Consider the Cheeto
You open the bag. The comforting sound of the crinkling plastic reaches your ears. You pull the top apart and the smell of fake delicious cheese hits your nostrils. You take the first strangely shaped orange doodle out and pop it into your mouth. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. You are assaulted by a wave of deliciousness. The satisfying crunch is followed by the surprisingly soft texture of the ultra processed corn melting into your mouth along with the staggering taste of salt and cheese. Perhaps your pupils dilate. You reach for another one.
The Cheeto has been perfectly calibrated and designed to have the perfect texture on both ends of the crunchy and melty spectrum with enough salt and “cheese” for you to grab a bag, blink, and then realize the bag is empty. Nature will never be able to compete for our taste buds the way a Cheeto does. It is one of our greatest culinary achievements.
Of course, they will also kill you.
The Power of Science
It may truly suck to hear this, but foods that lead to jacked and tanned and healthy bodies just don’t taste as good as the incredible world of processed foods. For those of you who cringed and perhaps spat to the side in disgust when I described Cheetos*, fine, take your pick. Is it Doritos? Potato Chips? Devil Dogs? Little Debbies pastries? Pick your guilty pleasure package and insert it into the above paragraph with the appropriate description. Then go ahead and tell me that healthy foods are “just as delicious!” as the manufactured utopia food-scientists have created.
Still don’t believe me? You made an incredible broiled chicken breast that made your taste buds jump with the delight the way they did when you first had some sour cream and onion potato chips did you? Let me tell you what healthy foods are up against.
When Frito Lay famously set out to make the perfect version of the Dorito, they poured over 50 million dollars into research and development. Read that again and think about it. They tried different levels of sodium, crunchiness, texture, cheesiness, coolranchiness, and they mixed and matched all these different aspects of flavor and texture on thousands of test subjects until they came up with what we now know as the Nacho Cheese and Cool Ranch Dorito. It was an absolute triumph in food science. These two mainstay flavors have been in our culture for over 40 years, and they’re unlikely to leave anytime soon.
The reason Mother nature didn’t make any organism nearly that tasty is because something that addictive would be ravenously fought for and eliminated from the evolutionary chain before it even had a chance to say, “betcha can’t have just one.”
*Cheetos are delicious you uncultured swine
Social Media Flavored Bullshit
Every time I see a Crossfit athlete or bodybuilder post a picture of their “delicious” dinner of top round steak, plain potatoes, and asparagus with the exclamation “Sooooo Goood!” my eyes come damn close to getting stuck to the top of their sockets. No doubt real food tastes good. In some sense it “tastes good” to fill yourself with nourishing food that leads to a body you desire. But that's a philosophical game. It’s a thought process that leads to convincing yourself it “tastes good.” I assure you the blasts of dopamine and instant (though brief) satisfaction that comes from opening your favorite guilty pleasure needs no such thought process to convince your taste buds which way is nirvana.
A common and popular recommendation for anyone looking to put on muscle and/or lose fat is to eat your body weight in grams of protein. I.E. if you weigh 200 pounds, eat 200 grams of protein. The recommendation is usually followed by saying that your protein should come from lean protein sources. I.E. 2 pounds of chicken breast is about 200 grams of protein, 4 double quarter pounders with cheese from Mcdonalds also has about 200 grams of protein. I’ll let you guess which of those two options has less calories. When people make these protein recommendations on paper it completely works. What's rarely mentioned is how bland these meals become. Maybe you already know, or maybe this is yet another dose of tough love that you need to realize, but in the pantheon of tasty things you can shove into your pie hole, lean proteins are not exactly tasty.
In fact, one of the biggest reasons people struggle with their diet is because they struggle to consume enough lean quality protein day in and day out. Anybody can smash their body weight in protein without any regard for taste for a day or two, but the true battle is can you do it forever until death do us part?
I can already hear the chefs screaming. What about slow cooked brisket!?! What about lean cuts of filet mignon!?! What about the recipe for chicken breast that Nonna taught me as a small boy!?! Real food cooked to perfection is the true height of taste bud orgasm. Alright. Touche.
I do in fact agree that real food cooked well actually does taste better than any processed food. In fact, I go out of my way to make pasta from scratch almost every weekend. But guess what. Culinary masterpieces that excite the senses take time and money. Often lots of it. While a perfect slow cooked short rib taco that melts in your mouth can fit into the realm of healthy, (which is a sliding scale for everybody) you either have to buy that for a large dent in the wallet, or you have to make it….over an 8 hour course of the day.
A bag of Cheetos? 5 minutes in the gas station. Medium bag $1.99. Addictively delicious.
Embrace the Truth
The purpose here isn’t to lose hope. I believe the fight to eat nutritiously and maintain your health is one of the best battles you can choose to undertake in this life. But fighting that fight first comes to accepting a certain reality. Healthy food on a price-effective-time-effective scale will never taste as good as processed foods. Every instagram/tiktok post extolling the delicious nature of air fryer salmon with rice and broccoli is lying to you.
So let us embrace the philosophy of loving the fight. While 90% lean ground beef will never leave you with the instant gratification of [insert favorite bullshit snack food here], just know that every bite of that slightly dry unflavorful low fat cut of meat leads to becoming a more kick-ass human being. More energy, more muscle, less body fat, greater feelings of satisfaction, better sleep, better sex drive, more focus, and more everything lies at the end of consistently eating brutally nutritious food.
And cutting out the packaged shit.