| 5. You can’t eat it if you don’t buy it. It’s easier to just not walk down that aisle in the supermarket, to not start looking at certain displays etc., than it is to not eat food that you’ve bought. It’s easier to not go to KFC than to eat less at KFC. There is an excellent pizza restaurant one minute’s walk from my house, which does takeaway food. When I moved here I made a commitment to never order a takeaway from it, and in 18 years I never have. I have no sugar in my house. In terms of sweet food I never buy more than I would feel was acceptable to eat in a day or so, and I go five or six days between shopping trips. Aside from odd occasions in a pub, I haven’t had a fizzy drink with sugar in it for fifteen years, and I do not buy even the sugar free stuff to keep in the house. 6. You probably don’t need to eat red meat very often. Cutting back and finding alternatives will improve your diet. 7. Vegetables fill you up. Find at least one you like. Learn how to cook it. Then make it your longer term goal to find five more. 8. Only add salt when cooking —- if at all. And then less than you think you need. Herbs add flavours that can replace salt, and you can learn that by not buying salt for a while. None of these habits are clever or pious. They all rely on the fact that I am an idiot with lifelong ARFID and little to no moral courage or willpower, and this means impactful decisions need to be taken where they are the easiest, and bigger changes need to be spread out over years. |
Unless you have salt-dependent hypertension (and most people, even those with hypertension, do not), there is very little to be gained from leaving salt out. Things should not taste salty, necessarily, but salt improves the flavor of just about everything. Buy a tube of frozen creamed corn and it tastes like paste. Add salt and it's sweet. The caloric content has not changed; your taste perception has.
When recipes state "season to taste", they're telling you to put salt in. No amount of herbs can replace salt. Small amounts of salt will take the burned flavor away from bad coffee (it mitigates your perception of bitter flavors to make them more pleasant-bitter rather than bitter-bitter). Your natural thirst mechanisms will deal with the rest.