If you haven’t read part 1 of this article on dominating hunger, read that first. Physiological hunger sets the stage for psychological cravings (9). Learning how to stay full is an easy way to reduce cravings (1-4,10).
This is also why food smells exponentially irresistible when you’re hungry (5). If you go grocery shopping on an empty stomach, you’ll crave everything in sight, especially your favorite treats from the bakery (72). However, cravings have to do with more than simply hunger.
By definition, a craving is an intense desire to consume a particular type of food that is hard to resist (2).
Food cravings can be difficult to manage while dieting because the moment people are told, they’re eating nutritious or low-calorie foods, both satiety and food satisfaction decreases which leaves your brain begging for more food (6,7,8).
I’ll get into practical tips later, but let’s go over what does and doesn’t cause food cravings.
People think they crave specific foods because they’re deficient in certain nutrients, but this makes no sense at all.
The foods people typically crave are nutritionally void foods high in fat, sugar, starch, and salt (2). These foods are engineered to seduce the reward pathways in your brain to astronomical levels, but they’re not exactly what you would describe as nutritionally nourishing (11).
In fact, people who consume too much sodium still crave salt (12). Other minerals like zinc also cause a decrease, not increase in appetite when deficient (13). Your brain also has no way or registering total nutrients because digestion can take hours especially with high fat, high fiber meals.
So the deficiency hypothesis is utterly bogus. Blood work and other symptoms reveals deficiencies, not cravings.
So if it’s not deficiencies, what causes these random cravings I keep getting?
Well, if you look closely, cravings aren’t as random as you think.
Remember how hunger impacts the relevance of cravings? Willpower does too.
Willpower, sometimes called mental energy can be defined as the psychological resource of decision making, self-restraint, or boredom. Each time you make a conscious decision, resist temptations, or are not being stimulated by your current task, your willpower depletes like a video game character losing mana.
Because willpower is a psychological resource, there is debate on whether it’s limited or limitless.
Indeed, some research shows it’s limited displaying poorer mental function after events that commonly zap willpower (14). This is why people commonly give into cravings at night. During the day, your willpower and self-control remain fresh, but after a long stressful day, they’re depleted.
However, other research shows willpower can be extended by simply being aware and believing you have more (15).
Nonetheless, as willpower runs low, even temporarily, task specific fatigue occurs. This means your brain gets easily fatigued from doing a specific task for too long especially if that task is not stimulating enough. Our brain prefers it’s reward pathways stimulated because it feels good.
This is why we watch entertaining movies, hangout with people that excite us, and date people we find attractive. Boring movies are too draining to sit through. Dull people don’t stimulate us. And unattractive people don’t give us that fuzzy pleasurable feeling we long for.
Where am I going with this? Well in the mundane of everyday life, we simply can’t be stimulated 24/7. You will inevitably find yourself bored throughout the week. When you’re bored, here’s what your brain tells you, “Yo, you know what would be really fun right now? Eating that box of cookies on the counter (42).”
In fact, boredom eating or temporary willpower fatigue is not primarily to reward us. Research finds humans do it to escape the pain of boredom (16).
Unfortunately, food cravings are simply a pleasurable recent experience your brain easily runs to in order to escape task boredom.
It’s also not hormonally driven no matter how many pregnant women tell you it is. Let me explain.
Take chocolate cravings for example. Chocolate cravings are purely psychological, believe it or not.
We only crave what our brain knows is available to us. People crave junk food because it tastes bomb, but people only crave the specific junk foods they’re most exposed to (24). If you grow up in a village where you have no idea chocolate exist, you’ll never crave a Snickers bar.
Chocolate cravings seemingly exist because it’s a cultural phenomenon. Research finds there are no hormonal changes during the menstrual cycle that drives chocolate cravings (25). Chocolate cravings are primarily only relevant in North America where we accept the phenomenon as truth (25).
In other countries, women don’t get chocolate cravings even during their menstrual cycle (26). In fact, chocolate cravings can easily be predicted based on background, location, and generation (27).
In addition, chocolate is often associated with comfort and pleasure. Our parents gave it to us at a young age as a reward (19). This develops a psychological attachment called associated learning where we unknowingly associate chocolate with reward fulfillment or stress reduction.
But at the end of the day, there is nothing hormonal or physiological about chocolate cravings. When studies sneak chocolate or cocoa extract into chocolate cravers, their cravings were not appeased (28).
Thus, chocolate cravings (or any exact craving) is a psychological phenomenon set up by your environment and behavior history in which your brain runs to because it associates that food with pleasure within your mind’s recent database.
Understanding this framework will help in fighting cravings.
Before I discuss the strategies for vanquishing cravings, keep in mind, not all cravings are worth fighting. As discussed in part 1, we all have some level of food reward to fulfill. Craving pleasure is not inherently bad.
If the goal is fat loss and you’re still moving towards your goal without compromising your long-term health, what’s the big deal with eating a candy bar or a slice of pizza occasionally?
In fact, the term guilty pleasure is utter nonsense. You shouldn’t feel guilty about pleasures that aren’t inherently bad. Thus, I have no regrets when I intentionally indulge in some French toast while listening to Katy Perry on repeat. You shouldn’t either.
In other words, if you can fit the food into your caloric limits, there’s no need to fight cravings.
In fact, some research in women finds limiting treats is associated with more successful weight loss than completely restricting them (17).
Another study in diabetics found incorporating sugary sweets as 10% of their caloric intake didn’t impact their health or diet adherence (21).
However, we can’t always fit all of our favorite cravings depending on the circumstances. For example, deeply low-calorie diets might not allow for a satisfying portion of treats without taking up a majority of your calories.
Indeed, we also have research finding successful people who’ve maintained their weight loss often learn to avoid certain foods (22). You have to pick which foods are more worth it, but even this is not always enough.
Research also finds obese people’s brains reinforce junk food with learned behavior more than lean people hence why some people can stop after eating half a donut while others will binge an entire dozen frequently (23).
Furthermore, things can change based on gender and hunger. Females have a greater reward response during a fasted state (73).
In addition, some specific treats are easier to moderate while others trigger you to eat endlessly either due to individual preference or emotional experiences with that particular food (18,19). For example, I utterly love ice cream. I would marry it if it had some boobs and estrogen.
I struggle portioning out 75 grams of ice cream. That much is merely a tease to my brain. If available, my primal instincts would have me finishing entire pints even after a satiating dinner.
However, other treats like cheesecake or pretzels, I can easily stop after a few bites. They simply don’t stimulate my reward pathways enough, but they might for someone else. Foods that cause overconsumption are often called trigger foods and we all have them.
I’m sure you can relate, so let’s go over the game plan for outsmarting food cravings.
Once you’ve defined a craving is worth fighting at least for a period of time, the focus is to starve the craving, not feed it. No more entertaining moderation.
Ever give a teenage gamer the opportunity to play video games in moderation? He can’t. One more game never satisfies him. It merely grows his desire for another game which ends up turning into 8 more games while his homework collects dust.
You allow that to happen consistently and he’ll evolve into a jobless dork in your basement. Similarly, if you allow yourselves to indulge continuously in foods that override your self-control, you’ll collect fat tissue faster than Ash Ketchum collects Pokémon.
In other words, feeding your cravings merely teases it for more because the excessive food reward is now fresh in your mind (29,30). While it’s fresh in your mind, if willpower runs low and/or hunger increases, the craving becomes impossible to resist.
This is why there’s no correlation between how much of something you eat in one sitting and how frequent you crave it later, but how frequent you eat something does increase how frequent you crave it later (31).
So if you have trigger foods that sabotage your goals, simply exposing yourself to small portions frequently is not wise. Instead, be merciless with eliminating cravings.
You remember how I said we crave things we know are pleasurable enough to help us escape task boredom?
Well, trigger foods are only an option for your brain to seek if it’s close enough to you.
For example, my family’s Vietnamese restaurant in Utah serves the tastiest Vietnamese food on the planet. However, I don’t ever crave it because I currently live in California most of the year.
How close, recent, and assessable a food is to you determines how much you crave it (34). If your neighbor told you he bought some cheesy potato chips, you won’t crave them much, but if your spouse said they bought cheesy potato chips, your cravings will escalate because the chips are within reach.
So a simple way to manage cravings is to manage your environment. Setup an environment that makes it hard or impossible to access cravings.
It ultimately comes down to this principle: “If it causes you to overeat, don’t have it in your house.” It’s not rocket science.
The further away the better. No nuts on the desk. No junk in the pantry. And no buying treats “just in case we have company over.” You can’t outwork your environment silly. That’s like a recovering alcoholic thinking he can stock his house with booze and not drink.
For further perspective, legendary bodybuilder Dorian Yates would recall stories during his contest prep of waking up in the middle of the night from nightmares of indulging in junk food. He would realize he didn’t keep those foods in the house and return sleeping with relief. Arguably, the most disciplined bodybuilder on the planet didn’t even trust his own willpower, what makes an average Joe like you think you can leave temptations in your fridge while resisting them day after day.
You can’t. When research compares people with high or low willpower, it doesn’t matter how much more willpower you have, you’re doomed to your environment if tempting food is close enough (32,33).
So if you’re serious about fighting cravings, you’ll throw out any temptations immediately. If you think you’re wasting food, your wimpy brain is rationalizing. Go donate to a third world country if you feel so strongly about food waste, but the tempting food you keep around will not be productive once it ends up around your waistline.
Your external environment is important, but your internal headspace matters too. Your brain can only be tempted if it needs to escape boredom. This is why boredom will sabotage your weight loss like no other.
It’s critical to stay occupied and in a manner that doesn’t let your brain get too bored.
Routines are powerful here. Having your day planned out doesn’t allow for dead space. Even your downtime on the weekends should be planned. If you find yourself too bored, plan new hobbies, read books, go for a walk, call a friend, or clean your house.
You will naturally eat less over time if you can preoccupy or distract your brain (35). Furthermore make sure you have breaks or split tasks up if needed. If a task is monotonous, doing it for too long will zap your willpower and bring you closer to boredom.
Mindfulness training is also effective in fighting food cravings (36,37,38).
One study gave sweet cravers a box of chocolates handcuffed to them for 72 hours (39). Participants were instructed to try to resist eating the chocolates or any other sweets. One group was taught standard cognitive-based coping strategies involving distracting yourself when cravings arrive. The second group was taught acceptance-based coping strategies involving letting the cravings arrive in your head and accepting cravings as a thought that will pass.
The second group experienced less severe cravings and indulged less.
So don’t be frustrated when cravings arrive. Train yourself to accept that it’s a logical thought triggered by your need for pleasure that so happens to take the form of a recent treat.
Take the emotion out of it and suddenly, cravings have less control over you.
Once you accept this, it’s time to think towards the future also called episodic future thinking. Many times, we give in to cravings because we think about what we want now, but if we only thought about what we want most long term, our behaviors would be different.
Episodic future thinking is thinking about the future in a deeply specific manner. This has been shown to delay gratification for additional money, reduce caloric intake at buffets, and reduce how many calories somebody purchases (40,41).
If you get tempted with apple pie, start thinking about the Greek yogurt in your fridge with fresh apples and cinnamon. Think deeply about how much it will satisfy you while providing you more muscle building protein and fewer calories.
If you can’t think about the future specifically, you’re doomed to dwell on what’s tempting you presently. This goes beyond merely food.
For example, every guy in a relationship (even happily married ones) will get tempted by other women in their thoughts. However, if you think vividly about how hot your spouse is and how happy you’ll feel to come home to her, you’re much less likely to start flirting with other women at work.
Train your thoughts enough and you won’t succumb to temptations.
But as far as food, it’s only feasible to think about the future alternative if you have suitable choices that your brain can run to which brings me to my next point.
Green tea, chicken breast, and cauliflower can’t compete with milkshakes, bacon cheeseburgers, or French fries. However, they can get close if you learn to cook or are willing to pay for diet versions.
Of course, they won’t be perfectly the same. Like diet ice cream will never please you the same way Ben & Jerry’s will, but obviously if it did, everyone would be effortlessly lean and America wouldn’t have an obesity problem.
So now that your expectations are realistic, never let anyone make fun of you for eating Halo Top ice cream, drinking diet soda, or making buffalo cauliflower. They might be the difference between staying on track and binging repetitively.
You can also use your culinary skills to make healthier foods taste good. It doesn’t take much to sharpen your inner Gordon Ramsay either. A good air fryer can make things crispy. A good blender can make tasty shakes. And a quick google search will reveal an endless stream of easy low-calorie recipes that can fulfill your salty or sweet cravings.
In fact, learning how to cook, psychologically makes a ton of sense too. When you add new foods to your diet or learn a new recipe, you’re introducing novelty that also fights the pain of boredom (42).
Lifestyle factors like sleep and stress will directly impact the intensity of cravings and your ability to resist them because they directly impact both your willpower and your hunger.
Furthermore, sleep interacts with stress because sleep deprivation skyrockets your stress hormones and stress encourages sleep deprivation, a diabolical cycle that negatively manipulates your eating behavior (50,51,52).
Chronic stress in particular drives you to snack and self-medicate with tasty foods (53,54,55).
Fortunately, improving sleep or stress reverses this and decreases cravings especially sweet cravings (49,71).
Grab my Free Lifter’s Guide to Managing Stress
You ever see fit people annoyingly look forward to their oatmeal and resist pizza effortlessly? Believe it or not, you can too.
Remember, cravings are only desirable because your brain associates them as a reward. When you associate foods as less desirable, you crave them less (56,57). For example, let’s say your partner dumped you viciously at your favorite sushi joint. Whether you intended to or not, you won’t crave sushi there anymore because your brain associates that sushi as negative.
Contrastingly, you can crave nutritious foods more if you associate positivity with it. How do you do this? Simple. You continue starving your cravings and eat the foods that further support your goals. The less frequent your cravings are exposed to you, the less you will crave them because they fall further in the back of your mind (31,58).
This applies with flavors as well.
Research finds how much you prefer sweet or salty things correlate with how much you eat of each flavor (59,60). So when people say, I have an insane sweet tooth, what they really mean is, “I eat sweets so much that my brain has no choice but to crave it daily.” (61).
Fortunately, the intensity of sweet or salty preference is changeable (59). You’ll notice that if you don’t give into those trigger foods, your perceptions of sweet and salty are much different. Your “sweet tooth” decreases and you don’t need as much salt to taste it’s flavor.
In many cases, if you do this long enough, your brain reward pathways will reach a healthier level and many of those trigger foods that once gripped your soul no longer possess that same power because your brain slowly forgets how insanely pleasurable those cravings once were (1,62-67).
One of the mechanisms is your gut bacteria. As the colony of bacteria in your stomach gets nourished from fiber dense foods, it modulates what your brain desires to eat (68,69). In other words, as you get healthier, you’ll crave healthier foods and your cravings for junk will fade.
It’s similar to the Christian teachings of feeding the spirit and starving the flesh.
Good becomes more desirable as you keep investing in it and sin becomes less desirable the less you do it.
This is why successful dieters who adopt a healthier lifestyle will know exactly what I’m talking about. Their food desires change. Oftentimes, they get to a point, where resisting the freshest box of cookies doesn’t even impact their willpower.
In addition to starving the craving, here are additional tips to reintroducing previous trigger foods.
The first tip is to go on a bulk. Once you lose fat, intentionally eating in a controlled surplus to maximize muscle growth will allow you more calories to be flexible while relieving the stress of dieting. Foods that once blew you past your calories can now support the goal of hypertrophy.
Another tip for reintroducing risky cravings is to reintroduce them when you’re full.
If you eat highly pleasurable food when you’re starving, it feels so tasty that your brain now associates that food as far more rewarding than it actually is. It’s like when a random dude saves a girl’s life in a movie. She immediately falls in love with him because she was in a vulnerable state and perceives him as this amazing guy even though he could be some unemployed loser for all we know.
But anyways, one study highlights this phenomenon well. It tested chocolate desire when Subjects were fed while either hungry or full (70). They found that eating chocolate after you’re already full, reduced chocolate cravings compared to eating it when you’re hungry.
So currently, your food cravings are like an ex-boyfriend/girlfriend you can’t get over.
Every time you think of the food, it triggers your emotions and causes you to behave in ways contrary to your intentions. Fortunately, you now have every tool at your resource to usurp your temptations and change your eating behavior.
Practice some of these tips consistently and you’ll get over your cravings similar to getting over an ex. Once you do, they’ll be a distant memory that possesses no power over you.
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