Kick Your Food Cravings
How many extra calories a day are you consuming just because you feel like eating something?
You know that your not hungry but you’ve got the munchies - these are cravings. And cravings can quickly pack on the extra pounds.
Cravings: Eating When You’re Not Even Hungry
Everyone has experienced the occasional self-indulgent binge; it’s part of life. You know your not hungry but you grab something to eat anyway. But how much craving eating are you doing? Is giving in to your cravings causing you to gain unwanted weight or preventing you from losing the weight you desire to lose?
This post will examine the nature of cravings and empower you with the knowledge and tools to stop their sabotaging effects on your weight and on your self-confidence.
Although our human nature is to satisfy our hunger, many of the signals we use to identify hunger and satiation we learn and develop over time, based on the influences of our circumstances and the other people around us.
Unlike how it was for our ancient, forest-dwelling ancestors, in modern civilization we have access to food around the clock, every day. 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Put that together with these misleading signals of ours and we find it so easy to succumb to the desire to eat, even though our body doesn’t require any additional calories or nutrients at that time.
In many regards, there is little that distinguishes compulsive overeating from other forms of substance abuse, and from addictive behavior in general. As with substance abuse and generally addictive behavior, stress, boredom, disappointment, anxiety, loneliness, insecurity, depression, and other negative emotional states all crave relief in some way.
And beyond drugs and alcohol, one of the other ways many people have found to assuage those ill feeling and find the relief they crave is through the comfort of certain foods, or even simply through the comfort provided by very the act of eating.
The sad part of this response to stress is that, usually, giving in to the craving results in you feeling worse, not better, heaping guilt and shame on top of whatever negative feelings you are already experiencing to begin with.
As with all forms of addictive behavior, there may often be a “trigger”, or an event that provokes the craving. This can be a television commercial, an impending part of a person’s daily routine (ie. work or school), an argument, a particular memory, the presence of a particular person, etc. Any of these can lead to a person craving certain foods (or food in general) when their body is not actually hungry.
Listen to your cravings closely, and not only because, in part, many times those cravings will be displaced desires for some form of mental or emotional fulfillment. Listen to them also in part because every once in a while, a craving is an honest-to-goodness cue from your body that a particular nutrient is lacking at that moment and sorely needed. When you have a craving that you may consider absurd (in other words, for something other than fats and sugars), consider that your body may be telling you that it needs some nutrient which that food contains.
Ordinarily, it won’t take much of the food in question to satisfy the craving. So just eat a little of it, then wait 5-10 minutes and see how you feel. Most times, the craving will have dissipated by then. If it hasn’t, eat just a little more and then wait again for 5-10 minutes.
And even before giving in to any cravings be sure to drink a glass of water as it has been shown that many times when we think that we are hungry or have cravings for a particular treat we are really thirsty. Just by having this glass of water may help you fend off an additional 200 or more calories. Don’t care for plain water or you feel you want something with a lot of taste?
Try a sugar free drink like Crystal Light or eat a Crystal Light ice pop.
Zero calories but lots of flavor.
