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Article Series: Weight Loss & Dieting
How Do I Really Lose Weight?
How
To Satisfy Your Cravings For Food
Everyone
has experienced the occasional self-indulgent binge; it’s
part of life. But how much a part of life do you
make it? Is giving in to your cravings causing you to gain
unwanted weight and/or preventing you from losing the weight
you want to shed? This article will examine the nature
of cravings and empower you with the knowledge and tools to thwart
their sabotaging effects on your weight.
Although our human compulsion to eat is at first purely instinctive,
many of the signals we use to identify hunger and satiation
we learn and develop over time, based on the influences of
our circumstances and the other people around us. Unlike how
it was for our ancient, forest-dwelling ancestors, in modern
civilization we have access to food around the clock, every
day. Put that together with these misleading signals of ours
and we find it dreadfully easy to succumb to the desire to
eat, even though our body doesn’t require any additional calories
or nutrients at that time.
In
many regards, there is little that distinguishes compulsive
overeating from other forms of substance abuse, and from
addictive behavior in general. As with substance abuse and
generally addictive behavior, stress, boredom, disappointment,
anxiety, loneliness, insecurity, depression, and other negative
emotional states all crave relief in some way. And beyond
drugs and alcohol, one of the other ways many people have
found to assuage those ill feeling and find the relief they
crave is through the comfort of certain foods, or even simply
through the comfort provided by very the act of eating.
The ruthlessness of this response to stress is that, usually,
giving in to the craving results in the person feeling
worse,
not better, heaping guilt and shame atop whatever negative
feelings they were already experiencing to begin with.
As with all forms of addictive behavior, there may often be
a “trigger”, or an event that provokes the craving. This can
be a television commercial, an impending part of a person’s
daily routine (ie. work or school), an argument, a particular
memory, the presence of a particular person, etc. Any of these
can lead to a person craving certain foods (or food in general)
when their body is not actually hungry.
Listen to your cravings closely, and not only because, in
part, many times those cravings will be displaced desires for
some form of mental or emotional fulfillment. Listen to them
also in part because every once in a while, a craving is an
honest-to-goodness cue from your body that a particular nutrient
is lacking at that moment and sorely needed. When you have
a craving that you may consider absurd (in other words, for
something other than fats and sugars), consider that your body
may be telling you that it needs some nutrient which that food
contains.
Ordinarily, it won’t take much of the food in question to
satisfy the craving. So just eat a little of it, then wait
5-10 minutes and see how you feel. Most times, the craving
will have dissipated by then. If it hasn’t, eat just a little
more and then wait again for 5-10 minutes, and so on, each
time eating just a small amount and then giving your body time
process what it needs and give you the signal as to whether
or not it needs more.
Research
on dieting and nutrition have actually identified three sources
of food cravings that are not behavioral, those
being:
- Starvation,
or a response to the body feeling deprived of food (as
in dieting);
- A
response to the body’s perceived need for a particular
nutrient to be supplied.
- A
response to a hormonal state, (esp. in females).
To distinguish between hunger, which should be satiated, and
cravings, which should be handled in some other way, here is
a tip: wait 15 minutes or so, maybe take a walk or engage in
a bit of activity or, in any case, distract yourself momentarily
from your thoughts and the situation at the time (especially
your hunger) and then see how you feel. Maybe even drink a
glass of water (oftentimes we mistake thirst for hunger), and
then see how you feel. # # # # #
SolveYourProblem.com
: 2008
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