Suddenly you get a craving for something salty or something sweet. It’s 3:00 o’clock in the afternoon and you’re still at work. Conveniently on the floor below, there are vending machines that will produce what you want. So you stop work, go downstairs and get your snack. In fact, you get two of each, two salty things and two sweet things. You hurry back to your office, close the door, and devour all four bags of goodies.
What’s up with this when you know you were trying to lose weight. Why blow it? What was so all-fired important about filling yourself up? Where’d that craving come from anyway?
Looking back, the craving didn’t have much of a beginning. It didn’t start out in any well-formulated way, like a picture of food or actual food thoughts or a hunger sensation. The start was vague and ill defined, nothing you could put your finger on. Not really. And there seemed to be no particular cause for the craving.
As it usually turns out in situations such as this, there is indeed a distinct cause or a bunch of distinct causes for a craving despite the craving’s ill-defined beginning. In the case of the person at work, her craving may have arisen from some circumstance that affected her at work, some mood state she brought with her from home that day, or chronic inner turmoil that she usually carries around with her and she needed relief from.
So if you can, try not to leave your craving in an explanatory vacuum. Cravings do have better defined beginnings if you can discover their cause(s). The process of searching for and finding the origins of your cravings is a way to know what makes you have weight loss slip ups, and it allows you to take the very satisfying weight loss step of doing something about your craving before the craving grabs a hold of you.
If you need more help to stop your food cravings, please go to The Reading Room in the left-hand column of this blog at MariasLastDiet.com and look under cravings/urges..
If you need more specific help, email us at and we’ll point you in the right direction.