Winter is Coming, But You Don’t Have to be a Slave to Your Food Cravings

You don’t need to snack:

A colleague of mine asked me a question the other day. Given that winter is approaching and he anticipated gaining some weight over the colder months, he wanted my advice for losing ten pounds. I gave him a few suggestions and then he asked another question: “What do I do for snacks?”

I said, “you don’t have to snack.” That was a shocker to him and it led to his next question: “But what do I do about my cravings?” I told him, “You don’t have to have cravings.” That blew his mind.

He had always believed that his food cravings were inevitable and uncontrollable. He was convinced that he was always going to have them and he’d always have to give in to them. I told him that none of this was true. He wanted to know more, so here’s what I said:

Food cravings are psychological, not physical. They’re not the same as hunger, which is a physiological signal that we’re in need of more fuel. Food cravings have nothing to do with our state of nourishment.

The mind is more powerful than any craving:

Cravings can feel very powerful – too powerful to resist – but the truth is that our mind is more powerful than any craving we might have.

In fact, cravings – for food, alcohol, drugs, or anything, really, arise in response to unconscious material in our psyche. Our mind is saying, “I want potato chips” but that’s not what we really want.

The psyche is always trying to protect us from unpleasantness. Unfortunately, the way it goes about it often does us more harm than good. Cravings have a purpose: to keep us unaware of the feelings and needs that are coming to the surface from deep within.

It can be upsetting to recognize our real feelings and needs. Giving in to our cravings serves to soothe our discomfort, numb our pain, distract us from our fears, stimulate us when we’re bored, or comfort us when we feel lonely.

The psyche doesn’t realize that it’s ultimately healthier for us to face our feelings and deal with our needs than to avoid them by indulging in our cravings.

There are consequences to giving in to our cravings:

Once we’ve satisfied our cravings, the feelings and needs get buried again and we have no idea of what’s going on inside of us. Unfortunately, this creates a few problems: There are consequences to all the indulging. We can become overweight and unhealthy, eating all the food we crave.

There’s also a consequence to ignoring the needs and feelings festering inside us. We can become emotionally, or even physically ill from suppressing this unconscious content, and even if we don’t, we’re depriving ourselves of what we truly desire. That’s a tragedy.

Cravings are a signal that we have buried emotions and emotional needs but we experience them as a desire for something physical. If we understand this, we can see that every time we have a food craving, it’s a sign that we need to pay attention to our inner world.

There are three main reasons why people are uncomfortable facing their unconscious material:

1. Our society encourages us to ignore it and to engage in consumption to “feel better.” We’re constantly encouraged to spend more, eat more, gamble more, and accumulate more, as though this is the solution to our deepest needs.

2. Some people have had childhood trauma. The feelings they experienced while growing up were overwhelming. The psyche buried them out of a fear that they’d be intolerable to re-experience. Cravings arose to keep these frightening emotions at bay.

3. Some people grew up with adults who modeled to them that they should ignore their deeper feelings and emotional needs. It just wasn’t done in their family, and in fact, the grown-ups indulged their own food cravings, showing the children that this is what to do instead.

What we need to know is that we don’t have to blindly follow the customs of our society or the modeling of our families. We also need to understand that as adults, we’re strong enough to face any emotion that might be buried within us from our past experiences.

Cravings can take over our lives:

There’s a third problem that arises when we give in to our cravings. They start to control our lives. We end up spending an awful lot of time and money indulging in our cravings. They can start to take over our days. The reason for this is partly psychological and partly physiological.

Psychologically, the more we indulge in our cravings, the more we reinforce that this is the way to deal with our emotional content. The more we indulge in our cravings, the more alienated we become from our true needs and feelings, so even if we wanted to look at them, they would be so deeply buried we’d have great difficulty discovering them.

Physiologically, indulging in any type of cravings causes a release of Dopamine in the brain. This gives us an immediate rush of pleasurable sensations, followed by an intense craving for more. But, the more we indulge, the more we crave. This is the physical basis for all addictions.

My colleague, having spent years giving in to his cravings, is naturally finding them very powerful, these days. The good news is that there’s a simple physical way to eliminate food cravings. You just stop giving into them.

Initially, you have to bring a lot of willpower to this, resisting the cravings and refusing to give in. very soon, the cravings will begin to diminish, and eventually, they’ll go away. For anyone who has gone on a diet, they will have already gone through something like this.

The thing that ruins a diet isn’t the persistence of the food cravings. It’s the psychological part, which is a lot trickier. People give up on their diets because all the real feelings and needs start to surface when they’re not indulging in their food cravings, and the discomfort with dealing with this emotional content makes them turn back to food to shove it all down again.

So, a big part of overcoming food cravings is being able to face whatever is inside you. If it’s so scary that you simply can’t do it on your own, you’ll probably need to talk to a professional who can create a safe space in which to do the work of exploring your unconscious content.

One thing that you should know is that as long as you keep indulging your cravings, it will be difficult to know what you really need because fulfilling the cravings keeps everything buried.

Three steps to overcoming cravings for food (or anything else):

Overcoming food cravings has to be done in three steps.

1. First, you’ll need to stop the cycle of craving, indulging, and craving more. That comes from exercising your willpower and just saying, “No.”

2. Then, you’ll need to face whatever is in your unconscious, clamoring to be seen. You can do that on your own, or with the help of a qualified professional.

3. The third step is giving yourself what you really need. This might be love, emotional healing, creative fulfillment, more meaning in your life, or a combination thereof. Whatever it is that you need, the cravings won’t go away if the needs aren’t met. Taking time to tune in to those needs will enable you to know them and to start fulfilling them.

It’s not inevitable to have cravings:

It’s not inevitable for you to have food cravings – or cravings for anything else, for that matter. It’s not inevitable that you’ll be a slave to your cravings. You can be free of cravings by following the above three steps. The good news is that willpower only has to be exerted until you’ve broken the physiological cycle of the Dopamine pathway in your brain – usually a matter of a couple of months.

Freedom from cravings does not have to be a life-long struggle. If you add steps two and three to the willpower of step one, you can live a life completely free of cravings. You can live your very best life.

For more information on how to address emotional over-eating, you can check out my book Emotional Over-eating: Know the Triggers, Heal Your Mind and Never Diet Again.

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