The Almond Test

When I was little, my mom used to buy a sh*t ton of almonds. She bought them religiously. Every week of grocery shopping, she would buy about a pound of almonds and it would be finished within a matter of days.

But, I hated them.

Dude, they was gross. They were these little brown, hard, chewy nuggets of… nut (that aren’t even real nuts, scientifically) and they would always get stuck in my teeth so that I had little brown specks when I smiled. I hated almonds.

But during the peak of my weight loss years (about 2 years ago, when I dropped from ~220 lbs to ~180 lbs) I bought almonds a LOT. Almost every time I went shopping, I copped a tin of Blue Diamond almonds.

And it wasn’t because almonds have “healthy fats”.

And it wasn’t because almonds kept my stomach full.

It was because they were gross.

You see, to any person on a diet, there is always a temptation to eat. And it’s very important to distinguish the temptation between eating for pleasure and eating for hunger.

Eating for pleasure is bad. It’s binge eating. It’s eating because it feels good. It’s going to Whataburger late at night and drunkenly munching on a chicken biscuit.

Eating for hunger is good. It’s essential to survival. It’s eating because your stomach and body need some kind of energy to function.

How do you tell the difference? Use the almond test.

If you’re truly hungry, then you will eat any edible food, including something gross like almonds.

If you say to yourself “nah… I don’t want almonds… but I want some potato chips!” then you’re not truly hungry. You’re eating for pleasure. And in that case, you probably should wait to eat until you’re actually eating for hunger.

Obviously, there are people out there (like my mom) who don’t think almonds are disgusting, and who actually love them. For those people, they should replace almonds with some other food that they don’t really like, but will force themselves to eat if they’re starving of hunger. The concept is the same.