What Triggers Cravings And How To Turn Them Off?
Cravings make you eat uncontrollably and play an important role in weight gain. After an craving attack you feel horrible, stuffed with what ever you ate and the bad conscious plagues you. So when you find a way to turn those cravings off, you’ll feel in control again and on top of the game.
But how cravings are triggered?
- physical cravings: The physical cravings show up in physical reactions: you have a feeling of weakness, your stomach growls, you are shaky, unfocused and you have the feeling that you now need something to eat very quickly. This is a real lack of energy and a sign you had too little to eat. This happens during a extremely low calorie diet, or your are under extreme time pressure and just can’t find the time to eat. As a result, your body is crying out for readily available energy.
Solution: Have something ready to eat with you, for example a banana. Bananas have a relatively high amount of fructose, which goes rapidly into the blood stream and satisfy hunger. At the same time you provide the body with plenty of vitamins and minerals. - Food cravings: We need a lot of essential protein building blocks, highly unsaturated fats and vital substances. A deficiency can be shown by an appetite for a specific food.
- Hormonal cravings: Lack of sleep can also lead to cravings because the hormones Leptin and Ghrelin are not working impeccably. These two hormones are important for perceiving hunger – and the feeling of satiety by sending the relevant information to the brain. Insufficient sleep can cause the functions of these hormones to become completely out of whack and we might be more hungry.
Solution: Find your own way to enhance your sleep – for example: Relaxation techniques in bed, avoid stress before bedtime, develop your nightly routine, avoid TV, smartphone, Tablet. They send out blue light, which reduces the production of melatonin (the sleep hormone). Try a hot bottle for warm feed ….. - Emotional cravings: Ingesting food is a reaction to an uncomfortable or stressful situation in your life that makes you feel negative. By eating, you try to get a grip on these negative emotions. In such moments, invisible automatisms run in your head. These are so-called subconscious thought and behaviour patterns that you have learned in the past. However, eating does not help to deal with problems. It’s just a short term compensator. After a binge eating, guilt often spreads. Other long-term consequences of emotional eating are obesity and increasing self-dissatisfaction. Solution: Find out what are these underlying issues from your past. A fantastic tool for this is EFT tapping. It is tapping on energy points on the meridians to reinstall interrupted energy flow to dissolve the emotional baggage that we carry around with us. Once we rid ourselves from it, Weight Loss itself is not a big deal any more.
How do you find out what kind of cravings you are experiencing right now?
The first step is to observe yourself. Where this hunger is coming from? In time you will develop a feeling what kind of hunger it is right now. For several weeks you should keep a record and include when these cravings occur. To what kind of food you feel drawn to, and how you feel mentally and physically at that time.
Additionally check your meal planning. Do you have regular meals? Do you eat yourself really full with a balanced diet? It is worth taking a closer look at this. Just regular meals and a good amount of protein leads to more saturation and clearly less cravings already.
What can help with cravings as well is toping meals up with Magnesium in form of magnesium rich foods (like green leave vegetables) or in form of supplements (Forever Calcium, contains 82% of the daily requirement of Magnesium).
