means all anyone who wants to lose weight has to do is to hold their nose while they eat, or if that proves to be a tad awkward, invest about 5 cents in a clothespin.
Because 80-90% of what we perceive as taste is actually due to our sense of smell, 5 cents is poised to bring down a 40 billion dollar diet industry.
(In other good news, clothespins come in all kinds of colors, so coordinating them with this outfit or that should be easy.)
The only problem with The Clothespin Diet is what we actually do when we haven’t tasted our food.
We do the same thing that we do when we are watching a movie, and someone starts talking to us, and we realize that even though our eyes have been on the movie as they’ve been talking, we’ve missed about 10 minutes of what’s happened.
Naturally, we back up the movie so that we can get what we missed.
What happens when you’re focused on the movie and nothing distracts you?
It can often be the case that because our taste buds doing their tasting thing is key to our comprehension and satisfaction that we’ve eaten, when we haven’t tasted our food, we want to eat more of what we’ve already eaten – even when we’re physically satisfied – not because we want more food, but because we want more taste.
We want to get what we’ve missed. When we’re satisfied that we have, we’re comfortable moving on.
(Worth considering is that as far as your body is concerned, eating more when you’re physically satisfied is like continuing to sit and look at the movie screen after the last credit has rolled and the screen has gone dark. Something you probably don’t find yourself doing much of.)
This is why I’m so fond of saying, let’s just stick with who you are.
Research has shown that our palates are at their most sensitive during the first 3 bites of any given food during any given eating experience, and that after those first 3 bites, our taste buds don’t enjoy the flavors as acutely as they did in the beginning.
Give it a whirl today. Pick a meal, and eat your first 3 bites of each of the different foods on your plate as if they are your last 3 bites of those foods for the meal, and that this is the last time you are ever going to eat whatever it is you’re eating.
(Then for added fun, try as hard as you possibly can to not taste the entire rest of your meal.)
Caution… you don’t want to taste more than 3 bites of your food, you’ll be getting dangerously close to having your cake, and eating it too.
I’ll be all eyes and ears in the comments if you care to share your thoughts or experience. 
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