Are Food Cravings Sabotaging Your Weight Loss? 

A health article about food cravings from Your Health Online the A to Z directory of dealing with Health Problems & nutritional Self Care Strategies

Over 40 million people start a diet every year.

While some of them lose a little bit of weight, complete success can be difficult due to the struggles that always pops up.

One of the biggest of these issues that can sabotage weight loss is food cravings.

What Causes Food Cravings?

Sometimes a food craving just appears without warning. You could be going about your day when all of a sudden you feel you just have to have that food. But other times, a food craving is triggered.

You might see your favorite kind of donut in the break room at work. Or you might get a whiff of someone’s French fries. You could see a commercial that shows a food that you like.

The next thing you know, all you can think about is that food. The reason that this happens has to do with your brain. When you eat the foods that you like, they taste good, and you feel happy.

Your brain catalogs this response in its memory system. You can develop cravings out of habit. For example, if after working a long day, you always have a sweet treat afterward, this habit can trigger a craving.

When you choose not to have that item, this craving can intensify. The intensity occurs because it’s common for people to have food triggers that are associated with habitual behavior.

Your brain associates that reward with something you deserve that makes you happy. “You finished work, you deserve something sweet,” is the message that your brain has stored.

Nutritional deficiencies can also cause cravings. Your body must have certain vitamins and minerals in order to work correctly. If you’re not getting these essential nutrients, it can cause cravings.

This happens because your body is trying to get you to give it something that it needs to be able to continue to work well. Your emotions can drive cravings, too. If you feel sad or upset or even happy, this can make you desire a specific food.

What most people do when they’re going through something that affects them emotionally, is they turn to food. It’s their go-to emotional release or celebratory action.

This action is one that a person can do without even thinking about it.

That’s why you can find yourself halfway through eating a cookie, then realize that you weren’t even planning to have that. It just happened. This goes back to the reward center of the brain.

When you’re dealing with emotions and you’ve eaten in the past as a way of dealing with the emotion, whether it was a positive or negative one, it made you feel better. It lifted a bad mood or solidified a good one.

Your brain released feel good chemicals that boosted your mood, whether happy or sad, and this triggers the reward center for both past and future behavior. If you’re tired, this can cause food cravings even if you’re not truly hungry.

That’s because the body gains energy when you sleep. But if you don’t get enough sleep or you’re dealing with a lot of mentally or physically taxing things during the day, you don’t have enough energy so the body pushes you toward food as a way of trying to get that energy that it needs.

Some Cravings Hit at Certain Times in Your Life

While cravings can be commonplace and a daily occurrence, there are specific times when you’re more likely to experience them. Women who are pregnant will go through food cravings.

Part of the reason for this has to do with what happens to the hormones. Your hormones change and in turn cause pregnant women to want certain foods. These cravings can come and go with most women experiencing them more often during the first trimester.

However, the cravings can appear throughout the length of the pregnancy. They can be triggered by a lack of proper nutrients in diet as well as hormonal reasons. Cravings can be an issue after giving birth as well.

If you recently had a child and are trying to lose the weight that you gain but find yourself struggling with food cravings, hormones can be an issue during this time as well.

That’s because your hormones change again once you’ve given birth. The same thing can happen during a menstrual cycle. When you’re having a cycle, you develop cravings that are brought on by hormonal changes as well.

These hormonal changes, specifically your estrogen and progesterone can cause you to want to eat certain foods. If you also deal with PMS, this can heighten the cravings before your monthly cycle even begins.

Your emotions before and during your cycle can also play a part. When you’re feeling more emotional due to hormonal changes, it can cause you to have cravings. Everyone experiences stress at some point in their lives.

Stress is something that can also make you crave food. That’s because when you’re under stress, your body will start to release more cortisol. This hormone causes your appetite to increase with a focus on foods that are carb heavy or sweet.

Certain times of day can make you have food cravings. First thing in the morning shortly after waking up, you can experience this. One of the reasons for it is because your body has been fasting while you sleep and your glucose level has dropped.

You’ll crave food, usually something sweet, because your body is telling you to eat something that can give it fast energy. In the afternoons, you can have cravings because as you’ve been busy, your glucose levels drop again.

When this happens, you’ll get a desire to have a specific food. This may or may not be something sweet. When the evening hits, your cravings kick in again because of your body’s natural circadian rhythm.

You’ll find that you strongly want to eat things like junk food - especially ones that have a higher sodium content. This is why so many people feel the desire to eat things like potato chips in the evenings while watching television.

How a Detox Can Give You Power Over Your Cravings

Cravings can make you feel like you have no control. You can end up giving in to the cravings time and time again to the point that you’re not making any headway toward your weight loss goals.

But a detox can change that for you. A detox simply means that you’re going to undertake a diet or that you’re going to use a method that will free you from the toxins in your body and get you back on track to shedding the pounds you want to lose.

When you have food cravings and you’ve given in to them, it can create an addiction to that food, whether it’s salty or sugary. This addiction can be as strong as being addicted to something like nicotine.

This is why so many people struggle to overcome their cravings. They don’t fully understand just how strong they are or that they need to take steps to clear their bodies of the after effects of having given in to them.

After having given in to your cravings, it can cause higher levels of glucose as well as weight gain and inflammation. These things also play a part in keeping you stuck in a food craving cycle.

Plus, if you give in to a sugar craving, this causes the body to release more dopamine, which makes you feel great so you keep coming back to the sugar. In order to return your glucose levels to normal and break the addiction to any craving, you have to reset your body.

The way to do that is through a detox. A detox gives you power over your cravings because it gets to the root of what makes you crave the foods. It can stop the connection between your brain and your cravings so that you won’t want the foods you normally reach for.

In addition to that, a detox will reawaken your metabolism so that your struggle to lose weight is not as difficult. There’s more than one way to detox. Many people turn to a diet.

When you follow a detox diet, you’ll concentrate on eating foods that aren’t processed. These foods are usually things like protein and fruits and vegetables.

That’s because they don’t create addictions since they don’t have additional sugar or the sodium that can create a craving.

They also work to keep your glucose levels within normal range, which also helps stop cravings. Because you’ll end up having more of your nutritional needs met, this also helps.

You’ll be getting foods that help you feel full for longer, too. Others use things like tonics or powders that work to detoxify their bodies.

Because these items are created from natural ingredients, they can help you detox quickly and get back on the road to weight loss.

Easy Ways to Stop Cravings in Their Tracks  

To prevent giving in to cravings, you need a way to stop them before they become unmanageable. There are several ways that you can do this. By quickly stopping a craving, you don’t end up eating the foods and adding the calories that are sabotaging your weight loss.

Sometimes a craving is the body’s way of letting you know to put something in your stomach. But that’s not usually the case. Because a craving can be a habit that you’ve developed over time by giving in to it, you need to curb it.

You can do this by having a bottle of water. This usually ends the craving because your stomach then feels full. Get distracted. When a craving hits, if all you do is spend time thinking about how much you want that food or how hungry you are, you’ll end up giving in.

You need to change your focus. The best way to do that is to engage your mind in something that requires focus. This can be like playing a quick word search game on your cell phone or getting busy with a task that requires some effort.

Put something in your mouth that’s not related to the craving. For example, you can pop a sugar free cinnamon candy - the stronger the better - into your mouth. The cinnamon flavor will disrupt the desire for whatever food you’re craving.

You can also go brush your teeth. Having a clean mouth can often take away the urge to eat. Have a cup or two of coffee. Studies have shown that coffee works to raise the serotonin level in the body.

This is the hormone that works as a natural appetite suppressor. So when you drink coffee, it boosts serotonin, which in turn makes you less likely to have or give in to a food craving.

Plus, drinking coffee can help you to feel full. What you eat does matter. If your diet is lacking in the right amount of protein, this can make cravings worse. So have some protein in order to lower your cravings.

When you eat foods that are rich in protein, not only does it curb cravings, but because it goes through the digestive system at a slower rate, you don’t feel hungry. This can help you be able to lose weight.

So have some protein with every meal and with your healthy snacks. It sounds elementary, but one of the reasons that people lose control over their cravings is because they don’t pay attention to when they need to eat.

They’ll put off fixing themselves a snack or a meal if they’re busy and by the time they realize that they’re hungry, they’re hit with intense cravings. Because they are so hungry, they end up giving in to the cravings.

One way to avoid getting too hungry is to break your foods into even intervals. Eat at your scheduled time for every meal and make sure you have a low-calorie snack in between meals.

Break bad habits that make you crave foods. Everyone has a trigger. That’s when a craving hits because it’s associated with an action.

If you discover that you get a sugar craving every afternoon at work when you see the snack vending machine, eat a healthy option before you’re in the area where that vending machine is.

By preparing ahead of time you can avoid the temptation to give in to a craving.

A Tonic That Can Curb Your Cravings for Good

Because cravings can cause you to continue to sabotage your weight loss, you need a way to deal with them for good. For the sake of your health, you should take a natural supplement that can help break the craving cycle.

One supplement is the Formula #1 Protein drink powder. This is a supplement that can not only help you curb cravings, but also works to help you lose weight. This all natural supplement with no synthetic additives consists of herbal extracts.

These ingredients work to help you regain your energy, while at the same time work to help you get rid of the belly fat that’s so unhealthy.

The supplement is one that works with or without a strenuous exercise routine to help you lose the weight. It’s in a powder form that can be mixed with a liquid that you like. For example, if you like milk, you can mix it with that.

You can use it to create a tasty shake. You only need to use one scoop of the formula.

The product includes the helpful B vitamins as well as prebiotics. It’s also loaded with antioxidants and ingredients that can help get your metabolism back on track.

The Protein drink also works to help your digestive system work better, thanks to the probiotics it contains. Something else that the powder contains that helps the body with weight loss is a polyphenol blend.

This can help fight inflammation that can make losing weight harder than it has to be. One of the reasons why the supplement is so effective at stopping the food cravings you experience is because it works to fix hormonal imbalances that can interfere with weight loss efforts.

If your hormones are out of balance, you’ll constantly have to battle hormonal changes that can cause cravings. By fixing this, it cuts down on the cravings and allows you to take control.

The supplement works to restore your hormonal balance in a way that gets the body’s fat storage back to how it’s supposed to be, which also helps with weight loss.

The supplement has extra benefits, too - including helping you achieve better cholesterol levels and boosting your energy level.

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Vitamin & Nutrient Associations

Even when we try to eat well, we're disadvantaged. The nutritional content of most food has been compromised over the years, not only by deficient soils and modern production, transportation, storage and processing methods, but also by the enormous amounts of chemical and artificial substances added to promote growth, storage life, taste and appearance.

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This allows the cells to grow, repair and to perform their functions with the best possible efficiency so that we feel and look better and are more able to prevent and fight disease. Once the body begins to clear itself of toxins it can more efficiently absorb nutrition.

Further reading through our articles on health issues will give you a body of information that will help you decide what options you have to deal with the underlying causes of your problem through giving your body the nutrition products that will assist you body to heal from the inside out.

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We wish you well in your search for solutions to this problem and your movement towards better health in all areas.

More Resources available about Cravings

Below here are examples of Health Success Results other people have had with using a self care strategy for dealing with this condition:

We would be very interested to hear your result stories with your problem if you are using some of our nutrition products. To send us your story just fill out the form below.

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