'' Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster. – Sun Tzu, Chinese philosopher ''
Listen to the wise man. You can’t win the battle against cravings if you don’t understand what triggers them. By the way: You’re not alone in this situation… 100% of all women and 75% of all men crave various foods. I personally crave chocolate – the most craved food in America. The thing is – I’ve learned to deal with my cravings the healthy way. It all starts with learning these little-known truths about cravings.
Cravings Are Social
Research consistently finds that cravings are most often related to social rather than nutritional cues. In plain English, you’ll crave foods that you come across often in your environment or that’s popular in your culture. For most us, this means we are likely to crave French fries and greasy chemical-laden burgers, unfortunately. Understand that there’s no such thing as a universal food craving. Many Japanese women actually crave sushi, and other people all around the world crave foods that may sound disgusting to us – like the Vietnamese and Cambodian that regularly eat fertilized duck embryos.
We Crave Foods We Eat Often
A study performed by at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia proved that we start to crave whatever foods we eat in large quantities. The researchers put study subjects on a vanilla-flavored drink low in saturated fat. After consuming it every day for two weeks, about a third of the subjects reported craving the drink, even though the researchers pointed out, "It was chalky and not very yummy."
You Crave What You Can’t Eat
Restricting yourself from certain foods and putting them in that “forbidden” category might be the worst thing to do to ward off cravings. For example – as Marcia Pelchat, a food psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center put it – the simple fact that you’re waiting in a long line at the cinema and unable to buy your popcorn might make you crave it even more – even if it’s not the world's best popcorn.
High-Sugar + High-Fat = Cravings
The equation is pretty simple. Foods that contain a boatload of sugar and fat at the same time bombard your brain’s pleasure receptors (dopamine), shutting them down to prevent overload. After a while, this means you don’t get the same satisfaction from simply eating the food you’ve been craving anymore – you have to stuff yourself and binge.
We often Crave Memories
Sensory memory food cravings activate the same parts of the brain that drug and alcohol cravings do, including the hippocampus, which helps store memories; the insula, involved in perception and emotion; and the caudate, which is important for learning and memory. That’s why you probably crave foods that made you feel good when you were young.
You Can Crave Foods You Don’t like
People usually crave foods they enjoy – but not always. It's possible to like a food without craving it, and crave a food without liking it. This is also true for non-food cravings like those people with pica experience. This condition leads them to eat objects like nails, sofa stuffing or anything that’s usually not eatable– and eventually get featured on TLC.
Summary--> Everyone has cravings.
--> Cravings have little to do with your personal preferences, but are related to your environment and habits.
--> You’re not born or stuck with cravings; they can be modified to your liking with the techniques you’re going to learn in the next articles.
