How to Beat Cravings

ImLosingWeight

Full Member
I did a bit of looking into this recently and here's what I found, thought it might help some others too:

The bits in Italic are from this article:
http://www.everydayhealth.com/diet-and-nutrition-pictures/ways-to-fend-off-food-cravings.aspx

and everything else is basically my interpretation ;)

Space your products evenly

“If you go longer than five hours without food, your blood sugar will drop and your cravings will begin”

So the trick here is to make sure we are spacing our meal replacement products evenly throughout the day, if you go half the day without a product your blood sugar level will drop.

The meal replacement products do have sugar in believe it or not!

The below is nutritional info for a chocolate shake for instance:

image.png


Drink water when you crave, and drink plenty of water throughout the day too anyway

"Dehydration can cause some people to crave salty foods. The solution is simple: Drink more water."


This is kind of amazing I think as you would think if you're dehydrated the last thing the body would crave is salt... but there you go, the article seems pretty authoritative. So another good way to fight the food cravings is to drink plenty of water. I know we are always told to drink plenty of water and know we should, but it's useful to understand why I think, and now I know this, I'll for sure be drinking water any time I crave any food.

Distract yourself!

“When the craving is psychological, it is meeting a need different from hunger,” Anding explains. The way to combat food cravings caused by boredom, anxiety, or other emotions is by finding an activity that will take your mind off your craving without adding calories. "

Another great tactic for fighting food cravings, distractions.

Netflix is a favorite of mine. Maybe fire up a game on the computer if you're into that kind of thing. Go for a walk. Play some music. Dance around your house. Call a friend. Anything really to occupy your mind.

This reminds me of something I saw in a funny video about mental health and mindfulness by Ruby Wax. At some point in the video she talks about how the brain can not focus well cognitively when it has tactile stimulus, so basically the idea was to touch a hard surface repeatedly with your hand or any physical object and focus on it to snap out of some conditioned thought patterns.

I think this would also work well for cravings, I'll try it next time. Something as simple as getting tactile with something like tapping your fingers repeatedly on a hard object etc. You can try this yourself, just start thinking about something, then start hitting your finger tips off a hard surface repeatedly and see how difficult it is to maintain fluid concentration on what you were thinking about! -this is a distraction that is easily accessible for us all!

So the three key tips are:

1) Space your meal replacement products evenly, so you have at least some sugar going into your body at regular intervals to help with your blood glucose levels.

2) Drink plenty of water, so you don't crave salty foods. Water is also great for filling you up.

3) Find a distraction. Have your distraction ready so you can go to it as soon as your craving kicks in.

Fighting with a few cravings myself today, this is what I discovered.
Hope someone finds something useful in it. =)
 
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