A famous editor I used to work with once told me that he didn’t like going to a certain well-known restaurant in Toronto, because it felt too much like going to church. It was too much of a burden to have to revere each bite, rather than simply eating it and enjoying it on a more superficial level. The dishes at this restaurant were so complex and the presentation so fussy that they demanded that you dissect and discuss them, and this made it just too much work to get through a meal.

Certainly, there is something to be said for a meal that challenges your palate and your mind, but sometimes you just want to fill your belly, satisfy your hunger, and experience the pleasure of eating. However, new research seems to indicate that exactly the kind of “mindful eating” demanded by haute cuisine might be a key to helping us maintain healthier weights.

A fascinating new study out of the Oregon Research Institute indicates that there is a real difference between the way obese people and slimmer folks experience the pleasure of food. The study measured the brain’s response to consuming a chocolate milkshake and found that the response in obese people was greatly diminished. The study also followed the weights of subjects for a year after the test and found that the lower the brain’s response to the milkshake, the greater the risk that these same people would experience unhealthy weight gain during the subsequent year.

Eric Stice, who lead the study, told Reuters in an interview “It’s much the same way that people who smoke regulate cigarettes. If you give them the low-tar cigarettes, they make up for the lost tar by smoking more efficiently, and get more of it.” The study also found that those subjects with a variant of gene TaqlA1 were more likely to have this diminished response to food.

At Psychology Today, Jay Winner responds to this study by suggesting that we can train ourselves to get more pleasure out of food by becoming more reverential about it. He’s an advocate of mindful eating, the practice of paying careful attention to the aromas, textures and flavours of what we eat. There’s even a Center for Mindful Eating that advocates a whole set of principles for improving the relationship between what we eat and how we think about it.

It sounds like the best advice for losing weight I’ve ever heard. I’m going to do my best to try it out.

Either that, or I’m going to devote myself to The Banana Diet.

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