Food Triggers and Cravings: Change Your Diet and Lifestyle

In my previous article, I covered the strategies you might use to cope better with food triggers influenced by your environment or emotions. Today I’ll touch on the significance of what you eat and how you live.

What you eat influences your hunger.

Diet and lifestyle can increase your hunger and push you to overeat without you being consciously aware of what is happening. There are biochemical and physiological pathways that spring into action when you fail to give your body what it needs. These subtle yet powerful changes that go on inside your body can easily override any conscious efforts you’ve made to reduce your food intake.

Fortunately there are choices you can make to dramatically lessen these powerful urges. Let’s start at the beginning with what you choose to eat. There’s no doubt about it. We all want to eat food we like!

A survey performed annually by the International Food Information Council Foundation suggests TASTE is the top consideration (87%)* for the American public when making food purchases. And we all know someone who became enamored of the latest “miracle diet” that would take off pounds like a charm with little or no effort by eating some crazy and less than healthy restricted diet. Yes, the weight may have come off but 95% of the time it goes right back on with a vengeance. Why? Because these crazy fad diets are unsustainable. They are nutritionally inadequate and unsatisfying.

So the underlying issue is the importance of choosing foods that agree with your body from a nutritional perspective AND your taste buds. If you succeed you will satisfy BOTH your hunger and desire for tasty foods. This in turn makes weight loss AND maintenance much easier because you will have discovered a way of eating that works (one that keeps you AND your doctor happy).

1. Eat Enough Food

Starving yourself has never been the answer. In a food abundant society such as ours it simply won’t work. When you’ve deprived your body long enough it will do one of two things. It will hold on firmly to whatever calories it gets. Or you’ll experience an incredibly powerful urge to eat and you’ll give in because there is so much easily accessible food around.

Another important concept that you don’t want to ignore has to do with calories. Determine how many calories YOU need for a healthy diet. As much as 90% or more of the American public does not know how much they need for either weight loss or maintenance* as I mentioned in the previous article. Do you? (See: Calories Needed for Weight Loss or Maintenance)

If you’ve been eating enough calories, you will still have days when you feel hungry. Allow for this. You may be experiencing a temporary increase in basal metabolism for a variety of reasons. Eating more on occasion will not only satisfy that temporary need, it will also serve to let your body know you are not starving.

Avoid skipping meals or going long stretches of time without eating anything at all. Eat nutritious, low-calorie, portion-wise food when you FEEL hungry. This is the best way to meet your body’s needs. Scheduling regular meals (and snacks if that works for you) is good. Just don’t get too rigid about when you eat. Try to follow your body’s natural rhythms.

2. Improve Your Diet

Eating a balanced healthy diet matters a LOT more than you might imagine. We have the science to show how the wrong kind of food and food ingredients throw off the body’s ability to maintain weight and health. The right kinds of food help us to achieve a healthy weight and live well with a greatly reduced risk for disease.

As you might imagine, your body’s primary task is to keep you alive. In addition to the oxygen you breath, your body requires specific nutrients to keep functioning properly. If those nutrients are not present in adequate levels when needed, your body biochemistry can send messages to your hormones to increase your appetite. This protective mechanism is in place to not only encourage you to eat more food for the calories your body needs but also the nutrients.

The recommendation to focus primarily on eating a balanced mix of fruits and vegetables, whole grains; lean meat, poultry, fish, and other good protein sources such as legumes (dried beans and peas), nuts, seeds, and eggs; and low fat dairy or dairy substitutes still holds true with a few notable changes.

Recent updates to the science of nutrition and weight management suggest that a more well-defined diet may be the best for weight loss. For example, it has become more evident that weight loss may be considerably easier when carbohydrates are limited. A somewhat limited carbohydrate intake may work well for many people whereas a strict low carb diet is better for others.

Certain foods such as sugars and refined carbohydrates activate fat storage pathways and others such as lean protein foods activate fat burning pathways. How this works is complicated and will vary from one person to another. These pathways can influence your hunger and how you react to food triggers and cravings. The newly emerging science of nutrigenomics (how genes influence nutritional needs) will someday provide health professionals with a way to assess specifically what kind of diet will work best for a given individual.

In the meantime, limiting your carbohydrate intake for weight loss should help. Eliminating sweets (added sugars of all kinds) and refined carbohydrates is particularly important for weight loss. For weight maintenance and better health, a lot will depend on the individual. You’ll need to get a sense of whether or not you can include these foods in your diet occasionally or not.

3. Get enough sleep

Sleep deprivation influences certain hormones that affect hunger and satiety. Researchers from the University of Chicago found that study participants having 4 hours or less of sleep for as little as two nights in a row reduced levels of the hormone leptin by 18% and boosted ghrelin by about 30%. (Prevention Magazine, February 2008)

Leptin is a hormone that functions to let your body know if you’ve had enough to eat. The hormone ghrelin works to STIMULATE appetite. Being sleep deprived fights against your diet efforts in two ways. It increases your hunger and gives you less feedback to let you know when you’ve had enough.

4. Be Physically Active

Physical activity matters. You already know that. What you may not know is how little you might need to do to speed up your metabolism, burn more fat, and improve your overall health. The key is doing short bursts of INTENSE exercise. You might be surprised at the benefits you can achieve in doing as little as 20 minutes a week of intense exercise.

Include weight lifting and/or resistance training in your exercise routine. According to the International Food Information Council Foundation, 59% of American do not do any kind of strength training.* Moderate aerobic activity such as walking or bike riding may not give you the kind of fat burning boost  you might like. However, it is good for your overall physical and mental health.

There is so much more information I hope to share with you in the upcoming months and years on the value of a healthy diet and exercise for weight loss and maintenance. I hope you keep checking back for the latest updates. Also don’t hesitate to ask if you have questions.

*International Food Information Council Foundation 2011

Tagged as: cravings, diet and lifestyle, food triggers, hunger cues, what you eat