Food cravings can be very intense and can rule our lives. They can also cause us to overeating and emotionally numb ourselves. They seem impossible to overcome, but with the tips in this article, they can be easier to overcome than you think.
1. Eat A Good Diet – Many people find that they experience food cravings in the afternoon and will tend to snack and binge on high fat, high calorie foods like chips, cookies and chocolate. These intense hunger pangs/yearnings then will spill over into the evening and the high fat, high calorie food binge doesn’t seem to end. Usually many people have these in the afternoon because they skip breakfast or just haven’t had time to eat properly earlier on in the day. The best thing to do is make an effort to eat a large calorie dense breakfast. This will help prevent those afternoon craves and will set you up for eating properly. If you don’t eat regularly you will experience the desire for high density foods, so make things easier on yourself by eating regularly to avoid them.
2. Keep Occupied – A lot of the cravings we experience in the evening tend to be as a result of television watching. TV watching is actually rather dull and often we desire snacks to help us suppress the feelings of boredom. So if you want to avoid them but usually use this time to watch TV and end up vegging out, try doing something different. Find a new hobbie, get creative – paint, learn an instrument, dance, or exercise. Use your evening productively and enjoy it and snacking will be a thing of the past.
3. Help Suppress It – There are many things we can do to help suppress the cravings and stop ourselves from overeating. You can brush your teeth or use something like chewing gum or even a lollipop to take our attention away from it. Until we continuously overcome them this may be our only solution to stop ourselves from eating, but the more we do it the easier cravings will become without a crutch.
4. Drink Water – Sometimes we think we are hungry when really we are just dehydrated. In fact most people who live on a cooked food diet are dehydrated. We need to be drinking more water – so if in doubt drink.
5. Wait it out – Sometimes just waiting 10-15 minutes is enough for the it to go away. There are plenty of things you can do to distract yourself in this time. If you find it difficult to think of something make a list so that when you are experiencing the desire to eat something when you aren’t hungry, you can just pick something off the list to do. Once you get past it you will feel much more empowered and feel more confident in your ability to kick the next craving to the curb.
There are plenty of others things you can do to overcome those fake hunger pangs, but this are good starting points. Don’t let food get the better of you. They can be beaten and you don’t have to let them rule your life.
For more cravings advice and tips visit Stop Cravings. If you struggle with emotional eating check out our article on how to stop emotional eating.
Tags: Addiction, addictions
