I had some sardines and an avocado for lunch today. With celery.

It was really good, even though I didn’t actually think I liked sardines that much.

I think my tastes have changed on the ketogenic way of eating. More than that, I think I’ve been willing to allow them to change.

I am eating sardines because they are keto friendly and because they have calcium. I am writing about them because they — more specifically, my reaction to them — is making me think.

Long story short: The medication I’m on for thyroid hormone replacement and cancer suppression threatens bone density, and my doctor and my research both agree that nutritional calcium is preferable to supplements. I looked up high-calcium foods. Sardines are way up at the top of the list.

I really don’t know what to do with them. So today, I had some with half an avocado and a stalk of celery. The celery tasted sinfully sweet, although that is probably only believable to people who are fully keto adapted. The avocado paired well with the sardines. Fat and salt.  Next time I’ll add some tomatoes, olives, and spicy mayonnaise, and maybe a couple of pieces of a hard, dry aged cheese.

It surprises how thrilled I’ve become at the taste of simple, whole foods.

It seems like there might be a life lesson in here about being willing to let go of what we think we think.

As a practical matter, it’s important to be both narrowly committed and open-minded when starting out keto because this way of eating at first seems impossibly restrictive. Ice cream, pizza, pasta, all junk food, diet soda, chips, french fries, bread…. all on the “do not touch list. But if we leave ourselves open to changing, change will come, and it may surprise us.

This happens all the time with kids: They hate vegetables or pickles or olives or beer, and then they grow up, and all of a sudden, they don’t.  Of course, almost all of us have things we really detest. For me, it was always only one food: peanut butter. I detested even the smell of it in anything — it in cookies, Snickers bars, M&Ms — and I have never had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in my life.

The first time I tried peanut butter in cooking, I was climbing Mt. Elgon in Uganda, and my husband had a jar of it. Our guides disappeared into the woods one evening and brought back a basket full of leaves. They said if Dan would contribute some of his peanut butter, they would make a stew to share, so Dan happily agreed. I only tried it because I was too polite to decline. Plus I was hungry from hiking all day, and we were  cooking over a fire with our guides, sharing a meal made from greens found in the forest…. Which means I was willing to like it. And so I did.

Since then, I’ve enjoyed peanut butter in satays and sauces, but never like most people eat it — out of the jar. But my tastes have changed with keto, so, all in the spirit of scientific inquiry, I thought I’d try and see if the change extended to peanut butter. The results: I can’t say I love it, at least not yet… but found that I could eat it for the first time in my life.

Tastes change… if we let them.

The ketogenic way of eating has changed my insulin cycle and my metabolism, and my body is responding accordingly. That’s certainly part of the equation. But change also seems like something that I have had to allow to happen.

And when tastes and ideas and opinions change, our world changes — whether it’s our nutritional world, our artistic world, our family world, or our interpersonal world.

It makes me wonder what else might happen, if only I could let it.