You can maximize the amount of pleasure you experience in your life by bringing it under conscious control.

There are certain tricks you can use to get more pleasure from a meal. Here are a few tricks you might find fun to try.

1. Save the Best for Last

What you experience last greatly influences how you experience your entire meal. Make the last bite great and you'll feel better about your whole meal.

2. Eat More Smaller Courses

Your appetite and your pleasure increase by eating smaller selections of high quality food. You don't always need to eat large meals.

3. Control Expectations

Having high expectations sets you up for almost certain disappointment. Go into a meal with an open mind and low expectations. Aim to be pleasantly surprised instead of knowingly dissatisfied.

4. Space Out Experiences

You brain adapts to experiences if you have them too close together. Separate out how often you have a taste experience and you'll enjoy it more.

5. Be Grateful

Don't talk about how much better the experience could have been. Look for the good in the experience you had.

6. Forget What You Didn't Choose

Don't think about the attractive food options you didn't take. This only builds up regret. Focus on enjoying what you did order and forget what you didn't choose.

7. Take Flavor Vacations

Not eating a flavor for a while revitalizes your ability to taste that flavor. So take a 2 week vacation from sweet, salty, sour, and bitter flavors from time to time. Parting is such sweet sorrow, but the makeup tasting is great.

8. Smell What You Love

Your sense of smell deteriorates with age. You can fight back by taking a whiff of your favorite smell everyday for a few months. This forces your body to create new scent receptors.

9. Search Out New Experiences

Look for interesting, rich, and complex foods. Look for new and different tastes. Look for fresh, colorful foods. Look for spicy foods. Look for subtle and simple foods. Food is an adventure and you are an explorer. Go forth and eat well. The 20 Tastes to Try Before You Die strategy suggests different foods to experience. You may find a few them interesting.

This doesn't contradict the idea of You Don't Always have to Try New Things. Both principles work if you use them well.

10. Plan Your Journey

The first time you experience a food may be the strongest experience you will have with the food.

To recreate the first-time experience you may want to leave time between eating the same kind of food. "Absence makes the heart grow fonder" applies to food as well. If, for example, you have dozens of strawberries every day it may be difficult to find the joy in each new strawberry. If you wait a week between strawberry tastings or have a few each day you give your body a chance to forget about strawberries. Then the next time you have a strawberry it will be a bolder experience.

If you plan your entire diet with this in mind, you can keep yourself at a continual peak of the eating experience. Certainly, there is also great delight in coming to know something completely. So mix it up. Keep your mind and taste buds off balance by combining short periods of new flavors with longer periods of focus on a single family of flavors.

Think of your eating life as a journey. The key to a life time of eating pleasure is to avoid most of the ruts in the road, continually travel to new places, while still managing to visit and stay with old friends along the way. You must consciously manage your journey, otherwise you will build up a series of habits and fears that will lock you into one boring path.

Planning your journey applies at many different points in time. You may pick different contrasting dishes within a meal. You may select different restaurant styles on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. You may concentrate on wine from a particular region for a month. You may try cooking from different cuisines at home. You may fast for a day. You may go out to eat with different groups of friends. The possibilities are infinite.