12 Tricks for Getting Your Cravings Under Control

Homemade Strawberry Ice Cream

If you hang around low carb circles for more than a couple of days, you’re sure to hear the low carb mantra that says restricting carbohydrates controls cravings. The perspective is that low calorie diets make you hungry and low carb diets do not, but how true is that? Does everyone who follows a low carb diet experience relief from their cravings and excessive hunger? If they did, there wouldn’t be tons of people joining low carb groups and forums saying, “Hi guys…I’m back!”

All of us, short or tall, thin or fat, are hard-wired as infants to seek after pleasure and avoid discomfort at all costs. That’s practically the first rule we create for ourselves. By the time we reach adulthood, seeking comfort and alleviating pain is so deeply ingrained into our subconscious minds, that the steps we take to do that have become an automatic response.

When it comes to diets, all diet programs introduce us to restriction and change. That produces cravings and a strong physical or psychological need to feel pleasure. There’s nothing magical about low carb diets. They can help to control cravings for some people because protein deficiencies, nutritional imbalances and food sensitivities are corrected, but that doesn’t happen for everyone. Learning to spot, analyze and overcome cravings is essential if we want to reach our weight loss goals. Here are 12 tricks for getting your cravings under control:

1. Becoming aware of the craving is always the first step towards solving the problem. If we pretend that the problem doesn’t exist, if we don’t accept and admit that we have a problem, we cannot begin to take the essential steps required to overcome it. Observe yourself for several days to see what you are doing. Don’t self-judge, just watch how you unconsciously strive to feel pleasure and avoid discomfort.

2. Once you admit you have a problem, you are ready to begin discovering what is actually triggering the issue. Many triggers and emotional states cause us to overeat. So the first step after acceptance is to take a good look at your emotional state. Notice how uncomfortable you feel when craving something off plan. In addition, take note of your overall emotional state as well. Are you tired, stressed or frustrated? Emotional triggers can be people, events, the environment or even past memories of a happier time. They do not have to be specific foods.

3. When following a low carb diet, many people like to blame carbohydrates for making them overeat. That tendency to relieve ourselves of the responsibility for submitting to our cravings hinders us from finding constructive ways of dealing with the problem. Although placing blame is another automatic response that comes from our childhood conditioning, we need to stop doing that if we want to find ways to turn low carb dieting into a lifestyle.

4. Once we admit we have a problem, observe our emotional state, and stop blaming carbohydrates, we are ready to seek constructive ways of overcoming our cravings. One of the easiest ways to do that is to start a food journal. Record what you eat, when you eat it, how you feel at the time, and what’s going on around you. The idea is to look for strong repetitive patterns, so give yourself a good month before trying to analyze what you’re doing. The goal is to understand yourself. To know yourself, you must learn how you eat, what you eat, when you eat, and how much.

5. A food journal is a good way to spot trigger foods, events, people, and emotional conditions. Once you learn what is triggering your overeating episodes or binges, you can take logical steps to avoid those problems. For example, one of my trigger foods is mixed nuts. If they are in the house, I will eat them. I can tell myself that I am going to measure them out and stick with just that amount, but within a couple of days, I return to my programmed behavior. If I’m in weight loss mode, I can’t have them in the house. Another way of solving that problem is to just buy a 2oz individual bag when my husband and I travel up North. That turns them into a special treat that I can only have at specific intervals. That way, I don’t completely deprive myself of them, but rationally work them into my plan.

6. Cut down on food stimuli. Thinking about food, seeing it on television or on the web, and searching through recipes all activate the right frontal cortex of the brain that controls motivation and pleasure. Advertizing, snack machines, cooking shows and web videos, Facebook pages, and store displays all bombard our brains with food stimuli. Once those thoughts get into our head, it’s very difficult to get rid of them. They will make us begin to crave the possible pleasure they can bring.

7. Take a good look at the amount of stress you have in your life. Stress affects the hypothalamus. When we are under stress, the body feels threatened, so the hypothalamus signals the adrenals to release stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline to help us deal with the issue. When we don’t burn that excess energy physically because the threat was mental or emotional rather than physical, the brain has to find some type of adaption to rebalance the body. Many times, it does that by initiating cravings because eating brings comfort and comfort releases the stress. To combat the problem, we need to find pleasurable ways to comfort ourselves other than food.

8. Watch for food sensitivities. Cravings increase when we eat foods we are sensitive to because they bind themselves to our pleasure centers in the brain. Giving up our favorite foods isn’t easy, but it can be done if you find foods and activities to replace them with. Don’t just cut out cheese or corn derivatives or gluten without seeking ways to replace the pleasure they provide.

9. Observe how you talk to yourself. Often, feelings of deprivation come from the things we say about ourselves. When we use language such as “I can’t have a piece of cake like everyone else is having because I’m on a diet,” we set ourselves up to fail. We have branded what we can’t have as bad and tried to tell ourselves that low carb foods are good. If we hate, or even mildly dislike, vegetables we are doomed. Our inner critique is not on our side. He or she is on the side of pleasure. If we don’t honestly find pleasure in eating meat and vegetables, then our discomfort will eventually win the war. Try restructuring how you talk to yourself into something positive. Instead of telling yourself you can’t have something, tell yourself what type of pleasure you will give yourself instead – and then make sure you follow through.

10. If you have eaten enough, but find yourself craving more, try focusing on something other than food to distract yourself. Take a walk, do the dishes, take a shower or perform some other physical activity that requires mental concentration. When we keep ourselves physically active and busy, we are less hungry throughout the day.

11. Make sure you are drinking enough water. We can easily get the signals for hunger and thirst mixed up. Always go and drink a glass of water first whenever hunger strikes. Give yourself a good ten to twenty minutes, and then if you are still hungry, eat something you particularly like. Don’t try to control a craving with food or activities that are just so-so. Always remember that cravings are because the body and mind are seeking after pleasure. Give it to them.

12. Many times when we set ourselves up with a diet that we think we are going to follow for the rest of our lives, we don’t fill it with things that give us pleasure. The low calorie, low fat mindset is a deprivation mindset, and a deprivation mindset will always be temporary. Always. So if you want to succeed on a low carb diet, fill it with foods, recipes, nonfoods, and activities that you enjoy. If you are enjoying your meals because they are filled with foods you love, if you are enjoying your day because it is filled with activities you love, you will be less tempted to seek for pleasures elsewhere.

We seek after pleasure and do everything in our power to avoid discomfort. That is what we, as mortals, do automatically every single day. It doesn’t matter if we are following a low carb diet, a low calorie diet, or eating at a maintenance level of calories, that tendency still controls what we think, do, and eat. While we cannot short circuit that tendency, we can use it to our advantage. Cravings are a signal that we are somehow feeling deprived. When we feed those cravings in a healthy way, they will disappear.


If you need even more ideas for handling night time cravings, check out JoshKnowsBest's article at Infobarrel: Weight Loss Tips: Late Night Cravings. I particularly liked his idea about eating a 300-calorie diet meal to keep yourself on track.