What are some other examples? Were you eating the "chocolate covered candy of a brand that I hadn't had before" with or without noseclips?
It isn't obvious what's going on here. Since you don't experience smells when nose-clipping, it's unlikely you'd unlearn smell-calorie associations. But apparently something has changed...
It happened again. A friend gave me a dried fruit leather that also had psyllium husk, flaxseed meal, and soy in it. First I had some nose clipped and it “tasted” fine. A short while later I tried it without clips and my first thought was that it was bad or rancid, I really didn’t like it. But I smelled it and tasted it again and realized that it wasn’t bad, but it just didn’t taste right to me. (My friend confirmed that it wasn’t bad.) I didn’t have (or had lost) a positive flavor association to it. I expected it to taste good, but it was worse than neutral.
The friend also gave me some dried fruit leather of unusual flavors that didn’t have the added fiber. I ate those at the same times that I tried the fiber fruit leather. I expected them to taste really good without the nose clips. Instead they tasted okay without clips but not any better than with them. My flavor association was much more neutral than I expected.
When I first started nose clipping, tasting food without nose clips was a heightened experience. Everything tasted exquisitely good. My sense of taste seemed especially enhanced (like I’d taken drugs). But since then something has changed in my perception of flavors, which is why I keep thinking that I’m losing my flavor associations. My pleasure rating of the flavors of unclipped food leans more towards neutral most of the time. It’s gotten easier to nose clip because there isn’t much difference anymore. I think there are still some delectable sumptuous meals that would taste much better without nose clips. But most of the time when I taste something, I wonder why I’m bothering to taste it. I might as well nose clip it, because it doesn’t really taste that good.
It doesn’t take that long to regain a positive flavor association, though. I got a new brand of herbal cough drops that didn’t taste good to me the first time that I tried them. But I kept trying them (mostly without nose clips) on different occasions, maybe even a week or so a part. Just had them again and I realized (with some surprise) that they now taste good. I think I’ve had them without clips about 4-6 times.
Lately my appetite has been huge and it seems like I’ve been eating a lot. I was worried that perhaps my set point had gone up. But I’m still slowly losing fat, though not always in the places where I want to lose it. I now have more ribcage definition. Ribcage definition is not something I even wanted to begin with. I prefer meat on my bones.
I keep wondering if I’m going to hit a point where SLD stops working. Perhaps there’s some bottom set point for my body. I also feel like I’m eating too much to still be losing weight. My association with weight loss is that you need to eat less than satiation and fullness in order to lose. Lately I’ve been indulging myself in lots of nuts, dried fruit, cheeses, dense multigrain bread, etc. – high calorie foods. I don’t even want to know the calories I’m consuming. My body must be in some kind of building phase.
The nose clipping keeps surprising me. I never thought I’d be nose clipping this much for this long. But it continues to be much easier than I thought. I don’t feel like I’m dieting. Nose clipping is vastly easier and works much better than any kind of diet and trying to restrict calories. Perhaps I would lose faster if I didn’t eat so much. But for now I’m curious to see how much I can lose without working hard at it.
I keep thinking it would be good to write down and post what I eat. But I’m embarrassed to confess what I eat. Writing down what I consume feels like some kind of confessional or exposé. I feel guilty for indulging in eating, especially since I’m supposedly “dieting”. Without being fully aware of it, I make lots of little judgments about what I’m eating: this is too much, too many calories, too many carbs, too much sugar, etc. My intention is to move more towards Shangri-la freedom. I’ll have to see what I can do to let go of my judgments. Maybe keeping a food log for a short time would help. I’ve been resistant to keeping one.
Author
Topic: Nose clipping lots of food really works – it's easier! (Read 72873 times)