Picture yourself sitting down to a beautiful table full of the foods you love most. Take your time (close your eyes if you’d like) and imagine:

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What do you see on the table in front of you? What do you smell?

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What’s the space around you like? What do you hear in the background?

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Who’s with you?

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How do you feel?

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If your breath slowed and your mouth began to water during this exercise, congratulations: You’ve dropped into the pleasure zone of eating, if only in your imagination.

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“Eating, like procreating, is designed at the most primitive level of the nervous system to be extremely pleasurable,” explains Marc David, MA, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating and author of Nourishing Wisdom and The Slow Down Diet. “Pleasure at its core is primal.”

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Even the physiology of eating rewards enjoyment. Savoring food aids digestion, helps regulate appetite, and supports overall health — largely by helping us chill out. Taking the time to create and enjoy a sumptuous meal can catalyze our body’s relaxation response. This moves the nervous system into its parasympathetic, or rest-and-digest, state, David explains.

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Eating with delight triggers the secretion of hormones, neurotransmitters, and enzymes that help optimize digestion and the absorption of nutrients.

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When we’re relaxed, we’re also likely to feel more satisfied, adds nutrition therapist Jenna Hollenstein, MS, RDN, author of Intuitive Eating for Life. And “depending on where you are on the spectrum of not at all hungry to the hungriest you’ve ever been, somewhere in the middle is where you’re wired to find food the most appealing.”

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If you’re missing this state of gustatory bliss — in which you enjoy meals, your digestion hums along, and you find it easy to feel satisfied — it may be that pleasure is deficient in your diet.

Paradise Lost

For many, pleasure in eating has become secondary — or irrelevant. Rather than prioritizing meals that are satisfying, sensual, and relaxing, we may be preoccupied with health, disease management, or weight loss, says Hollenstein.

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We might be afraid to eat our favorite traditional foods because they seem unhealthy to us. Or we’re holding on to values of self-denial and restraint from our cultural or religious upbringing. Or we’re so pressed for time that we snarf down food on the run, hardly tasting it.

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Add to this mix a pervasive and toxic diet culture that equates slenderness with social acceptability, and the very act of eating can become shrouded in anxiety.

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“Fear, guilt, and shame cut us off from pleasure,” says David. “When we feel ashamed of our body, when we feel it’s not a safe place, we disembody — which means we don’t feel our emotions, and we certainly don’t feel pleasure.”

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“People fear that if they eat for pleasure, then they’ll go off the deep end. The pendulum will swing out to some extreme end of the spectrum, and they’ll lose control.”

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If anything, we may try to restrict pleasure in the service of self-discipline.

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“People fear that if they eat for pleasure, then they’ll go off the deep end. The pendulum will swing out to some extreme end of the spectrum, and they’ll lose control,” says Hollenstein. “If you’re approaching things with control above all, that doesn’t leave a whole lot of space for joy.”

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A solely restrictive attitude toward food also leaves little room for satisfaction and satiety, she notes. Paradoxically, this can trigger eating more food . . . without pleasure. “You can get full on baked chicken and steamed broccoli. You can feel the distention in your belly, but you may not be satisfied.”

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When we continually resist giving ourselves permission to eat what we want — say you want a peanut butter cup, but instead you go for sugar-free hard candy — we’re likely to make up for the diminished qualitative experience by eating more, Hollenstein says.

Pain and Pleasure

Anxiety about eating can make us physically sick. “When we’re tied up in knots at the plate and eating with fear, it activates the stress response and disrupts the enteric nervous system, which governs your gastrointestinal tract,” explains nutritionist Kathie Swift, MS, RDN, LDN, cofounder of the Integrative and Functional Nutrition Academy. “I see this as one of the reasons so many people have irritable bowel and other GI issues. It’s a factor that’s often ignored, and it’s a very important piece.”

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On top of our general anxiety about eating, what we want from food may often look less like pleasure and more like pain relief. “We use food to soothe pains other than hunger,” says David. “Stress is a pain. Boredom is a pain. Anxiety is a pain. Anger occurs to us as pain.”

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Eating emotionally, for comfort and distraction, is something we all do from time to time. “And that’s fine, because we’re emotional beings,” he adds. “The problem is when food is our only, or our No. 1, way of regulating uncomfortable emotions.”

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And self-shaming while eating can trigger the release of stress hormones that blunt the body’s receptors to pleasure. “The more cortisol you have circulating in your system, the less your body has the ability to feel pleasure,” he explains.

Get Your Vitamin P

It can help to think of pleasure as a nutrient, a source of nourishment as important to health as nutrition itself. This can make pleasure easier to prioritize, especially if you’re health-minded. These are some useful guidelines to keep in mind:

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• Pleasure is personal. You might relish a crunchy, fresh red pepper, while your friend might pick every last sliver out of her salad. No two people are going to have the same dietary preferences when pursuing pleasure.
• Pleasure is contextual. You may love eating the pumpkin pie your father makes at Thanksgiving and feel indifferent to pumpkin pie during the rest of the year.
• Pleasure is associative. We often enjoy certain foods because we link them to positive memories and relationships. “My grandpa was so in love with popcorn he would buy 100-pound bags of it, and every time we went to his house, he would send us home with a milk jug full of popcorn,” says functional nutritionist Jesse Haas, MS, CNS, LN. “That’s a deep core memory and deep connection with people I love and people I miss.”

Cultivate Your Pleasure

“People say wine is an acquired pleasure, or seaweed is an acquired pleasure,” notes David. “So, how do you acquire a pleasure? You get curious, you sense it, you try different things, and you notice nuances.”

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Many coaches, dietitians, and therapists recommend a mindful-eating approach to help cultivate more pleasure. Slowing down and becoming more conscious about food can help us break a pattern of stressed, reactive, or anxious eating and tap into delight.

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Imagine how it feels when you slow down enough to notice the details of a food experience: the aroma, taste, and mouthfeel of the meal; the temperature in the room; the appearance of your surroundings; how you feel emotionally. Attending to sensations activates the cephalic phase of digestion, which contributes 40 to 50 percent of your GI tract’s digestive power, says David.

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“Mindfulness can help you notice the thought of, I shouldn’t be eating this. It helps you detach and recognize this as just a sentence in your mind. Then you’re more likely to enjoy your food.”

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Mindful eating can also protect you from falling prey to diet culture, says Ingrid Wolpert, MA, MSc, a coach who specializes in food freedom and body confidence. “Mindfulness can help you notice the thought of, I shouldn’t be eating this. It helps you detach and recognize this as just a sentence in your mind. Then you’re more likely to enjoy your food.”

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The practice of actively savoring takes mindful eating into full appreciation mode, kicking up the pleasure factor even further. “Savoring is about extracting the pleasure from the act of eating,” says integrative psychiatrist Henry Emmons, MD. “You don’t need to get more sweetness or more flavor or more quantity, because you’re really getting what you need from your moment-to-moment experience.”

Choose Pleasure

It can be easy to get stuck in our heads about our food choices and lose touch with our bodies altogether. Cultivating a more mindful, intuitive eating style can help bridge that gap.

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“Let’s say you’re feeling anxious,” says Wolpert. “If you’ve been practicing mindfulness, you’ll recognize the experience and the thoughts that go with it.”

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You can then make choices about how to respond to those anxious feelings rather than react habitually, she explains. Maybe you’ll comfort yourself with a hug, or go for a walk. Perhaps you decide you really do want to eat a piece of cake for comfort. The difference now is you’re doing it with intention, rather than as an automatic, mindless reaction.

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“A big part of intuitive eating is giving yourself unconditional permission to eat and not putting foods on a moral hierarchy.”

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“A big part of intuitive eating is giving yourself unconditional permission to eat and not putting foods on a moral hierarchy,” says Hollenstein.

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Choice and pleasure go hand in hand, she adds. When we seek external validation for our choices, it can feel like we’re not in charge of our own lives. “There’s a part of us that feels deprived, limited, and controlled, and humans don’t really like that — particularly when it comes to our bodies,” she adds.

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When we stop restricting our choices — restricting our pleasure — we may unlock the ability to enjoy unexpected dishes. We can make choices based on what feels right and sounds good in the moment. That may be a piece of cake, or a plate of fresh garden tomatoes and basil drizzled with olive oil.

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When we practice listening, our body will learn to guide us to the foods that feel best in every way. “Being well feels good,” says Haas. “We think more clearly. We have energy to accomplish the things that we need to do, and we enjoy the things that we want to do. We’re more present in our relationships.”

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Still, she adds, it’s important to enjoy the journey. “If we’re not experiencing pleasure in our health and in the ways that we care for ourselves, what’s the point?”

Pleasure in Sickness and in Health

So, what if a health condition requires that you limit or eliminate certain foods? How can you find pleasure and avoid fear if eating your favorite foods can truly make you ill?

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It may be as simple as finding substitutes that are enjoyable in themselves. “Nowadays, there are a lot of good options for people who need to avoid gluten, for example,” says integrative psychiatrist Henry Emmons, MD. “Many things still taste good, have the right kind of texture, and bring back at least some of that sense of pleasure.”

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“If we think about seeking the pleasure of feeling well in our body — and [food] restriction is a requirement to care for our unique body — then we shift the focus from what we’re eliminating or limiting to what we get to invite in. We make space for something new. And perhaps that can be pleasurable.”

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But finding a deeper, more satisfying pleasure in food again may require some curiosity and creativity, adds functional nutritionist Jesse Haas, MS, CNS, LN. “If we think about seeking the pleasure of feeling well in our body — and [food] restriction is a requirement to care for our unique body — then we shift the focus from what we’re eliminating or limiting to what we get to invite in. We make space for something new. And perhaps that can be pleasurable.”

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This takes some mindset work for many. “Sometimes we need to rethink what breakfast is if we’re not having toast anymore,” says Haas. “Could soup be for breakfast? Could stir-fry be for breakfast? The sky’s the limit — what sounds fun?”

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Kathie Swift, MS, RDN, LDN, a nutritionist who often works with people whose health conditions require food restrictions, says many balk at the idea of pleasure in eating — they associate it with all the foods they can no longer have. “So, I’ll bring in the theme of gratitude,” she says. “Most people can relate to that. They can tune in to the connection between what they can eat and how they feel physically and emotionally,” she says.

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This article was originally written by Jill Patton, FMCHC, is a Minneapolis-based health writer and functional-medicine certified health coach for Experience Life.