Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

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.

by Maria's Last Diet

There are a number of in-the-moment ways to deal with food thoughts that keep you in a weight-gaining and weight-maintaining eating pattern.

First of all, you can try to suppress the thought. In other words, stop thinking what you’re thinking. You can think “stop,” say “stop” out loud, or even shout “stop.”

Another technique is to remove the thought. In this case you simply dismiss the thought. Or if suppression and removal aren’t effective methods for you, you could replace the food thought with a neutral thought, one not having to do with food and weight gain.

You could also resort to acceptance of the food thought without acting on it. This would mean being exposed to the food thought without doing anything about it. Acceptance, you could say, is a form of waiting it out. If you wait out a food thought, it will eventually fade away and you will be free of it. If waiting it out is too hard for you to do, trying to be accepting while you wait will give you a more focused goal and help you wait it out better.

Do you have your own way of dealing with pesky food thoughts? If so, what is it?

by Maria's Last Diet

Here are some ins and outs about cravings.

Cravings are usually described as a strong desire or urge. Nevertheless, cravings can vary in strength from mild to severe. A food craving is an emotionally charged focus of your attention toward food or eating that is associated with gaining pleasure or feeling relief from discomfort. There is, of course, the target of the craving, which in the case of food is generally a particular food. There is also the activity that is involved in reaching this target. When you have a craving, you might only be aware of the thoughts and feelings that make up the craving and not the physiological components.

One reason you might succumb to a craving and throw off your weight loss effort is not due to the power of the craving itself but to the ineffective method you are using to cope with the craving.

For more on cravings, please go to The Reading Room and the White Paper, both of which are in the left-hand column of this blog at MariasLastDiet.com. Or, if you want to have an actual book or an e-book to read through and refer to, check out the weight-loss books for women section on the right-hand side of this blog.

If you need more specific help, email us at [email protected] and we’ll point you in the right direction.

by Maria's Last Diet

Do you set up an event or chain of events that leads to you having cravings? Check yourself out on this and see. While cravings may seem like they come out of the blue, cravings do have their causes, and one of these causes is the purposeful, albeit unsuspecting, creation of events and situations that will eventually make you have a craving.

What makes the situation a put up job is that a woman is taking more of a risk than usual. She is doing something risky and doing it on purpose, but without letting herself know the full implication of what she is doing. For example, a woman thought she would just pick up some donuts to have with coffee because a couple of her friends were stopping by in the morning. Another woman did the very thing she didn’t want to do, which put her under considerable stress. Still another woman planned a luncheon for her book group, something no one in the book group had done before. And one more woman picked a fight with her daughter in the morning before her daughter went off to school. Each of these circumstances is a means to an end, the end being cravings and perhaps even falling prey to the craving.

You can understand the risk these women are taking if you put their behavior in the context of a violation of their weight loss plan. Each of the women was involved in some type of weight loss regimen. Everyone knows you try to minimize the risk of cravings and falling prey to them when you are trying to keep to your weight loss plan. Taking the risks they did meant these women were putting themselves in harms way.

There is something mysterious and threatening about a food craving. If you are trying to lose some weight, you may worry that a big bad craving will come along and ruin everything.

Well, you should know there are cravings and there are cravings. Cravings are not simply your desire to have a certain food, like something salty or something sweet or something starchy. For a craving to be a craving you have to have a strong, even intense desire for a specific food or food group. So don’t scare yourself by thinking that just wanting something off your weight loss diet plan is a craving that could destroy it all.

Food cravings are a normal part of everyone’s experience with food. It doesn’t matter if you are dieting or not dieting, at some time you will have a strong desire to eat a particular kind of food. Very often your craving will be for salty, sweet, or some type of calorie-rich food.

Right along with the craving, especially if your goal is to try to lose some weight, you may feel ambivalent about satisfying your craving. Should you or shouldn’t you? You really shouldn’t, but you feel like having it. What should you do? What will you do? What will make the difference between satisfying your desire and denying yourself what you crave?

One thing that can make you turn away from your desire is feeling guilty. If you are on the verge of deciding in favor of satisfying your craving and you feel guilty for doing it, you might just use feeling guilty to shut the door on your craving, at least this time around. Or if feeling guilty doesn’t kick in until after you start to satisfy your craving, you might use feeling guilty to limit the quantity this time or the frequency with which you satisfy your cravings at other times.

What happens, though, if feeling guilty doesn’t have this kind of limiting impact on you? What might you do then? Did you ever think of simply satisfying your craving. Yes, that’s right. Satisfy your craving. Eat the piece of chocolate or the chips or whatever. Why not? Are you afraid that if you satisfy your craving by eating off your weight loss regimen, something more serious could happen? Like what? Like eating too many or too much? How likely is that for you? If you are prone to binging, satisfying a craving can no doubt end up in a binge. Binging, though, is a lot different from satisfying a craving. Binging is something you will have to work on in a whole different way.

The value of satisfying rather than suppressing a craving is that once you satisfy your craving you can move on. Think of it like a diet cheat. A diet cheat is just part of the process of dieting. Everyone cheats. It’s actually good to cheat. Cheating on your diet, if you do it only to a certain extent, gives you opportunities to go off your diet and then go right back on. In the process you learn a number of things. You learn how to eat too much food, if that’s the nature of your cheat, or you learn to eat calorie rich food and then go back to eating the kind of food that enables you to lose weight. By cheating and going right back to your weight loss routine, you can gain more control over your old weight gaining eating pattern. By eating off your weight loss regimen, you are also preparing yourself for the phase of weight loss that comes after you reach goal weight, when you are no longer on a weight loss regimen and have to know how to modify your eating if you eat a little too much here and there.

by Maria's Last Diet

Let’s say you are trying to lose some weight and you modify your eating according to the new diet you went on. The diet doesn’t allow for any sugar and you find yourself on some days craving something sugary. You think of all sorts of sugary foods you could eat. This is the usual explanation of craving. You crave some type of food, in this case something sugary.

Here’s a new way of thinking about cravings. You don’t crave a particular type of food or food at all. What you crave is an end to the uncomfortable thoughts and feelings you are having. Even the thought of the specific kind of sugary food, which you call craving, is your way of trying to turn off your disquieting thoughts.

What do you think? Is this a more accurate description of what a craving is and does? What’s your experience?

by Maria's Last Diet

Wumpf! You’re smack in the middle of a great dieting run. Weight has been coming off you week-by-week and you’re psyched to keep it going. BUT…you’ve been having a craving for, of all things, mashed potatoes and gravy. You don’t know why. Mashed potatoes and gravy isn’t one of your favorites, but that’s what you’ve been thinking about meal after meal, and even in between some meals.

Mashed potatoes and gravy. You’ve gone so far as looking up special recipes for how you can make the potatoes extra creamier and also looking up different recipes for gravy. Now what can you do about this crazy desire of yours. It just doesn’t fit in with your weight loss plans. Should you put a stop to the mashed potatoes and gravy thing? If so, how?

Long-term, accepting your cravings is a better technique than trying to suppress them, so says the research. A new study says it works differently over the short-term. Suppression works better than acceptance in the short run. Cravings significantly dropped in the short-term, though, when you could eat the food you wanted.

What’s your experience with cravings while you are dieting? Do you dare to give in to your cravings and eat what you crave?

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?

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.