Curb Your Food Cravings

Curb Your Food Cravings to Live More Healthfully

Food cravings… we’ve all experienced them. Whether it’s an overwhelming drive to eat something sweet, a yearning for something salty or the desire to have a pizza loaded with gooey cheese, food cravings can be an ongoing challenge in our quest to eat right to be and stay healthy!

Most of us know that sugary snacks and over-indulgence in other foods aren’t good for our health. There have been dozens of studies showing the effects of these types of foods on our bodies. So why then, if we know the harmful effects, do we still crave these and other foods?

There are many reasons that cause us to crave certain foods.

Food cravings are unlike physical hunger, which develops over time. Unlike hunger, food cravings are appetite and those cravings can come out of the blue and can strike you quickly. They can be triggered by many things like stress, boredom, emotions or just the scent or sight of certain foods.

Some believe cravings are psychological while others believe they are brought on by nutritional deficiencies in our daily diet. Emotional stressors can cause cravings of certain comfort foods while a physical addiction to foods or ingredients, like sugar and simple carbohydrates may be to blame.

Junk food manufacturers and advertisers have learned to tap into our need for certain foods and have actually engineered them to be addictive; they want us to crave them. For example, manufacturers have learned to create products that fill our need for salty or sugary foods, and advertisers have used our trigger points as a way to sell us more to feed our food cravings.

While we can certainly blame the manufacturers and advertisers for manipulating the population in this respect, there are several reasons why we crave certain foods. In my next few posts, we’ll look at what’s causing our cravings and how we can control them.  We’ll talk about what alternatives you can eat to derail those food cravings when they sneak up on you!

This series will also discuss the harmful effects food cravings can have on our bodies and how you can curb your cravings to live more healthfully.

Make Major Improvements in Your Life!

Cheryl A Major, CNWC