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Understanding Cravings!

Understanding cravings and what they are telling us…

Do you have cravings? I do, well I did, naaa who am I kidding, I actually still do…. (I’m only human after all), Yep, right after lunch I always want a little piece of chocolate to follow my beautiful energy rich nutritious salad…and I undo all that goodness with this craving.


And it comes from my childhood in which my parents served up dessert after dinner every night, year after year. So this craving I have is habitual and requires the will forces to break the habit and patterning from my childhood. I have also experienced cravings that come from a lack of nutrients and deficiency. When I was pregnant with my third child and was low in iron I spent at least 10 hours a day wanting to chew ice (the tell-tale sign of iron deficiency). I drove my husband and my parent’s crazy (I crunched all their ice cubes when I would visit and would occasionally forget to fill it back up! Whoops confession time it is).


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CRAVINGS

I studied the psychology of food last year as a subject because this subject fascinates me. Some of the weirdest cravings on record (apart from super weird pregnancy cravings) include chewing cigarette butts and super burnt food (YUK)! I learnt a lot in this subject and have included this in nutshell fashion in my new book. There are ways to identify food cravings and what they are telling us. One is to understand the time you crave (lack of nutrient/deficiency), what happens just before and after (emotional) and also asking when you crave something what pattern may lie behind it. That’s the easy part though, the hard part is overcoming them and changing them.


HOW TO OVERCOME CRAVINGS!

My top few strategies include: • Movement as soon as a craving hit, change the scenery, get up and walk  • If you can identify the deficiency then you eat the nutrient rich foods and replenish the levels, and craving resolves itself. • Drink water and replace the craving with hydration. Works most of the time • And if its emotional eating (the trickiest one of all), then one has to discover the triggers and then have a plan to be able to override them in order to break the emotional pattern and give your body what it really seeks.

All this and more is covered in my new book, Know Your Body. Head to this link for more info: KNOWING YOUR BODY


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