When you’re trying to lose weight or keep up a healthful lifestyle, food cravings can hit you out of nowhere and can place all the victories from your carefully designed efforts at risk. The problem they present is that they rarely – if ever – come in the form of a desire to eat carrot sticks and a tall glass of ice water.
Why Do Food Cravings Always Work Against Our Goals?
Even if you have those carrots sitting prepared and ready in your fridge, if there’s something else available with a notably higher calorie load, that’s what you’ll want. While you do your best to stick to a nutritious eating plan, food cravings make you want to eat chocolate, chips, donuts and other options that should be kept to a minimum, if not avoided except as a rare treat.
Food cravings can be powerful. They’re not just a matter of thinking it might be nice to have one of these favorites. It feels as though you don’t have a choice. It’s as though something is telling you that if you’re ever going to be anything but miserable in life, you must have the snack you’re desiring overwhelmingly. It’s not true, but that’s how it feels, and it can be exceptionally convincing.
What’s Going on that Makes This Happen?
Why is it that food cravings occur in the form of fatty, sugary, or other high-calorie sources? Fatty foods are particularly common. While fats are certainly an important component of a healthy diet, they come with a large calorie load, so they need to be carefully selected in order to keep a daily calorie total under control.
While cravings for fatty or oily foods could be connected to a nutritional deficiency of some form – as the body does need some fats in order to properly function – it is much more common for these desires to be connected to emotional and stress-based eating.
Sugar and fat meet a calorie need that our bodies are programmed to think they have. Even when we’ve already had enough, our bodies have evolved to prepare for times of starvation. That takes the form of eating more than is necessary on any given day. The issue is that unlike our lifestyles when that feature helped us to survive, most of us don’t face imminent starvation on a regular basis. As a result, we end up gaining weight or struggling to lose.
What is Causing YOUR Food Cravings?
If you’re not sure why you’re constantly in the mood to eat high fat foods, and if you’re relatively certain it’s not because you’re exhausted or under a lot of emotional strain, then it could be the signal you need to head to the doctor’s office so that you can request a few simple tests. This will just help to confirm that there aren’t any deficiencies or other problems present.
It could be that your body isn’t receiving enough of the fat-soluble vitamins it requires – such as vitamins A, D, E and K. Your body could be attempting to boost the levels of those vitamins by creating a powerful desire to consume the vehicle that allows them to be metabolized in your body: fats.
If you’re fatigued, consider trying diet pills that give you energy to help you to know that you’re not just responding to a natural reaction to being tired. This way, you’ll feel powered up and you won’t be as inclined to reach for fatty or sugary foods as an energy source.
It could also simply be that you’ve been eating light a lot and your body isn’t receiving the “reward” in the form of flavor that it’s used to. Try increasing the texture, taste and aroma of your foods by adding lots of herbs and spices to each dish. Herbs and spices are a phenomenal way to enhance the enjoyment of a dish without boosting its calorie content. When you already love the foods you’re eating, it’s less likely that you’ll crave others.