Find Freedom & Get Rid of Your Cravings For Good
- Annmarie Jenkins, MS, RD
- Sep 30, 2024
- 8 min read
One of the more challenging aspects of sticking to a nutrition plan (and finding success) are the cravings that come with it. This can not only disrupt our progress, but can also be a sign of a larger nutritional, behavioral, and psychological challenge. While the more common thought-process is to use as much discipline and will power as you can muster, dietitians like to go a bit deeper and truly uncover the root of the issue so you can find freedom and get rid of your cravings for good.
In this article:
What Are Cravings
To begin, let’s define food cravings as the desire to eat a particular type of food - this can be differentiated from hunger, which refers to the absence of fullness brought on by an empty stomach. While cravings can typically only be satiated by a specific type of food, true hunger can be alleviated by any type of food.
Food cravings are noteworthy for their specificity and intensity, rising through the late afternoon and evening with the desire for chocolate and other high-calorie sweet and savory foods. Seriously - we didn’t make that up! The research shows that humans typically crave energy-dense foods, with chocolate and chocolate-containing foods being the most common. Our experts on staff can confirm this is unfortunately true.
Where Do Cravings Come From
Food cravings are multidimensional in origin, ranging from physiologically, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral factors - from increased salivary flow and activation of the reward-related brain areas, to changes in mood, and seeking the craving out!
Interestingly enough, the theory that food cravings are derived from various nutrient deficiencies have relatively poor evidence to support it. For example, when study participants consumed a nutritionally balanced and adequate, but monotonous liquid diet, they reported food cravings much higher than their baseline. We’re not saying that a nutrient deficiency is never the culprit, but per the research, this accounts for a very small percentage of food cravings.
Instead, various psychological theories have emerged, including Pavlovian conditioning, where a cue that has been repeatedly paired with food intake can become a conditioned response (food craving) that promotes food intake. Internal cues can range from anything, such as hunger, time of day, a television program, a long car-ride, or an emotional stressor, among many others specific to the individual.
The good news here? If your craving is a learned response, that also means you can unlearn yourself out of your cravings. It will take active energy that may feel difficult in the moment, but through repetition in unlearning some of your unhelpful habits and behaviors, you can beat even your most significant cravings.
Restriction and Cravings
If you’ve ever told yourself you were going to cut out a certain food or food/macro group for a new diet, it’s probably no surprise to you now that your cravings for that specific thing actually increased significantly. This phenomenon has been demonstrated in the research, such as between restrained eaters and unrestrained eaters (“normal” eaters). Self-reported restrained eaters typically have more intense and more frequent food cravings than unrestrained eaters.
Additionally, experiments have demonstrated an increase in food-specific cravings as a result of selective food deprivation - i.e., depriving chocolate induced higher chocolate cravings in almost all studies. Since the selective food deprivation was unlikely to have created a nutrient deficiency, there is likely a psychological factor at play. This means that the feeling of not getting to eat what you want, despite being in energy balance, plays a larger part in food cravings than actual nutrient deficiencies.
This is why most dietitians take an all-foods-fit approach. Our nutrition choices are not just as simple as the food we put on our plate (or even the food available). Nutrition, and subsequently our intake, is largely psychological and can have a multitude of different physical, emotional, and behavioral factors attached to it. What does the research show us? In order to decrease cravings, we must abolish the “bad foods” list and recondition ourselves to think, feel, speak, and interact with foods neutrally.
This journey can lead you down a rabbit hole and you’ll likely meet yourself with resistance when attempting to feel positively about eating a pint of Ben & Jerrys. For this reason, we recommend finding a dietitian, and perhaps even a therapist, to partner with and help you change your relationship with food.
Weight Loss and Cravings
We talked above about the types of cravings that were likely perpetuated by psychological factors, but what does the research say about cravings and weight loss interventions that actually do cause a reduction of energy intake? Interestingly enough, we see opposite findings.
When calorie restriction is used for weight loss, food cravings actually decrease from pre- and post- intervention. Perhaps it is because in weight loss interventions, the conditioned response from cravings has been removed. Additional findings found that a reduced frequency of consuming craved foods, but not the amount, saw a reduction in cravings for specific foods. This means that not eating specific foods over the span of at least a few weeks may help remove learned associations (i.e., evening time and ice cream) so that certain cues (evening time) no longer trigger a conditioned response (ice cream consumption).
5 Tips to Beat Your Cravings
To recap what we learned, selective food deprivation (i.e., “I will no longer eat ice cream”) increases food cravings, while weight loss actually decreases food cravings. There’s a whole host of factors that may have influenced the research (such as age, weight, and study duration), however there are many nutritional counseling implications that can help you beat your cravings for good.
Change Your Psychology Around Foods
It is imperative that you banish the words “good” or “bad” from your vocabulary when talking about foods. Although this may sound elementary, using polarizing descriptors actually has a whole landslide worth of implications from how we think about food, interact with it (either eat more or less of it), how we teach our children about food, and many others.
Think about this as using reverse psychology with yourself. If you are “allowed” to eat any food you like, then there are no longer psychological pressures to eat as much as you can of that food before it's taken away or restricted again. Being “allowed” to consume a specific food will then open the door for other questions: Am I hungry for this food? Would this make me feel good afterwards, or sick? Do I truly want this food right now?
Assess Your Cues
Knowing that cravings have a deeply psychological influence related to Pavlovian conditioning, one helpful tactic to reduce your cravings in the first place is to assess the cues that are triggering a conditioned response or food craving. Keep a food journal to understand the exact environment and other present factors you experienced right before and after the food craving / food intake. Look for patterns that might reveal a cue and learned response.
Take this example: you struggled with severe food cravings and overeating most of your adult life. Upon reflection, you realized that in your long car rides back from work, one of your favorite ways to pass the time was to listen to an audiobook (cue). Unfortunately, you frequently paired this with a large bag of chips from the gas station, and now every time you listen to the audio book on a long car ride (which happens daily), you are craving something salty (learned response). By removing the cue and listening to music on your way home, you are able to remove the craving, or learned response, entirely.
Exposure - Allow Yourself to Eat the Once Restricted Foods
If cravings are strongest when we deprive ourselves of a specific food, leading to increased desire for that food, then one method to overcome your craving is to allow yourself to eat the food as much as you want. This means that anytime a craving hits, you allow yourself to eat it. After enough repeated exposures, the craving will subside since it is no longer so taboo or restricted. Beware: this can feel scary due to our lengthy history with diet culture and weight-centric messaging.
This process can be messy and is best supervised by a Registered Dietitian to provide guidance, encouragement, and ensure you stay the course even when you see the scale creeping up. Although the thought of weight gain might be the exact opposite of what you’re looking for, getting to the root cause of something that might be perpetuating a yo-yo style effect with weight and dieting will actually help you lose and maintain a healthy weight in the long-term.
Be Proactive With Consistent Daily Intake
As we learned, food cravings tend to increase in the late afternoon and evening. Although there is a distinction between hunger and food cravings, they often coexist and occur together, made even stronger if you have not eaten in a longer period of time. Our clients who exhibit the strongest food cravings are typically those with inconsistent eating and dieting patterns. This means that we actually need to change our mindset when it comes to cravings. It’s not enough to be reactive when cravings hit - we need to be proactive.
Being proactive means ensuring not to intentionally or unintentionally skip meals. Your healthy meals and snacks need to be a daily priority, or else you will find yourself in the same craving loop as soon as the sun begins to set each day. We recommend ensuring that each meal is protein and fiber packed, including adequate amounts of carbs and fats to ensure satiety and nutritional adequacy.
If you have the challenge of “forgetting” to eat, it should be a top priority to make schedule changes, as able, to prioritize consistent meal times. This is important for many reasons aside from just food intake (like stress management!), but is one that has huge implications on our overall intake, weight, and food cravings.
An editor-favorite hack? Directly after each meal, try consuming a small piece of fruit for added fiber, nutrients, and sweetness! Yes - even after dinner. This has radically decreased our urges for late night munchies and helps you feel full, satiated, and healthy in the process.
Creating Healthy Habits, Creates More Healthy Habits
Remember the research on weight loss and cravings? One of your biggest takeaways should not be that weight loss = no cravings. It’s much more complex than that. What is more likely is that people who are able to successfully lose and maintain weight loss have reduced their number of unhealthy habits and increased their number of healthy habits. I.e., when you start implementing one healthy habit, you’re more likely to create a second, and a third, and so on leading to your desired outcome.
We like to call this the healthy-habit-snowball effect. You know how when you fall off your diet, then stop going to the gym, then stop waking up early (and so on), and before you know it, it’s been six months of not feeling great? Well the opposite is also true and we tend to see this snowball effect that gets bigger and bigger as a result of one healthy or unhealthy behavior.
What’s great about understanding this cycle is realizing that to stop it, you probably will have to do something that feels really hard in order to break the cycle and begin the healthy snowball effect again. This is about so much more than forcing a painful diet in the hopes of weight loss that will help reduce cravings. This is about truly assessing your behaviors and changing them.
We sound like a broken record, but one-on-one counseling with a Registered Dietitian is essential to help guide you through a tough, but rewarding journey of reducing and eliminating food cravings. If this sounds like you, fill out our contact form and a dietitian from our team will get back to you quickly.
Reference
Meule, A. (2020, June 23). The Psychology of Food Cravings: The role of food deprivation -
current nutrition reports. SpringerLink.
Disclaimer: The information provided in this post is for informational purposes only. Any changes to your nutrition & health should be supervised by a registered dietitian or physician.
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