How to Eliminate Junk Food Cravings for Good

Americans' reliance on processed foods and snacks is undoubtedly one of the primary factors driving our skyrocketing obesity and disease rates. Even many people who "know better" have trouble keeping their hands out of the Doritos.

 

In 2005 alone, Americans spent a staggering $60 billion on snack foods!1 Sugar and salt cravings are often blamed for snack attacks, but how can you stop them?

The truth is, processed foods contain carefully orchestrated flavors and other sensory factors designed to be as addictive as possible. This is in stark contrast to whole foods, the taste and consistency of which was created by nature and therefore work with your body to satiate hunger and nutritional cravings.

As discussed in a previous article, junk food manufacturers have taken flavor science to extraordinary levels, and the artificial ingredients used to produce that sought after "bliss point" can seriously confuse and befuddle your body's metabolism.

For example, the sweetness from non-caloric artificial sweeteners tends to disrupt your metabolic response to real sugar,2 thereby exacerbating obesity and diabetes. Your body simply isn't fooled by sweet taste without calories, so it keeps signaling your brain to keep eating, as the point of satisfaction has not yet been reached.

Fortunately, there are solutions to unhealthy junk food cravings. One of the most effective strategies I know of is intermittent fasting, along with particular diet modifications that effectively helps reset your body's metabolism.

Another helpful technique, which addresses the emotional component of food cravings, is the Emotional Freedom Technique.

What Makes Processed Foods and Snacks Addictive?

Before we jump into the solutions, let's take a quick look at what's causing junk food cravings in the first place. You probably know that refined sugar is more addictive than cocaine,3 but sugar is not the sole culprit causing food addiction.

Another part stems from the way food manufacturers combine various flavors and textures to produce truly addictive products. This science is used not just for chips, cookies, and sodas, but for ALL processed foods, from condiments to pasta sauce.

Food scientist Steven Witherly has studied taste and addictive flavors for the last two decades. In his report: "Why Humans Like Junk Food,"4 he reveals what it is about a wide range of specific foods that stir our senses and taste buds. For example, the reason people love corn chips is because of the following combination of factors:

• Corn chips contain lots of "taste-active solutes," including salt, sugar, MSG, and others
• Seasonings create a high salivation response
• The chips melt quickly in your mouth, enhancing "dynamic contrast and evoked quality"—two parameters that contribute to pleasurable sensations
• Corn chips are calorie dense
• Cheese proteins create pleasurable—and addictive—casomorphines5when digested

Other Tricks of the Junk Food Trade

Two primary factors make the experience of eating food pleasurable. The first factor involves taste, and how the food feels in your mouth. The second factor is the actual macronutrient content of the food.

 

As previously described by investigative reporter Michael Moss, author of the book Salt Sugar Fat, food manufacturers go to great lengths to find the perfect blend of salt, sugar, fat, and additional flavorings to excite your brain's reward center, thereby assuring you'll be back for more. In addition to those basics, the food industry also employs other strategies to increase their products' addictive nature. This includes:

• Dynamic contrast. This is when a combination of contrasting sensations produces pleasurable sensations, such as biting through a crunchy chocolate shell, followed by a soft, creamy center filling

• Salivation response, which boosts taste and feelings of pleasure. Examples of foods and/or ingredients that promote salivation include butter, chocolate, ice cream, and mayonnaise
• Rapid food meltdown and vanishing caloric density. As noted in the featured Lifehacker6 article, foods that quickly melt in your mouth trick your brain into thinking you're not eating as much food as you really are, despite the fact you're stuffing in plenty of calories. A prime example of a snack food that has perfected this is Cheetos
• Sensory specific response. Repetitive flavors, or flavor overload, tend to lead to decreased sensations of pleasure. In short, you "get tired" of eating the same flavor again and again. Your palate can even tire of a flavor within minutes.

Processed food manufacturers circumvent this by creating more complex flavor and sensory profiles. The greatest successes, whether beverages or foods, owe their "craveability" to formulas that pique your taste buds just enough, without overwhelming them, thereby overriding your brain's inclination to say "enough"
• Calorie density. As noted in the featured article:7 "Junk foods are designed to convince your brain that it is getting nutrition, but to not fill you up." This is accomplished by combining the ideal ratio of calories to prevent satiety signals to go off

So how can you get yourself out of the trap set up by junk food manufacturers? First of all, as with any other addiction program, the less of it you eat, the less you'll crave it as your body gets "weaned" from all these addictive hooks. Boosting your nutrition is a key factor here. If your body is getting all the nutrients it needs, it will send the appropriate signals to your brain to stop eating when your body's nutritional requirements have been met.

Intermittent Fasting—One of the Best Ways to Eliminate Sugar Cravings

One of the most effective ways I know of to eliminate sugar cravings and shed unwanted weight is intermittent fasting, as this will help reset your body to burning fat instead of sugar as its primary fuel. When sugar is not needed for your primary fuel and when your sugar stores run low, your body will crave it less.

There are many different variations of intermittent fasting. If you are like 85 percent of the population and have insulin resistance, my personal recommendation is to fast every day by simply scheduling my eating into a narrower window of approximately six to eight hours every day. I find this method to be easier than fasting for a full 24 hours or more, twice a week.

Once you are at your ideal body weight, and do not have diabetes, high blood pressure, or abnormal cholesterol levels, you can be less rigid with your fasting. However, it is probably best to resume some type of scheduled eating regimen once in a while, to make sure you don't slip back into old habits.

To understand how you can fast daily while still eating every day, you need to understand some basic facts about your metabolism. It takes most people eight to 12 hours for their body to burn the sugar stored in your body as glycogen found primarily in your liver and your muscles. Most people never deplete their glycogen stores because they eat three or more meals throughout the day and are in constant "feast" mode. This teaches your body to burn sugar as your primary fuel and effectively shuts off your ability to use fat as a fuel.

Therefore, in order to work, the length of your fast must be at least eight hours. For example, you could restrict your eating to the hours of 11am and 7pm. Essentially, you're just skipping breakfast and making lunch your first meal of the day instead. This equates to a daily fasting of 16 hours—twice the minimum required to deplete your glycogen stores and start shifting into fat burning mode.

Keep in mind that while most people will successfully switch over to burning fat after several weeks of intermittent fasting, you may need several months to teach your body to turn on the fat-burning enzymes that allow your body to effectively use fat as its primary fuel. So don't give up! 

Again, once you've become fat adapted and are of a normal weight, without high blood pressure, diabetes, or high cholesterol, you only need to do scheduled eating occasionally. As long as you maintain your ideal body weight, you can go back to eating three meals a day if you want to. I restricted my eating to a six- to seven-hour window each day until I got fat adapted and lost about 10 pounds. Now, I still rarely ever eat breakfast, but several days a week I will have two meals instead of just one.

Switch from Processed Foods to Unprocessed, Whole Foods

Replacing processed foods with homemade meals made from scratch using whole ingredients is an ideal and important way to ensure optimal nutrition. This will automatically cut out the vast majority of refined sugars, processed fructose, preservatives, dyes, other nasty chemicals, and many addictive ingredients from your diet. This will allow your body to depend less on sugar and more on fat as its primary fuel—provided you eat enough healthy fat, that is. As a result, you will no longer crave sugar to keep you going.

Please keep in mind that proper nutrition becomes even more important when you're fasting and/or cutting calories, so you really want to address your food choices before you try any form of fasting. The key elements for a healthy diet that can help kick your junk food cravings to the curb are the following. For a comprehensive guide, please see my free optimized nutrition plan:

• Avoiding refined sugar, processed fructose, grains, and processed foods
• Eating a healthful diet of whole foods, ideally organic, and replacing the carbs you eliminate with:
• As much high-quality healthful fat as you want (saturated and monounsaturated). Many would benefit from getting as much as 50-85 percent of their daily calories from healthy fats. While this may sound like a lot, consider that, in terms of volume, the largest portion of your plate would be vegetables, since they contain so few calories. Fat, on the other hand, tends to be very high in calories. For example, just one tablespoon of coconut oil is about 130 calories—all of it from healthful fat. Good sources include coconut and coconut oil, avocados, butter, nuts, and animal fats. Also take a high-quality source of animal-based omega-3 fat, such as krill oil

• Large amounts of high-quality organic locally grown vegetables and ideally sprouts grown at your home
• Low-to-moderate amount of high-quality protein (think organically raised, pastured animals or eggs)

Address the Emotional Component of Your Food Cravings

If you're drawn to sweets or grains because of an emotional challenge, I highly recommend using a psychological acupressure technique called the Emotional Freedom Technique. EFT is simple and effective, and can rapidly help you control your emotional food cravings. Many people don't understand that emotional well-being is essential to their physical health. In fact, in terms of dieting for weight loss, not addressing emotional issues -- whether small or serious traumas from the past -- is the primary reason that most people who lose weight often fail at keeping the weight off.

If you maintain negative thoughts and feelings about yourself while trying to take physical steps to improve your body, you're unlikely to succeed. Fine-tuning your brain to "positive" mode is absolutely imperative to achieve optimal physical health. Unfortunately, many people shun this notion, not because it doesn't make sense, but because the medical establishment has conned them into believing that it means they'll be shelling out many thousands of dollars for traditional psychological care. While traditional psychological approaches may sometimes work, EFT has shown to be a far better, not to mention inexpensive, solution. EFT can help you:

• Relieve most emotional traumas
• Abolish phobias and post-traumatic stress
• Shatter food cravings that sabotage your health
• Eliminate or significantly reduce most physical pain and discomfort

If you feel that your emotions, or your own self-image, may be your own worst enemy when it comes to altering your relationship with food, I highly recommend you read my free EFT manual and consider trying EFT on your own. A version of EFT specifically geared toward combating sugar cravings is called Turbo Tapping. For further instructions, please see the article, "Turbo Tapping: How to Get Rid of Your Soda Addiction."

Eating Real Food Is the Answer

The concerted effort by the processed food industry to make their products as addictive as possible has the unfortunate side effect of stimulating your metabolism to burn carbs as its primary fuel. As long as you are in primary carb-burning mode, you will strongly crave these types of foods. The solution is to decrease the amount of processed foods you eat, and replace them with high-quality whole foods. Remember, carbs need to be replaced with healthy fats in order to successfully achieve this metabolic switch over. 

Again, intermittent fasting is one of the most effective ways to end junk food cravings, especially cravings for sugar and grains. No matter how cleverly enhanced these junk foods are, your cravings for them will dramatically diminish, if not vanish altogether, once your body starts burning fat instead of sugar as its primary fuel.

To protect your health, I recommend spending 90 percent of your food budget on whole foods, and only 10 percent or less on processed foods. Unfortunately, most Americans currently do the opposite, which is in large part why so many struggle with junk food cravings. Remember, virtually ALL processed foods are to some degree designed to have a high "craveability" factor, and it's really difficult to find products that do not contain high amounts of addictive sugar and carbs. If you're on a budget, switching to a whole food diet may seem like a challenge. It can be done, however. Here are three strategies you may find helpful:

1. Become resourceful: This is an area where your grandmother, if still alive, can be a wealth of information as how to use up every morsel of food and stretch out a good meal was common knowledge to generations past. What I mean is getting back to the basics of cooking -- using the bones from a roast chicken to make stock for a pot of soup; extending a Sunday roast to use for weekday dinners; learning how to make hearty stews from inexpensive cuts of meat; using up leftovers, and so on.
2. Plan your meals: If you fail to plan, by default you are planning to fail. Ideally, planning your meals will involve scouting out your local farmer's markets for in-season produce that is priced to sell, and planning your meals accordingly, but you can also use this same premise with supermarket sales. You can generally plan a week of meals at a time, make sure you have all ingredients necessary on hand, and then do any prep work you can ahead of time so that dinner is easy to prepare if you're short on time in the evenings.
3. Avoid food waste: According to a study published in the journal PloS One,8 Americans waste an estimated 1,400 calories of food per person, each and every day. The two steps above will help you to mitigate food waste in your home. My previous article, "14 Ways to Save Money on Groceries," also offers valuable tips and tricks for keeping your groceries fresher, longer.

Source
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/05/26/eliminate-junk-food-cravings.aspx

[-] Sources and References

• 1 Why Humans Like Junk Food (PDF), Steven Witherly
• 2 MedicineNet.com March 29, 2014
• 3 PLOS One August 1, 2007
• 4 Why Humans Like Junk Food (PDF), Steven Witherly
• 5 Yum Universe, Cheese Addiction
• 6 Lifehacker.com November 21, 2013
• 7 Lifehacker.com November 21, 2013
• 8 PLoS ONE 4(11): e7940

The #1 Thing You MUST DO To Lose Weight and Keep it off

In the 4 + years since I started my weight loss journey I learned quite a bit about what it takes to lose weight and keep it off. Some lessons I recognized quickly while others took me a little bit longer to see. And, even though, I have a lot of knowledge in my weight loss arsenal I am positive there is still much more I can learn.

So far, these are my top weight loss lessons.

• Tracking food. This has been the cornerstone to my weight loss. I use My Fitness Pal to keep track of my daily calories, nutrition, exercise, and weight loss goals. Read here if you are curious why I don’t use Weight Watchers.

• Meal Planning. Taking the time to meal plan provides me with the road map and structure I need to stay on track with my food. However, meal planning is not always easy. So, instead of struggling I use Plan to Eat to streamline the process. Now meal planning is not an issue. The lesson learned here is don’t try to do things alone all the time. There are plenty of affordable services that can help.

• Make ahead meals. Preparing my foods ahead of time makes it easier to eat healthy during the week. Simple yet powerful concept. I am more likely to eat the foods I plan when I take the time to food prep.

• Clean(er) eating. Eating clean(er) foods makes me feel good, especially green smoothies. My body feels nourished and I feel focused.

• Strength training makes all the difference. A flat tummy and defined arms are not going to be the result of running 3-4 miles a day. However, I love to run – it keeps me focused and sane – so I keep it a part of my exercise routine.

• Keeping an exercise schedule that works. Exercising in the morning is the way to go for me. If I don’t exercise in the morning it won’t happen.

Each strategy plays a huge role in my weight loss journey. There are many more but there is one thing that trumps them all. Something that only occurred to me recently. Want to know what it is?

Consistency. Yep, I need to stay consistent. Consistency is the #1 thing you ABSOLUTELY MUST do to lose weight and keep it off.

Simple? Yes. Common sense? Probably. Is it the reason I did not get results years ago? I am going to go with YES. I now know that all of those weight loss strategies work but only when I am consistently using them.

To lose weight and keep it off I can’t meal plan sometimes, track food when I feel like it, eat clean food on occasion, or work out when time allows. No I need to consistently make all those strategies a part of my everyday lifestyle. That is the only way to change habits, lose weight, and keep it off.

Looking back, I can’t tell you the number of times I would start and stop an exercising routine. It seems like I was on a bi-monthly rotation. Some months it was like I was training for an iron man marathon while other months I was training more for a Keeping Up With the Kardashians marathon on E. Ha! Don’t judge we all have our guilty pleasures. It was the same with food. I would throw myself into salads and grilled chicken for a week or so only to binge on pizza and pasta the next. Basically, my lack of consistency is the #1 reason I never experienced weight loss.

I remember having thoughts like “If I only kept exercising I would feel comfortable in my summer clothes” or “If I kept up with running and eating healthy I would be able to wear that dress” or “If I stopped eating so much junk all the time I would feel better going on vacation” and I am sure many other thoughts like this entered my mind.

Now I can say “you know what Tammy, you were right”. If you stayed consistent with healthy eating habits and exercise yes you would be comfortable in summer clothes, be able to wear that dress, and feel better going on vacation. And I can say that now because I have lost the weight and know exactly what it feels like to be confident and happy in my own skin. I lost the weight by staying consistent with my weight loss efforts. I kept going!

Consistency is key!

Staying consistent is important because it provides you with the time you need to build new habits and see the results of your hard work. It takes about 3-4 weeks to implement a new habit. Sometimes this can take even longer when you are trying to replace bad ones. You are not going to change habits or see results overnight. One day of drinking smoothies, tracking food, running, squats, and sit-ups will not get you bikini ready. Not even one week of doing those things every single day will do the trick. Unfortunately, that is not how it works. In most cases, it takes a few weeks to see any physical results. That’s just the way it is and the reason it is so important to stay consistent with your efforts. Don’t get me wrong you will feel better and see some changes but if you are looking to drop 50 pounds and 4 dresses sizes in a week that won’t happen.

Inconsistency can be very frustrating when trying to lose weight. It can feel like you are “giving up” causing you to feel defeated with the entire weight loss process. I often here people say “that didn’t work for me”. Well, first of all that can’t make you lose weight. Only YOU can make you lose weight.

Second, you have to give yourself enough time and stay consistent. Weight loss is a process filled with many hills, valleys, curves, and even ditches. If you keep going despite all of these challenges you will build and sustain new healthier habits and see the results of your hard work.

What does consistency look like?

Consistency means stability, regularity, and dependability. It means you know what to do and expect day after day.

Here are some tasks you can do every week to stay consistent with creating a healthier lifestyle and losing weight.

• Plan your meals. I recommend setting time aside during the week to create a meal plan and grocery list so when you have time to shop you are ready to go. Make sure to plan for all meals and snacks. If you eat 5 times a days you need to know what those meals will be. You can view all my meal plans here.

• Weekend food prep. I have said this a million times but I will say it again. It is so much easier to eat healthy when healthy food is available. You don’t need to spend an entire weekend prepping food but it will be in your best interest to set some time aside. Even a little food prep will make a difference. Here is a beginners guide to food prep I wrote if you are looking for more information.

• Exercise 3 to 4 times a week. You don’t need to exercise every day nor do your routines need to be trainings for the Tough Mudder or marathons. However, to lose weight you will need to incorporate exercise in some fashion. I think it is important to get in the habit of exercising 3-4 times a week. Don’t feel like you need to join a gym. You can easily exercise in the comfort of your own living room. The key is to create a schedule that works for you. There are tons of home exercise routine posted here. If you need some tips on starting a morning exercise routine then check here.

• Track your food every day. Don’t be discouraged or overwhelmed by tracking food. I know it can seem tedious – and sometimes it is – but it will work to hold you accountable. To make it 100 times easier use a website and/or app like My Fitness Pal. I am telling ya that website was a game changer for me. Here is a post to help you get the most out of my fitness pal.

• Get and stay organized. I truly believe that an organized life is a happier life – at least it is for me. Trust me, I am not OCD organized in any way shape or form. However, I will say when I take the time to write a to do list, keep my calendar updated, and my house from looking like a bomb went off I feel better, happier, and much more focused. Staying organized keeps you out of the “hot zones” and frees up time and mental energy to keep you moving forward on all your goals, including weight loss goals. Here is one of my favorite posts I put together on this topic called 7 Things You Can Do to Lose Weight that Don’t Include Food or Exercise.

The best way to stay consistent week after week is to be intentional and plan, plan, and plan. Don’t expect to create and stick with new habits if you are flying by the seat of your pants every day. Take time every day to think about what you want to accomplish. Then write it down and keep it visible. Take time to review it every morning and night. This helps to reflect, make adjustments, and see progress. Personally, one of the most important things I do daily is write out a to do list. Without that list I am lost soul trying to figure out what to do next.

The biggest challenge to staying consistent is life happens. There is always something getting in the way of eating healthy, working out, cleaning, or doing anything we need to do. For this reason, it is important to focus consistently on habits and lifestyle instead of quick fixes and unrealistic diets. When you do this it is easier to get back on track (instead of starting over) with your goals when life gets in the way.

Again, weight loss is a journey and a process. It never ends – even when you reach your goal weight. It is about creating healthier habits, routines, and staying consistent with them. Consistency makes all the difference between results and regret. So keep going!

Source
http://www.organizeyourselfskinny.com/2015/04/16/the-1-thing-you-must-do-to-lose-weight-and-keep-it-off/