Maria's Last Diet

You Want Chocolate, But Do You Know Your Chocolate Facts?

by Maria's Last Diet

What is the most commonly craved food among women in the United States? It’s chocolate, of course.

Do you know that women who crave chocolate feel the urge to eat it as well as a strong urge not to eat it? Of course you do. Any woman concerned about her weight knows this.

You probably also know the terrible guilt feelings that come from spoiling your diet with chocolate, or even from just thinking of eating a piece of chocolate.

You might not know, however, that part of the positive appeal of chocolate is the anticipation of eating it and the memories of eating it, and not just the joy and satisfaction you get from eating it.

Here’s a doozy of a chocolate fact. Adults who eat chocolate more frequently have a lower Body Mass Index than those who eat chocolate less often. How can that be? But it’s true.

It may not be true that you eat chocolate to lift your feelings. A decade old research study with men as subjects showed that the men were more inclined to eat chocolate when they were feeling joyful than when they felt sad. When joyful they got more pleasure from eating chocolate and felt more stimulated by the chocolate.

What’s with you and chocolate? Do some of these research findings hold true for you?

 

How to Control Food Cravings

by Maria's Last Diet

Does making a conscious effort to suppress your craving for a favorite fattening food when you are trying to lose some weight work for you? It doesn’t work for lots of people. They often get a rebound effect: as soon as they stop suppressing their craving, they crave that same calorie-rich food again. Some might even crave it more after stifling their original craving.

What to do? What to do?

Here are some techniques that have helped people get past their cravings.

Adopt the mindset of experiencing your craving (thoughts, sensations, feelings) from a distance, stepping back from your craving, or just noticing your craving without any intention of acting on it. You might imagine yourself, for example, riding in a train looking out the window and watching the imagery of your craving pass by.

Another way of unlocking the cravings hold on you would be to modify the thoughts and feelings that make up the craving. You could say the thoughts in a funny way using a deep voice while saying the thought like it was in slow motion, or by using a high voice that sounds nothing like your voice, or by pretending to be someone other than yourself and use the way that person talks, thinks, and feels to express the craving.

You might also think of yourself as surfing your craving like you would surf a wave. You start at the trough of your craving and then you ride the crest of the craving until the craving goes back down to becoming a trough once again. That’s the way cravings work. They have a beginning, middle, and end, and you could think of yourself as riding your craving right through to the end.

Finally, if cravings have beginnings, middles, and ends, you could just, if you were brave enough, wait out the craving knowing full well that it will end. You might, in this case, actually time the craving, just so you know how long it took to get through it.

 

Some Odd Facts About Your Cravings for Specific Foods

by Maria's Last Diet

Food cravings are experienced more by people who are very overweight.

Restrictive diets and weight loss reduce food cravings.

People with an addictive eating pattern have more cause to experience cravings.

People who have food cravings do not expect that satisfying their cravings will lead to making them feel better.

The loss of control when satisfying a food craving often leads to feeling guilty.

 

How Do You Define Craving

by Maria's Last Diet

A craving is a desire that is either persistent or acute, that can vary in it’s intensity from mild to intense and in duration from short to long, and it makes you want to act in order to satisfy the desire or relieve the craving.

Sometimes cravings remain in the background. At other times the physical sensations and the thoughts and images that are so much a part of cravings are disruptive and intrusive to the point of becoming obsessive. Cravings are also comprised of the expectation that you will get relief from an uncomfortable state and achieve a more positive state (e.g., a high, feel satisfied). Cravings become habitual, such as a smoker craving a cigarette with her coffee, or an overweight woman craving a calorie-rich dessert each night with her dinner.

The craving and the behavior used to satisfy the craving are most often experienced as out of your control. But this is not altogether true. While you might not be aware of what caused the craving, there are definite cues that trigger the craving, like the cup of coffee for the smoker or the evening meal for the overweight woman or the abysmal mood state that we all suffer from time to time. Interestingly, the consumption of the craved substance itself, like the calorie-rich cake for dessert each night keeps the craving fresh enough in your memory to help elicit the craving the next time.

Withdrawal can also bring on cravings. If you are trying to lose weight and you are doing without, like when you are on a diet, you are likely to experience cravings. You may crave what you have been used to eating, like too much food or certain fattening foods or particular sweets or salty treats that you’ve excluded from your weight-loss diet.

Probably the biggest danger from having cravings is giving up on losing weight. Just because you give in to a craving, though, doesn’t mean that you’ve blown your weight-loss regimen. Like with a diet cheat, giving in to a craving can be something you think about and learn from. After giving in to a craving, giving up on losing weight usually occurs when you unrealistically expect too much of yourself, like never giving in to cravings.

 

Your Cravings: Feel Them, Fight Them, Forego Them, Give In to Them

by Maria's Last Diet

Whether to, whether not to. Guilt either way.

That’s the downfall of cravings.

It just came upon you. You must have some. It’s been on your mind off and on throughout the day. You just must have some of your favorite candy. A piece of chocolate. Just a few gummy bears. Skittles for me.

It’s after work and you’re on your way home. Your favorite candy is on your mind more than ever. You’re thinking of stopping to get some, but that would mean searching around for somewhere to get them. You’ll have to wait if you want to get them at your local supermarket because you’re nowhere near that now. Waiting is out of the question, though, and stopping, well that’s pretty inconvenient, since you’ll have to search for a parking space, maybe even walk a block or more. You’re tired and you want to get home.

These are all the convenience thoughts. Right on top of the convenience thoughts come the “should I” “shouldn’t I” thoughts. You’ll eat the candy and then eat dinner too. You’re trying to lose weight. It’s Monday, after all, and you ate like there was no tomorrow on Saturday. Now’s the time to make up for it. You were good on Sunday. Dinner was only a small portion of cottage cheese and sour cream, and you went to bed feeling very unfull. But I really do want some candy.

It’s like an eenie meenie miney mo game where you are the one doing the eenie meenies, and each time you start either on yourself or the other person knowing full well how to determine who the winner will be. Of course you’re going to stop for the candy despite all your protestations. Lately, you’ve been in the “I’m going to satisfy my craving groove,” and this time will be no different. Damn the ambivalence, full speed ahead.

 

How to Curb Cravings for Forbidden Food

by Maria's Last Diet

What about forbidden food cravings? Do you get them? When do you get them? What do you do about them? Is what you’re doing effective?

Food cravings can make it so you don’t stay on your diet or so you don’t do a good job of maintaining lost weight. Most times, cravings for sweets or other fattening foods are normal and expected and outside your voluntary control.

Here are a couple of strategies you can use when you get food cravings.

Accept the cravings as they are. Don’t try to change them or suppress them.
  Attempts to suppress or control cravings can make cravings more intense.

“Step back,” figuratively speaking, from your cravings and look at them as they are.
    This kind of personal distancing helps you experience the cravings without
    having to fall prey to them.

There Goes My Dieting Plan. I Gave in to My Craving.

by Maria's Last Diet

How often do you have an urgent desire, longing, or yearning for a particular food? You just have to have it. The feelings and thoughts are intense. It’s not that you are simply hungry. You’ve got to have what you want. It’s fattening. It’s off your diet. You’ll hate yourself later. You know that, but knowing it doesn’t stop you. You go ahead and eat what you craved. You eat a lot of it, more than you should. You end up not feeling rewarded. It doesn’t turn out to be a positive experience. You admonish yourself. You feel guilty. You question your sincerity. A diet is a diet, and you should have stayed on it, you say to yourself. You vow not to do this ever again.

The very next time, though, you do it again. Same pattern. Same result. Craving. You being too rigid about your diet may cause it. Check it out and see. If this is so, making your dieting more flexible may help.

For more on cravings and urges, go to The Reading Room (left-hand column of this blog).

What Causes Cravings, and Why Ruin Your Good Dieting

by Maria's Last Diet

Craving can get you into trouble. You throw all your weight-loss willpower away. All your hard work and good intentions are gone in a flash. You give in to your craving, and that’s the end of your dieting program, at least for now.

Yet cravings have been your way to adapt to and override unpleasant emotional cues. Before you even think about what’s going on with you, you snap into action. You take action. You act before you think. OK, sometimes you think too. But your craving, even before you act on it, is a pretty impulse-driven reaction to some discomfort you don’t want to really feel, and deal with.

To do something about your cravings means that you have to slow down this pretty automatic reaction to whatever feelings you’re trying to avoid or deny. You have to rescue your self-reflection and use it. You have to call upon some constructive self-criticism. You cannot simply give in to the driven quality of your craving.

When you are dieting and you crave something that’s not on your dieting plan, giving yourself a moment or two to think is entirely possible. It may not feel like this is so, but it is so. Your cravings have a beginning, middle, and end—most importantly, they do end. You can, with practice, actually wait out your craving. Try it Next time you crave something off your diet, you could even time your craving to see just how long you would have to wait until it goes away. Or, you could think of your craving as a wave that crests and falls, and you could picture yourself riding out the wave.

Whatever your technique, the thing to do about a craving is to be more deliberate in your thinking about it. Interrupt its driven quality. Self-reflect, and be constructively self-critical. And…if you can deal with the unpleasant emotional cues more directly without turning on the craving, do so.