First Bite: How We Learn to Eat Read Online Free PDF Page A

behaviors, found that the struggle of will required when a group of people were asked to eat “virtuous” foods, such as radishes, instead of the foods they really wanted, such as chocolate and cookies, led to diminishing returns. They were so depleted by the effort of the task that, when faced with another difficulttask—solving a tricky puzzle—they gave up more quickly. The emotional effort of not eating the cookies had a “psychic cost.”
    Changing our food habits is one of the hardest things we can do, because the impulses governing our preferences are often hidden, even from ourselves. And yet adjusting what you eat is entirely possible. We do it all the time. Were this not the case, the food companies that launch new products each year would be wasting their money. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, housewives from East and West Germany tried each other’s food products for the first time in decades. It didn’t take long for those from the East to realize that they preferred Western yogurt to their own. Equally, those from the West discovered a liking for the honey and vanilla wafer biscuits of the East. From both sides of the wall, these German housewives showed a remarkable flexibility in their food preferences.
    There is hope as well as concern in the fact that we remain like children in our eating patterns. We are like children in our fussiness and love of junk. But we also remain like children in that we have a capacity to learn new tricks. We seldom credit ourselves with this ability. But even though most of us have tastes that we acquired very young, we can still change.
      
    When I was a teenager, I could eat whole pint-sized tubs of ice cream, and second and third helpings of everything. Everywhere I went, food screamed at me. Maybe it was a response to living with my older sister, who was anorexic, though this was never mentioned, because in our family we did not speak of such things. Or it could have been a consequence of growing up in a house where emotional talk was taboo. It definitely got worse when I was fourteen and my parents separated. Overeaters often say they are swallowing their feelings.
    Around the age of twenty, something changed. I fell in love, I got happier, and my meals became more structured. I shrank, going from large to medium, without particularly dieting. I ate lots of vegetables—not because I had to, but because they were delicious, and they made me feel good. Then I had children. I could now bake a whole chocolate cake, eata small slice, and leave the rest. Recently I discovered yoga. My teenage self would have found my current self intensely annoying.
    The strange thing, however, is that my behavior changed without me ever really noticing that this was what was happening. Unlike the adolescent diets that I imposed on myself in a conscious, self-correcting way, this new healthier life crept up on me unawares. It’s not that I never keep eating potato chips long after I’m full, especially when there’s a glass of wine in my hand. And though I may be safe around chocolate cake, I wouldn’t fancy my chances with a Vacherin Mont d’Or cheese in the kitchen. But I have definitely reached the point where my second-order food preferences—I want to like greens—and my first-order food preferences—I do like greens—are fairly in sync. Food no longer screams at me, but speaks to me. It helps that our concept of healthy eating has enlarged in recent years to take in satisfying meals such as chicken and chickpea soup, buckwheat pancakes, avocado toast, or buttery scrambled eggs with herbs. I’m in the groove now of eating smaller lunches and larger dinners, but small or large, meals are occasions for pleasure, not angst. This feels good. I must have relearned how to feed myself somewhere along the way, treating myself with some of the solicitude I bestow on my own children.
      
    E. P. Köster, a behavioral psychologist who has spent decades studying why we make the food