How can I resist a food craving?
Food cravings are notoriously difficult to resist. A waft of doughnuts frying, a glimpse of salty chips or the rustle of a crisp packet can lead even the strongest willed of us to quickly break our healthy eating resolve.
Cravings are linked to memory. When we eat a food we like, we create a positive memory. When we associate a food with happy memories, it affects how good we think it tastes and how good it makes us feel, according to Professor Carey Morewedge of Boston University. The more we eat of that food, the more we reinforce this memory. When these positive memories are formed they intrude on our consciousness as a craving. A smell, feeling or place can recall the memory and bring on a craving.
Cravings are closely linked to reward centres in the brain. Carb-loaded foods such as sugary drinks and chips trigger a pathway of signals to these reward centres, while fatty foods such as cheese take a different route. Mix carbs and fat together, in an ice cream or chocolate for instance, and those reward centres are reinforced, according to from Yale University. So your brain rewards you for satisfying cravings for these foods.
What makes a craving stronger?
Our emotions and lifestyle can make cravings harder to resist. Here are some factors that have been shown to weaken resolve.
- Stress: Snacking on crisps, chocolate and biscuits has been .
- Higher levels of .
- has been linked to cravings, while poor or unusual sleep patterns have been associated with a higher body mass index (BMI).
- Restrictive diets to increase cravings.
5 ways to stop cravings
There are a number of theories about how to help yourself resist a food craving, or even prevent the craving.
Drink more water. A found that drinking 500ml of water before a meal helped people to lose weight.
Imagine eating a food many times, as this has been shown to reduce your consumption of that food, according to from Professor Morewedge. Worth a go!
Get moving. Chocolate cravings were reduced when people .
鈥淢ake sure you've eaten enough at mealtimes to stop you reaching for sugary treats in the afternoon or evening鈥, says senior therapist Sally Baker.
鈥淚f you're feeling stressed, anxious or even just bored, you could do something other than eat to get yourself out of that negative mood鈥, says Sally Baker. 鈥淭aking a walk in a park works for many people, meeting up to chat with friends or even a bath can be much more satisfying than turning to a snack and more likely to make you feel better.鈥
How and why does repeatedly thinking about a food help us resist a craving? Professor Carey Morewedge explains his theory to Dr Chris van Tulleken.
Chocolate craving
Professor Carey Morewedge explains his theory to Dr Chris van Tulleken
Chris: So ok, we鈥檝e got people in a room with the bowls of chocolate, asking them to think about chocolate. This seems like a bizarre way of trying to get them to eat less chocolate.Carey: It does seem bizarre, but it鈥檚 really based on some good science about how cravings are formed.Chris: So we all have cravings, or most of us do. What鈥檚 going on in the booths at the moment with the chocolate in front of our participants?Carey: Right, so we have 30 pieces of chocolate in each of the booths. And the idea is that those 30 chocolates are basically stimulating a craving. So cravings are often formed through a memory that we have. We may have a memory about a positive time that we ate chocolate, we may think about the taste of a chocolate that we once had. And so all these different kinds of cuescan lead us to think about how positive it would be to have it and to notice how unpleasant it is that we aren鈥檛 eating chocolate right now.Chris: OK, so to have a craving you鈥檝e got to have had a positive experience?That鈥檚 what a craving is 鈥 it鈥檚 about memory, it鈥檚 not a kind of physical addiction to the substance?Carey: Right, so we don鈥檛 think that any of these people are necessarily addicted to chocolate. But the basic idea is that they鈥檝e had positive experiences with chocolate in the past.Chris: Since I was a kid what we get told is just avoid it: avoid it physically, avoid thinking about it, avoid it mentally. Why can鈥檛 we just to do that?Carey: Right, that intuitively seems to make sense, but it鈥檚 problematic because of memory as well. So when we try to avoid thinking about something - like right now try not to think of a white bear, immediately, right, you think about a white bear? And so what we find is that when people try to suppress thoughts of something it tends to actually activate those thoughts and they鈥檙e more likely to have them.Chris: And that鈥檚 certainly true, in my own experience 鈥 with foods, with anything pleasurable 鈥 trying to avoid it makes it more desirable. So OK, we鈥檙e asking them to think about eating the chocolate as a way of reducing their chocolate intake, as a way of decreasing temptationCarey: No, it does seem crazy right?Chris: If it鈥檚 effective it will be a more enjoyable way of resisting a craving that the attempt at, kind of, blanking our minds?Carey: yeah, that鈥檚 the hope.
Who snacks the most?
