I don’t like tomatoes… or I never used to like them as a child.

Yet actually, when I first gave this thought, and it was probably in the eighties when pizzerias became popular in the UK, I realised that I like tomatoes in some forms. When I gave this further consideration, I recalled that as a child I used to slather lots of meals in tomato ketchup. I still do!

So why did I have this aversion to the food I was actually consuming regularly? Well, I remembered, it was the tinned tomatoes served on toast – I hated their sloppy texture and the soggy bready goo. I didn’t care for huge, under-ripe beef tomatoes either.

But now as an adult I also enjoy sun-dried tomatoes in olive oil, roast cherry tomatoes and tomato puree! When we think about some of our childhood fads compared to how we feel now about those foods, I’m sure we can find some modifications in our palettes. We can enjoy trying new flavours, too.

In the same way, we can apply what I call “Review Thinking” to many other aspects of our experiences; we can adapt our historic events by throwing away any of the irrelevant debris. These are old thought patterns, which no longer apply to how you feel today.

An example: When my first boyfriend dumped me, for far too long I wondered what’d happened to the gifted bottle of perfume that suddenly vanished. I used to boycott the scent, I vowed never to wear it again. When I looked back on this a while later, I realised that I no longer needed to carry that with me. I didn’t care about the boyfriend anymore, so why should I care about the scent? These days I can’t even remember what the perfume was called.

Back to a food example: A friend of mine hated fish as a child. She went through many adult years totally discounting it as an option. But one day she reviewed her old wiring and said: “That looks nice, maybe I’ll try a bit”. Nowadays she eats fish regularly and no longer misses out on the nourishing staple.

Try and review some of your old ways of thinking and see if you can try something new. Explore foods which you’ve told yourself you don’t like, or get rid of old associations which make you feel negatively towards something. Feel free to try my suggestions – see if they can help you too.