7 Ways to Curb Sugar Cravings

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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4 Steps to Crushing Your New Years Goals

Let me start the article off with some stats for you.

Studies show that less than 25% of people keep their commitment to their resolutions. Only 8% of those individuals actually accomplish what they said they would.

New Years resolutions suck. Plain and simple. Why, you ask?

They are not goals.

People give up on their resolutions because they are the furthest thing from real goals. They are mere statements, and nothing more. “Lose 50 pounds.” That is a resolution, a statement and a shit one at that.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a firm believer in fresh starts and setting out to accomplish things. But in my years of coaching in the fitness industry, I know that accomplishing things can only happen if goals are put in place.

You see, the difference between a resolution and a goal is a plan. Proper goals have plans. They have a path. They are detailed, planned out, and progress-oriented. They are not mere statements.

But people set out goals all the time, and they still don’t achieve them. That’s because they didn’t do a good enough job of breaking down their goal into action items that can be measured and completed. That is what we’ll be doing today. In this article, we are going to work through steps to making a proper goal that way you can finally complete what you set out to do at the beginning of the year.

No more falling off the wagon.

STEP #1 : Create a Basic Outline of Your Goal

Odds are you’ve heard of SMART goals millions of times. If you have, I will spare you the extreme details and take you through the basics of the acronym.

SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Oriented.

Your goal must be specific. For example, “I want to lose weight” could be much more specific, such as “I want to lose 20 pounds.”

Your goal must also be measurable. 20 pounds is specific, but how are you going to measure that? “I want to lose 20 pounds of body fat” is more like it. You can measure that through body fat testing each month or every two weeks.

Achievable. In my opinion, this is the same as Realistic. Your goal must be achievable and realistic. You MUST be honest with yourself. Have you ever lost 20 pounds of body fat before? If you haven’t lost more than 5 pounds in your life, you may want to reconsider. Set yourself up for a challenge, but not complete failure.

Lastly, your goal must be time-oriented. It must have a deadline. If your goal is not time-stamped, you will procrastinate like never before. Put a deadline on your goal.

STEP #2: Format Your Goals Based on Your Lower Levels of Motivation and Inspiration

This ties in with the A and R in SMART. You’ve gotta be real with yourself.

Too many people make goals while they are in a motivated, inspired, and hyped state of mind. There is nothing wrong with that, but it can be easy to believe that’s how you’re going to feel all the time. And let me tell you now, you will NOT feel that motivation, inspiration, and hype all the time.

Let’s say you are green to fitness and you haven’t really exercised before. You may think that it’s a good idea to workout five days per week when you’re motivated for this goal. But what happens when you’re not? Do you really think you’re going to go to the gym five days per week when you just don’t feel like it, especially if you’ve never exercised consistently in the past? I’ll answer that for you. No, you won’t.

Set your goals based on your lower level of motivation. Ask yourself what you’d be willing to do if you didn’t have any motivation and be extremely real with yourself. If you know you could only muster up enough will to go on a 30 minute walk when you’re not motivated, then that is a part of your goal. If you know you would still go to the gym when you come home completely drained from work, then go ahead and set out to accomplish it. Whatever it is, be real. Because motivation does not last.

STEP #3: Create Behaviors and Make Them the Focal Point of Your Goal

Goals are nothing without behavior. Behaviors are everything. Your behaviors are the actions that make your dream come to life.

In order to accomplish your goal, you need to set out clearcut behaviors that will get you to your goal, and focus on them.

If you have never worked out before, and your goal is to lose 20 pounds, you know you can do so by exercising more, and improving your diet. Two behaviors that you can focus on are walking 30 minutes per day and eating one big serving of greens every day. Let’s say your goal is the same, but you have experience training. Your behaviors can be strength training in the gym 3 times per week, and meeting your protein goal each day by having a certain amount of protein in each snack/meal.

You get the point. Create behaviors and make the execution of them your new goals. You may have your big goal, but your tiny goals are to execute your behaviors each day.

STEP #4: Establish Metrics to Measure Your Success

Whatever your goal may be, you must find a way to measure it, because adjustments may need to be made along the way.

If your goal is to lose body fat, make a point to get your body fat tested every month. I recommend having mini goals set up to make sure your behaviors are keeping you on track. If your goal is to deadlift 200 pounds, tell yourself you want to be at 160 pounds, 180 pounds, then 200 pounds by certain dates.

These metrics and measurements serve as great feedback. They will likely be a direct reflection of your behaviors. If you get your body fat tested and you are short of your mini goal, you may need to change your behaviors in order to get back on pace for your big goal.

TAKEAWAYS

If you want to hit your goals this year, you need to take these four steps.

1. Create (write down) a basic outline of your goal, using the SMART method.

2. Format your goals based on your lower (maybe average) levels of motivation and inspiration.

3. Create behaviors and make them the focal point of your goal.

4. Establish metrics to measure your success and make sure you’re on track.

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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HOW TO MANAGE YOUR DIET ON VACATION

Vacations are wonderful. 

They give us an opportunity to let go of all the things that tear us down during our every day lives. They give us time to reflect. They give us a chance to simply let go and just be. 

Vacations are a joy, but they can also be a real downer if you’re worried about gaining body fat or losing all the progress you’ve made up to that point. I don’t know about you but I don’t want my vacations to be full of thoughts like “Gosh, I don’t think I should have the glass of wine, I may get fat”, or “I should probably skip the dessert on all the dinners that way I can keep my figure.”

F*&$ that. 

The thing is, all of this is easier said than done. It’s easier to say that you’ll not stress on vacation that actually not stressing on vacations. There almost always seems to be that little voice in the back of our minds telling us “eh, you probably shouldn’t eat that.”

So what do we do? How can we truly enjoy vacations without worrying about derailing everything we’ve worked so hard for?

I believe we can free ourselves by working on some practices both at home, and at the resort. 

MAKE A HABIT OF EXERCISING AT HOME

As you know, exercise should be a part of your daily life if you want to live a long, healthy, and happy life. But, did you know that there is one form of exercise that you should be doing that will create more freedom for you at home as well as on vacation?

It’s resistance training. Weight training. Lifting weights. Whatever you want to call it. 

The reason we’re get our panties in a bunch on vacation is because we tend to move a lot less, and eat a LOT more. Eating more and moving less could potentially lead to weight gain. 

In order for us to gain weight, we need to be taking in more calories than we are burning in the day. In order for us to lose weight, we need to be burning more calories than we are taking in during the day. 

After hearing that statement, you may be thinking “wow, sounds like I need to start running my ass off and eating a lot less.” 

You could, but I would advise against that. 

You see, there are many different factors that come into play when it comes to the amount of calories you burn in the day. One of the biggest factors that contributes to calories burned is our metabolism. In fact, we burn about 60-80% of our total calories through our metabolism. The remainder of the calories are burned through exercise, digestion, and more. 

So it’s safe to say that it would be wise to invest some time and energy into speeding up our metabolisms, given that it burns the large majority of our total calories. 

Lifting weights can do that. Lifting weights can literally increase the amount of calories you burn in the day. In fact, lifting weights delivers the best of both worlds. It allows you to burning calories while lifting weights, as well as increase your body’s ability to burn calories throughout the day, even when you’re not exercising. 

Let’s take a step back and bring this together.

We need to be burning more calories in the day than we are taking in to lose weight. The immediate thought is to move and exercise like a maniac, and starve yourself. 

But when we thing about what lifting weights does to our metabolism, we realize that taking time to speed up our metabolism is the better option. When we have a faster metabolism, we can enjoy more food on vacation. We can stress less about having to get a workout in. 

Now I want to be clear. Two different people can lift weights and only one may end up with a faster metabolism. It’s all about how you lift those weights. Begin weight lifting with the goal of getting stronger. Lift heavier, rest a little bit longer, push your limits, find out what you’re truly capable of. 

Oh, and download this ebook for free for a detailed step-by-step guide on how to speed up your metabolism. 

DON’T EAT LIKE AN ASSHOLE

Too many people eat like assholes when they’re on vacation. They treat vacation like a kid treats halloween night. We’re all adults. We need to act like adults when it comes to our food. 

There are some practices that I have my clients implement when they are on vacation. It helps them enjoy it without acting like a child that is going coo-coo for coco puffs.

#1 SLOW DOWN

When you are eating your food, slow the freaking heck down. Eating too fast is a surefire way to binge eat and leave your vacation with an extra pound or two of body fat. 

When we eat too fast, we don’t give our body the opportunity it needs to tell us it is satisfied. When we don’t know when we’re satisfied, we keep going and end up being too stuffed. 

There are several ways you can slow down. A few ways I like to slow down is by chewing at least 30 times per bite, putting my utensil down in between bites, and using my opposite hand to eat. Try one or a combo of those and notice how much you slow down. 

#2 BE PRESENT

Being present is a part of slowing down. When you slow down, you don’t have a choice but to be present with the people around you and the food you are eating. When you’re present, you appreciate things more. You learn how to truly enjoy the taste for what it is, rather than eating it like you’ll never get food again. 

The idea is to enjoy your food, not cram it down your throat. Let’s face the reality here. You can binge eat any time you want to at home. The point of vacation is to have foods that you normally wouldn’t, to experience things you normally wouldn’t. So don’t eat like you’ve been deprived your whole entire life and you’ll never get a chance to eat again. Eat like you are eating with the purpose of enjoying the taste, texture and experience. You don’t need 10 pieces of cake to enjoy the taste, texture, and experience when all that comes in the first piece you ordered. 

#3 HAVE AN INTERNAL DIALOGUE

As you slow down, tell yourself what you’re enjoying about the food. Talk to yourself (in your head) or maybe even tell the people what you’re enjoying. 

“Wow, the cake is so soft, nothing like I’ve experienced before.”

“I love how refreshing the sorbet is. It’s so good!”

Don’t eat with an empty head. Eat mindfully. Be present. 

MOVE YOUR BODY 

Listen, no one is expecting you to get after in the gym while you’re on vacation. If you’re like me and you enjoy it and want to get a lift in almost every day, do it! But if the thought of exercising on vacation doesn’t appeal to you, THAT’S OK. 

You can still move. 

Go on walks in between meals, stretch, take a yoga class, walk up and down the beach, play some volleyball, or throw the frisbee around. 

Walking may not be the exact same as formal exercise, but getting your steps in can make a BIG difference. 

Relax and enjoy your time away, but move a little. Don’t be a blob that lays on the chair for 10 hours each day. 

CHILL OUT

I understand that the part of the brain that handles emotion will almost always overcome the logic side of the brain, but I still want to take you through some numbers anyway. 

A pound of body fat is roughly 3500 calories. To gain an extra pound of body fat in a week, you would need to eat an extra 700 calories per day while on vacation. If you listen to your body’s natural hunger and satiety signals, eating an extra 700 calories per day won’t be as effortless as you may think.

Speaking of effortless, I know how effortless it can be to get 1,000 more steps in each day. If you’re doing absolutely nothing but laying on your back and eating all day long, you will gain some body fat. If you’re moving, and implementing the above practices, you’ll probably be ok. 

And if you gain a pound of body fat on your vacation, WHO CARES!?

You can get rid of that body fat when you get home and get back to your routine. It’s not stuck with you forever unless you choose to let it be your buddy. 

ENJOY YOUR VACATION

In order to truly enjoy your vacation without the stress of derailing your health and fitness, do what your body wants you to do. 

Begin lifting weights regularly for a faster metabolism. Get some movement in during your trip. Slow down and be present when you eat. 

Relax, and let go. 

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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