“We think fast food is equivalent to pornography, nutritionally speaking.”  ~Steve Elber

As a culture, our diet often suffers from the overwhelming demands of schedule and time constraints; we pick up food on the run and call it a meal. Even when we take the time to prepare a meal at home, we often eat it in front of a screen, eating quickly and mindlessly. Taking the time to taste our food is a luxury many of us don’t know we are missing. We leap to the main course, over eating but never really filling up.

In many ways our sexual drive sadly gets the same treatment. We take the sensuous part of our humanity for granted, forgetting the power that scent has in waking up our memory, sexuality  and emotions. It is well documented that people who become anosmic, suffer not only a significant drop in their ability to taste, but to emote. Thus, sexual drive plummets.

Learning to pay attention to scent and the associated tastes is a form of building a sensory vocabulary.Taking the time to savor our senses makes life rich. Nowhere is that more true than in our intimate lives. Thinking about your sex life like a gourmet meal both takes the pressure off of any preconceived ideas of the main event and opens a gateway to the wonders of what it means to be a sexual being.

Last weekend when I was visiting with hundreds of naturopathic physicians at their annual conference, the analogy of a gourmet meal occurred to me when I was explaining why Good Clean Love is not just a lubricant company. The best lubricant in the world is a penetration aid, and contrary to the millions of dollars of KY advertising that “a little lube is all you need,” a satisfying intimate encounter takes more than a squirt of lube.

I explained over and over how our Good Clean Love product solution is a multi-course meal. Love oils that heighten your own pheromones and awareness of the scent chemistry between you and your partner, trigger the limbic brain through the olfactory bulb. The arousal mechanism is stirred and so is the feel of your partner’s body as the oils give the curves and valleys in the body glide.

Adding time and attention to our intimate encounters changes the game completely. Think of the last fabulous meal you had;  hors d’oeuvres, second course…  Tastes, conversation, lingering touches…   Awake with all your senses.  Why hurry to the main course?  Adding a flavor of body candy as a second step extends the pleasure, introducing a whole new synergy of scent and flavor to kissing our most sensitive tissue. Enervated with sensuality, the pressure is off and the pleasure is on.

Picking up a bottle of lubricant at this point makes infinitely more sense. This is the moment when a penetration device can do its job, adding the old familiar slip to the deepest communion we can manifest. Hurrying to the main course is anti-climactic at best and painful at worst. Take time to explore what it means to feel sensuous. It is a close cousin to our most satisfying sexual selves.