It’s late, you’ve had a stressful day.
After you’ve had your dinner, you plop on the couch. Thirty minutes in and you’re thinking about ice cream. This seems to happen every night at the same time. It doesn’t cease.
You wait it out for a couple minutes. The craving just won’t go away so you head to the freezer and pop the lid off on that pint of ice cream.
After grabbing the spoon, you sit back on the couch and take a bite, then another, and another. By the time the 25-minute episode is over, you’ve somehow blown through the whole entire pint.
Your craving got the best of you, and this isn’t the first time it’s happened.
You immediately feel a flood of guilt and shame rise over you and think, “gosh, I need to stop giving into these cravings. But, I just can’t seem to get rid of them.”
Here’s the thing, cravings can be beat, and you can beat yours.
There are seven ways I help my clients curb their cravings, and I hope they help you curb yours, too.
1. Give In, But Don’t Binge
This tip may surprise you.
Sugar cravings themselves aren’t horrible. They’re normal, and it’s ok to give in a bit.
Pay attention. It’s okay to give in, but just a bit.
When it’s not ok is when you let your craving turn into a 1,100 calorie binge through a pint of ice cream. It’s the binging that will keep you from progressing, not so much the craving.
When you get a craving, it’s ok to give in.
Have something around that you can use to healthily give into the craving. They key is having just enough and no more. It’s necessary that you don’t have an unlimited access of crap at home, because once you give in it’s easier to convince yourself that you need more.
When you only have a little bit, it feels like more of a treat that you can truly enjoy. You savor it, because it’s all you’ve got.
Make it hard to go further than a craving. Get rid of all the crap in your house. When you don’t have crap in the house, you’re more likely to choose something healthy to curb your craving. When you don’t have crap in the house, you’re less likely to go off the deep end. Make it harder to satisfy that craving. If you crave and you want to satisfy that craving, you should have to get in your car and drive to get what you want. Make it so you have to go to the gas station and grab one pack of Reese’s. Don’t have a value pack of Reese’s from Costco just sitting in the house.
Have whole food options available to give into as well, like fruit. Have apples, berries, grapes, whatever you like around the house. If you use whole foods like fruit to curb the craving, odds are you may start craving the healthier options over time.
2. Track Your Patterns
Sugar cravings usually come at similar times of the day. This can be due to emotional stress, lack of sleep, or simple boredom.
It’s important to know when the sugar cravings usually come, so you can both have a plan of attack, as well as figure out what the root source of those cravings are.
Grab a journal and track your thoughts and cravings for a couple of weeks. Note what you were doing at the time of the craving. Write down what you’re thinking, what you were doing before that moment, how stressed you are, how your day had been going, etc.
Take note of your environment, surroundings, emotional state, and more so you can create a plan of action for the future as well as address the source of the issue.
For example, if you usually crave sugar on Monday mornings at 10am, it would be good to know that it’s likely because of the stress that comes from your 8am meetings as well as your lack of sleep on Sunday nights.
3. Ditch the Artificial Sweeteners
Sure, artificial sweeteners don’t have any calories, which is why they get all of their praise, but there is much more to nutrition than what our food does to our physical body. It’s just as important to note what our food does to our brain.
When we consume artificial sweeteners, we are likely to crave more sweet things. In addition, we are less likely to feel any resistance to giving into the craving, since the diet Coke “didn’t have any calories anyway.” If you didn’t have that diet Coke in the first place, you may have been less likely to want sugar later on.
4. Reduce Overall Sugar Intake
If you’ve never tracked your food, I highly recommend it. It will give you a bird’s eye view of everything that is going on with your nutrition.
Most people eat too much sugar, but don’t know it because they haven’t every tracked what they put in their mouth.
When we eat too much sugar, we tend to want more, and that’s when the cravings kick in. Our body seems to get to a place where it just wants more of what we’re giving it.
By reducing your sugar intake slowly over time, you may reduce your body’s tendency to want more sugar. This is also a good opportunity to allow your body to want more of the good stuff. Rather than focusing more on eating less and less sugar, focus on eating more and more greens. The more veggies your body gets, the higher the likelihood your body will crave those foods.
5. Get Better Sleep, and Get More of It
When we don’t get enough sleep, our hormone function gets jacked up, which may lead to increased cravings. It’s extremely important to get plenty of high quality sleep for many reasons, curbing cravings being one of them.
Improving your sleep happens by taking time to improve your nightly routine. A couple of hours before bed, turn the lights off in the house and use salt lamps or whatever else you’d like. Avoid electronics as the blue light they emit can decrease melatonin production. You need that melatonin for quality sleep. If you have a show you enjoy and want to watch TV, at least combat the light by wearing blue light blocking glasses.
Your room should be a sleep sanctuary. Black it out, make it cool. We tend to get better sleep in a cool and dark environment. Make sure your body understands it’s time for bed.
The more your body thinks it’s daytime (lights, blue light from phone or tv, warm room), the lower your odds are of getting a good night’s rest.
6. Find Healthy Ways to Manage Your Stress
Stress will wreck you, and will increase your cravings.
Many people choose to handle their stress by mindlessly scrolling on social media, or plopping on the couch for three hours of TV in order to easily escape the world around them. This will help you forget about your stress, but it won’t get rid of it.
Plus, if you’re bored on the couch with built up stress inside you, what do you think you’re gonna do?
Find healthy ways to get rid of your stress. Get together with a friend and talk. Do some yoga, lift, exercise, or go on a walk. Allow your body to get rid of the stress you’re carrying rather than covering it up with a digital bandaid.
Learning healthy ways to deal with stress will help curb those cravings, and may actually reduce them overall especially if you begin to exercise on a regular basis.
7. Eat More Whole Foods and Less Processed Foods
This is the best tip I can give.
Highly processed, hyper palatable foods are designed to hijack our brain and taste buds. It’s no coincidence that we can’t just seem to have one potato chip.
When your diet consists of more highly processed foods, you may be likely to have far more sugar cravings.
Add more whole food into your diet. Whole food is what your body knows. I tell my clients that at least 80% of their diet needs to have had a face, or come from straight from the earth. There should be a minimal amount of change between the food’s initial state and your grocery cart.
Not only is a diet rich in whole foods important, but a diet rich in protein and healthy fats is crucial. Carbs are important, too, but they’re easy to come by. Healthy carbs can help reduce insulin spikes which may lead to less cravings. For example, oats will likely cause less of a spike than gummy bears. When we have hard spikes, we tend to have hard crashes, which can lead to cravings.
Protein and healthy fats can really help with this. Most people underconsume protein, one of the most important nutrients in the world. We need protein to thrive, and it’s important you get a lot of it. It is the most satiating food, so it will help us feel fuller for longer.
Healthy fats take a longer time to digest, and may help keep us from having drastic spikes and crashes in blood sugar. Those healthy fats are also important for proper hormone function, and hormones play a big role in cravings.
Eat less highly processed foods, and more whole foods, with an emphasis on protein and fats, as carbs are naturally easy to come by.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adam is a fitness professional, baseball fan, and cookie fanatic based in Fort Collins, Colorado. After hanging up the cleats, he found a strong interest in the human body and how it performs. Since then, Adam has been transforming lives through fitness in a fun and encouraging atmosphere. As an ACE CPT and Fitness Nutrition Specialist, he is constantly moved to help people improve in all walks of life.
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