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We believe everyone has the right to love their food and feel proud of how they choose to eat. Join the coaches at Confident Eaters as they share their insights and advice to ditch diet culture and step into your power. They've guided thousands of people out of emotional eating, compulsive overeating, and stressful relationships with food. With science based tools and inspiration, what awaits you? Body confidence, food freedom, and joyful ease with eating.
Research on Food Cravings : A Coaches Chat
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Georgie: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Confident Eaters Podcast, where you get proven methods to end overeating, emotional eating, and stressing about food. We are heading for harmony between your body, food and feelings, hosted by me, Georgie Fear, and my team at Confident Eaters.
So today I have some really interesting stuff for us to learn about food cravings. This is something that comes up pretty often in coaching when people are trying to change their food patterns. It doesn't just happen like we decide how we want to eat and then we eat that way. Stuff gets in the way like emotions, cravings, food preferences. So I did a little bit of a literature dive to see if I could find out anything interesting. You know, some of the fascinating questions that I explored would be, do food cravings have anything to do with a nutrient deficiency?
Do they have anything to do with your physiological state? Are [00:01:00] they just psychological? Are they related to hormones? Why do men get food cravings if they are related to, you know, particular women's hormones during the menstrual cycle? And then what can we do with food cravings? Instead of just thinking like resist, resist what can we do if somebody is impacted by food cravings? I was also interested in like, who doesn't get food cravings? Because I don't typically get food cravings. So that is not me saying everybody needs to be like me since I'm not plagued by them. No one should have a hard time with them. So I was kind of interested in like, why do some people struggle so much more than other people? And then I also found some interesting stuff on how they can change over time. So when we talk about food cravings, we're going to define craving as an intense desire to consume a specific food. So this is definitely different than what we know of as hunger. And it's very related to the idea of food liking, but it's not exactly the same thing. So I might like [00:02:00] bratwurst, but it doesn't mean that I crave bratwurst. The difference between liking and craving, liking would be, I really, really enjoy that. When I'm eating it, I get a lot of pleasure from it. I really look forward to eating it, but I don't get a specific intense desire, like I need bratwurst right now. So although I picked a kind of random food there humans typically crave very energy dense foods. Chocolate and chocolate containing foods are far and away the most frequently reported cravings, followed by other high calorie items like Such as potato chips or fried food. In Australia, it happens to be fast food is the number one craved thing. I also found in Japan, rice is the most frequently reported craved food. And I've never heard anyone in North America be like, I had a rice craving. So food cravings can be absolutely no problem. Sometimes we crave something, we have it and there's no issue. Or we crave something and it goes away. There's no [00:03:00] problem here. So food cravings are an absolutely normal thing and they don't have to cause any problem. However, they can be associated with binge eating, body weight gain and obesity. And since those come along with health problems, they may be a relevant topic for our people. So what context does craving come up with your clients?
I just wanted to weigh in briefly hear from each of you. What do you usually hear your clients say about cravings? How do they come up in your conversations?
Maryclaire: It's interesting. I mean, I don't know that I've heard so many people lately saying specifically craving, at least not context per se, but let's say they have a lot of work to do and they're feeling a bit of anxiety about completing it and they'll say, I'm maybe they'll use the word craving. I want something, you know, salty and crunchy just to help me get through my work. So is that a craving? You know, I don't know, but it's kind of like a specific situation where there's an idea that somehow food is going to help perhaps soothe the discomfort. That would be an example.
Georgie: How about you, [00:04:00] Christina?
Christina: I would say the vast majority of time I hear the word craving is with menstruating women or like just a cycle. Like I was really craving X, Y, Z, or sometimes they'll use the word hunger, but I think it's usually the word craving, like right before, right around when that's about to happen. I can see an uptick for salty, crunchy, or like ice cream chocolate. I've heard specifically those things.
Georgie: Yeah, I think chocolate ice cream. Those are pretty common ones. And I also know what you mean, Mary Claire, that we hear people say like, I just had the urge to go get something from the kitchen and it wasn't really targeted. It was like a sudden desire, but it wasn't food specific.
Maryclaire: There might've been several things that might've met the need, perhaps. Yeah.
Georgie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So among foods, which are not very high in calories. If we're looking at sort of like low calorie foods, fruit is the top thing that people crave, which I found interesting. Another fact that I scribbled down because I thought it was worth sharing. The desire for high calorie foods or the [00:05:00] craving potential for high calorie foods increases over the day. So few people are like really craving that chocolate first thing in the morning, but then it grows and grows and grows through the afternoon and evening, but cravings for fruit among people that have them start off strong in the morning and wane as the day goes on. So there's sort of like an inverse time effect there which I thought was pretty cool. Okay, so. We know also, probably you've heard some people say, I'm a salt person. I'm not really a dessert person or like, I really crave chips every now and then really crave candy. So I was interested in seeing what I could find out if there's just I don't know anything that correlates with sweet and salty food cravings or preferences, but any difference between people in those categories and do they change over time? There's a lot of claims that when people eat a very high ultra processed food diet, so food that's undergone a lot of processing and may have a lot of added ingredients and flavor enhancers, that it may lead [00:06:00] to weakening our perception for things like sweetness, salt, or fat. And so one of the interesting papers that I found in my hunt sort of wanted to test the hypothesis that if we took 10 people and we gave them a very high ultra processed food diet, and we took another 10 people and we gave them an unprocessed food diet. So the first group might be eating Pop Tarts. The second group is eating, like, Apples and oatmeal. What would happen after two weeks to their tastes? Like how much they could perceive sweetness and salt and fat in foods. And I was like, Oh, that's pretty interesting. I've heard some clients say things like, I've heard if you, Cut the amount of like sugar in your diet that eventually foods that are less sweet, taste sweet enough to you.
In particular, I remember one person who, and I don't recommend this, but this is just someone I know who decided to not eat sugar for an entire year. And he did eventually add it back in. And Before he added it back in, he said, when I wasn't eating [00:07:00] sugar, I'd eat something like bread and be like, wow, this is really, really sweet. And whether or not it had added sugar, he was starting to notice sweet flavors in all sorts of foods. So in this study, they put each group of 10 people on these diets for two weeks, and then they switched them over and had each group try the opposite diet as well. And so they actually did not find significant differences in people's tastes between doing the ultra processed diet versus the unprocessed diet, which doesn't mean that the amount of food processing in the foods that we eat most frequently, it doesn't mean that it has no effect, but at least it doesn't seem to have an effect in a two week period. I think there may be a longer term effect. There was some interesting data sort of related that when people eat a lower fat diet, they become more adept at sensing the fat in foods. So their taste detection, when they give them I don't actually know what they use to, to sample that, like with sugar, they give them [00:08:00] distilled water, like absolutely nothing in it versus like varying concentrations of sugar solution to drink. And they have people taste them and what is the lowest concentration of which they can detect that it's different than the distilled water. And I don't know how they do that with the fat, if they dissolve the fat in something else, but I'll have to look that up. But when people habituated to a low fat diet, they were much more sensitive to be able to taste, you know, small concentrations of fat in things. And also when people eat a higher fat diet, that the opposite effect happened. People can't taste the fat as, they're not as sensitive to it. And so I didn't see data about that with salt and sugar intake, but it was definitely some interesting things to look at. I do know that when I've had clients that came to me on a very, very, very low fat diet, often one of the problems that they were having was feeling hungry very soon after eating.
Is that something you guys have ever seen with your clients?
Not so much.
Christina: I don't think I've had many clients on a very low fat diet.
Maryclaire: Me either.
Christina: It's usually [00:09:00] a skill that we would have to work on together.
Georgie: Yeah, luckily that's, that's not something we see too often anymore. But sometimes I'd
Maryclaire: Now we have keto, it's going the other direction.
Georgie: Yeah. Right. Sometimes I'd have people who had a restrictive eating history orthorexic or anorexia, and they would be really staunch fat avoiders. And then when we added back in just like five grams of fat per meal, they were like, Whoa, I'm so much more satisfied. So it seems like people have a really increased sensitivity, at least to the satiety effects of having some extra fat. So I would agree currently we probably see more people who have higher fat diets. Thanks to the keto popularity of the last 10 years
Maryclaire: People are more carb phobic, I guess, than anything else these days.
Georgie: Yeah. Yeah. So another interesting topic is that the way that we taste a food is linked to our perception of the gender of the brand. And so, I had to read that twice. I was like, the What? Of the what? So here, [00:10:00] we have a photo of Yoplait greek 100 calorie whips, and it's like pink and purple and script, like this is a feminine branding, or at least like the packaging on this product compared to a identical food item. If you put that in a more masculinely labeled container, people will rate the feminine one as tasting sweeter, even if it's an identical food product, they also, if they're looking at like a very masculine food package and a feminine one, they will rate the feminine one as being healthier. So sweetness and health are both associated with more feminine packaging. This is absolutely not something I went to find. It was just one of the things that I came across and went, that's really cool. And after seeing the Yoplait container, I was like, what other food products can I find, which have like fairly feminine or masculine branding? Yeah, very interesting. So so just a fun little foray into some food labeling, but the female oriented products by both men [00:11:00] and women are perceived as sweeter. And healthier, regardless of what's on the package.
Maryclaire: Wow. Like I wouldn't think like pink and frilly is healthy. I think green, right. Something green or nature, like somehow looking natural would be healthy.
Georgie: Yeah. I find like green and blue are really popular on food labels when it comes to like a reduced fat or a light version. Or like the healthy choice is usually like blue or green
stripes. But, yeah.
Maryclaire: They're missing something here.
Georgie: Yeah, yeah. Okay. So if we talk about liking, there's actually been a fair amount of repeated research on people who like sweeter things than others.
So, if we give them the same food product with varying levels of sugar, the people who are like, Oh, that one is the best tasting one, where it's higher on the scale. It tends to have a negative impact on dietary diversity. So, people who really gravitate towards those sweeter food [00:12:00] items, they actually say no to a lot of food items possibly things that are more bitter or more savory and that can have a negative impact on overall nutrient intake as well as the variety of fibers that we take in, which feed our gut flora.
So if you are somebody who likes sweet food very, very much, that doesn't have to dictate your diet. Try and see if you can maintain a wide variety of food intake. You know, a popular challenge has been try to eat 30 different plants every week. Lots of different fruits and vegetables and grains and beans. Salt liking on the other hand, is linked to an increase in dietary diversity. I would propose possibly because you can make any food salty without a salt shaker. And it's probably just more socially acceptable to sprinkle salt on all of your food than sugar. But that's another interesting one. There is some really interesting research. This is on the older side, Berner et al, 2012, intermittent access to sweet and high fat foods. [00:13:00] drives binges. This is animal data. It was done in rats. It's since been repeated by a lot of reputable scientists. And when you take rats and you give them free access to food, that is very high in sugar and fat, sometimes they use like chopped up French fries, chopped up Oreo cookies, or they just mix the two together into one high fat, high sugar rat junk food. When you initially give that to rats, They eat twice as much food as their normal chow, twice as much calories. So, if a normal rat eats, you know, X calories when it's just eating standard rat chow, you start giving it this hyperpalatable stuff and it'll eat two times the amount of calories for a while. And then it gradually goes back to eating about its normal calorie needs. In about seven days, the calorie intake is the same as the normal chow. However, if you want, for some reason, to make this rat into something that resembles someone with strong food cravings or food [00:14:00] binges, Take away the hyperpalatable food every so often because when the rats only have intermittent access They continue to eat huge amounts of it every time it's available for long periods of time.
They don't habituate it to it so the reason that I think this is interesting for our Clients and the human beings that we work with is that you don't want to place yourself in that situation where you have only intermittent access. Now, what I think that how that plays out in real life isn't, Oh, you should surround yourself with the foods that you crave.
I don't think that's helpful, but reminding yourself that these foods are always available. They're always at the store. They're always something that you have. The ability to buy can go a long way toward decreasing overconsumption and having strong food cravings for particular foods. So I encourage people not to like actually surround themselves with these high calorie foods if they're trying to combat their cravings, but to remind themselves, [00:15:00] like, it's not going anywhere, this isn't the last chance. It's not now or never with foods. You have a thoughtful look on your face. Mary Claire, what are you thinking?
Maryclaire: fascinating to me. I almost wonder sometimes I was, you guys probably know my Hershey bar thought experiment, right? I used to think, Oh, I want to eat whatever I want to eat whenever I want to eat it. Anyway, I've thought about stacking up Hershey bars on my counter and having some for breakfast, some for lunch, some for dinner, because that's what I truly wanted. And just contemplating that, is like disgusting, right? I just think like I can't, I'll be ill. And that often is enough to say, I don't really want to eat chocolate all the time. I can't help but wonder if the rats eating Oreos and what was the other thing they ate? French fries, together. If you eat that every day for a whole bunch of meals, you're just kind of disgusted and sick. And then you might just acclimate to be like, I just can't eat any more of this and just eat as much as I have to, right? Like you just get sickening, I would think. I don't know. But, I do wonder about this. Yeah, it's, it's this [00:16:00] part of craving, right? It's, it's, you want to eat something specific, but I think what the issue is wanting to continue to eat it, right?
It's not like I'm craving Oreos and I eat one Oreo. It's you're craving Oreos and you want to eat the bag. And
Georgie: yeah.
Maryclaire: why this is kind of interesting. Yeah.
Georgie: They've generated animal models for binge eating. Nicole Levina at Princeton has done a lot of this research. And in order to make an animal binge, you have to give it that special food and take it away. And give it again and take it away. It's the only way that the animal will consume massive amounts of it.
Maryclaire: Yeah
Georgie: but it just goes to tell you like, wow, don't we people do that sometimes to ourselves when we say, you know, I'm only going to drink on Fridays or like, it's my cheat day,
Maryclaire: right.
Georgie: we don't want to set that up for ourselves, you know, this now you can have it now you can't. But as you said, Mary Claire, we have the ability to imagine things and experience them in our minds.
So we can imagine having continued unlimited access to Hershey bars. We don't have to actually [00:17:00] surround ourselves by Hershey bars.
Maryclaire: Yeah, I used to have like a deprivation index in my brain too, like in terms of wanting to include Foods on an occasional basis. They're not off limits and just saying do I feel like having something and kind of judging that for myself But there are long periods of time where it just isn't appealing And that's interesting too.
Like, I do consider myself someone who really enjoys chocolate and baked goods and things like that, but I can get into a pattern where it's not even interesting. I can go to the store and be like, nah, I don't want anything. It's just, I'm just fascinated by how this kind of comes and goes and how, if you tell yourself you're allowed to have it, It's maybe less appealing. it's fascinating.
Georgie: Yeah. I agree. So when it comes to liking, this is not particularly craving, but liking, if you're, if you think of yourself and you go, am I a high or low fat liker? Am I a high or low sugar liker or sweet? Am I a high or low salt liker? There's actually some interesting patterns. So people who like fat [00:18:00] strongly have fat liking has been positively linked to BMI.
So people who like fat more tend to have higher body mass indices. Most of the time it's been studied, that is very consistent. However, likings for salt and sweet don't necessarily link to higher or lower body weights. The authors do make a really good point, though, that liking something does not change your body weight. What you eat changes your body weight. So there's a difference there, because people who like fat very strongly do tend to consume more meat, cheese, and fat. Fatty hyphen sweet products, so what the researchers are calling that is like ice cream, something that's both high in fat and sweet. And they also drink more sugar sweetened beverages. Fat liking is also associated with a lower intake of fruit, oils, and whole grain products. So, just because you're like, I really, really like Foods that are high in fat, really love a chip, a french [00:19:00] fry. There's nothing wrong with that. It's not going to mean anything negative for your health. Assuming that you remember that the whole context of what you feed yourself is most important. They did find one specific element of sweet liking specifically people who say that they like natural sweetness, was associated with a lower risk of gaining weight. And again, Liking doesn't change your body weight, what you eat changes your body weight. And they did find that those people who reported a higher liking for natural sweetness eat more fruits, whole grains, they have less meat, sugar sweetened beverages. So, generally leads to a, healthier pattern if you like natural sweetness in foods. Okay, so then we can look at the question, Do food cravings have anything to do with a nutrient deficiency? I've definitely heard this one specifically people use to justify eating chocolate. They're like, I think I need the magnesium or something. And I've also heard it for red meat. Like, I just want a really greasy burger.
I must need some iron. And my brain's like, There's foods that are richer [00:20:00] in iron. Okay. Nevermind. Let them go. Let them do what they're going to do. That's not my client. Don't, don't coach them, Georgie. Let them enjoy their food. So when participants are given a monotonous, but nutritionally sufficient diet. So in this research that I'm going to cite, they were basically giving them shakes that met 100 percent of their energy, vitamin and mineral needs just to see like, do people miss the act of eating? if you just give them a full liquid diet. And yes, their food cravings went up dramatically. So that is one piece of evidence that doesn't seem to be consistent with nutrient deficiency being behind cravings.
At least it's not a singular explanation, because people getting plenty of nutrition still have food cravings. The types of foods that women crave during pregnancy are not any different than the foods that are reportedly craved by the rest of the population and the rest of the women's lives. So while it is really common anecdotally for people to [00:21:00] report high levels of cravings during pregnancy, there isn't really any data that shows pickles and ice cream or, I don't know, chocolate covered bacon as being, a pregnancy related thing for some reason. I just, this is just Georgie's opinion interspersed with this research. Georgie's opinion is that sometimes During pregnancy, women are a little more liberal with honoring what they're feeling and thinking and maybe craving and desiring. So perhaps during pregnancy is when women act on their cravings more than suppress them.
But that's just a, just a thought.
Maryclaire: Yeah, certainly in pregnancy, there's lots of changes going on. I mean, there are various stages to where you might feel differently. And I can imagine some stages might feel almost like a PMS where you might not feel your best and maybe turning to food to kind of soothe that. I can also remember when you get hungry, when you're pregnant, it comes on really hard and strong and out of nowhere, and that was kind of interesting too, like, I'm hungry, pull the car over right now! I[00:22:00]
need to get some food this moment! there's a lot going on, I don't even know how to tease all that out.
Georgie: Yeah. Yeah.
Maryclaire: And there's parts of the pregnancy where you're so nauseous you can't eat anything, so it's really,
Georgie: Yeah.
Maryclaire: there's a lot happening.
Georgie: And I could also imagine like, if you, if you were are feeling so terrible physically, and you eat a particular food and it makes you feel better, then the next time that you're feeling a little queasy, yeah, I'd be beelining for that food. Like anything that's going to make me feel better. So we can kind of come up with associations with foods that might make us desire them.
Christina: Mm.
Georgie: When it comes to chocolate cravings, In the pre menstrual or peri menstrual part of a woman's cycle anecdotally, they're consistent, but there isn't really any research on why, which doesn't mean they're not real.
It just means we don't have a great explanation for why. However, one paper that I read said that they did not believe that hormonal mechanisms were likely because chocolate cravings don't seem to go away after menopause. [00:23:00] So women before menopause who crave chocolate on a certain average number of days per month will have the same number of cravings after menopause, they may just be spaced differently throughout the month. So, moving on one of the theories that can help us understand cravings, and I think this leads us into What can we do about cravings? Cause all the fun facts are fun, but like, where does the rubber hit the road here? What can we do? I brought up in my book, give yourself more, the elaborated intrusion theory of desire. I feel that this is the best theory that explains cravings. It talks about how a cue from the environment, say an ad for ice cream or pizza, can unconsciously trigger images or thoughts. So if I see the ice cream being like curled by the perfect scoop on television, my brain is like, yeah, ice cream. But then that thought. Doesn't necessarily form a craving unless I [00:24:00] elaborate on it, which tends to be a conscious process, like, yeah, ice cream, they make the best ice cream at that place on 9th street, the last time I was there, they had that chocolate honeycomb. It was so good. Now I'm feeding the spark that will turn into the flame of a craving. So more intense and vivid imagery leads to more intense and strong cravings. And the more intense and strong your cravings are, the higher the likelihood that you're going to seek out and eat that product. So, the way we can use this knowledge to help us is, if something in the environment cues you, and again, it may be subconscious, such as a smell that's so faint it doesn't even register in your conscious mind. If you feel like you have the idea of going to get a food, You can decide not to do that conscious elaboration phase if it's outside of the way that you want to feed yourself. I often talk with clients about emotion regulation and how it's a really wonderful thing about [00:25:00] being human that we can have a gap between our stimulus and our response. So somebody may say something incredibly rude to me. And my first instinct is to respond back or something like F you very much. Yeah. But I'm going to consider the context. Is this someone I work for? Is this somebody in my extended family? Is this somebody I really don't care about who's a stranger on the street? So I can suppress that reaction if it serves me to do so. And it's the same with the desire to eat particular foods or to reach out and touch an attractive person who may not be our mate, we can have these impulses pop into our minds and say, Hang on! That's not what we want to do here, there's bad consequences associated with that. So we can sort of treat our food cravings the same way. One of the things that increases food cravings is restrained eating. Also known as going on a diet, or simply trying to keep your weight down. Many, many studies have been done on this, and selectively depriving people of specific foods really jacks up their cravings. [00:26:00] So, they, tend to do a lot of these on college students because there's like captive audiences around research departments, and when they took students and deprived them of chocolate, predictably, they have a really big increase in their desire to eat chocolate or chocolate containing foods. When people cut out carbs from their diet, they tend to have an increase in the desire for carbs. When people cut out protein in their diet, they tend to have an increased desire for foods that contain a lot of protein. And the same has been shown for rice and for bread. So it does seem to be food specific, not just macronutrient specific. So if you tell someone, don't eat rice, you can eat all the pasta and corn and bread and quinoa. You can have plenty of carbohydrates, just don't eat rice. They crave more rice. One study found that there was not an effect of seven days, When people were told that they could not have chocolate, and for comparison, they told another group that they could not have vanilla flavored anything. They actually found that their cravings didn't really go up or down.
So it was a bit of an outlier [00:27:00] there. I just want to mention it because When we're trying to learn things from research, we pay attention to what most of the studies say, but we want to remember that every now and then there might be a particular effect that isn't repeated in 100 percent of the findings. So the researchers that found no effect from telling people they couldn't eat chocolate for seven days, they scratched their heads and were like, huh, maybe this has something to do with some people don't like chocolate as much as others. And if you tell them not to eat chocolate for seven days, they're like, yeah, whatever.
I didn't eat that much of it anyway. So they did a follow up experiment and they doubled the length of time to 14 days. And they said they separated people into high chocolate cravers and people who are not particularly fond of chocolate. They didn't report a lot of chocolate cravings, but they didn't dislike it. And they sure found that the people who were the highest chocolate cravers were the ones that had much more cravings when they were put on a chocolate free diet. Diet or period of time. So it does sort of make sense there. I don't particularly love watermelon. So if somebody told me Georgie [00:28:00] seven days No watermelon, I'd be like, okay, it wouldn't be a big deal So when it comes to yourself the foods that you're most fond of are really not good candidates If there were a good candidate to cutting them out of your life, it's just a way to make yourself feel deprived So the conclusion I thought was worth writing down, they said perceived deprivation plays a greater role in generating food craving. So if you really want something and you can't have it, that's sort of the recipe for food craving. Okay a side note that I've just noticed, again, this is Georgie's anecdote interspersed with all of these research papers, is that when something is absolutely not available, people don't waste that much time craving it. If you take people and you put them in like a military boot camp or something, and they have a very routine, repetitive diet, and they can't get grandma's apple turnovers, they don't waste a lot of their time during those six weeks thinking about it, because it's just not feasible. They can't go get it.
They can't get it But when something is [00:29:00] available, and now it's the dilemma of do I or don't I, those are when people seem to have much more food cravings. Does that fit with your guys? Yes. Personal experience or what you've heard your client say?
Maryclaire: I don't know too many clients that have been in, you know, places where they can't get access, but there does seem to be something though, and people have frequent access to, and that should I, shouldn't I type situation. Let's say you decide to have chocolate every day because you don't want to be restricting. However, The converse may happen where you get accustomed to it and then you end up looking for it when maybe before you might not have. So it's almost like two halves of the same issue. In one case, you're not allowing yourself. In the other case, you're creating a habit of having it all the time and you're just always looking for it. It's a little different, but that's something I've noticed.
Georgie: Yeah. Yeah. It absolutely
Maryclaire: be available. Yeah, but not, not off limits, but maybe not all the time. Like a frequency seems to also maybe kicks up cravings. Hmm.
Christina: I would say like, I don't know if it's the same thing, but I have a few clients who travel [00:30:00] frequently and when they go to like, Florence, they're like, I got to have my gelato from Florence. And you know, they might not have the same quality of gelato. So it's like, they're not there every year or they go once a year.
So when they go, like they have to have it or similarly, like, Oh, I'm in Paris. I need a chocolate croissant, like those kinds of things. But I don't know if that's the same thing as what you're talking about. They're not restricted from it. They could get it. It just wouldn't be the one that they want, like grandma's apple
Georgie: turnovers. Actually, what you guys are saying is right on the next topic that I had here, which is that we can condition ourselves to have a response to being in Florence. This is what I do or to being that time of the month. This is what I pick up at the pharmacy when I'm grabbing a box of products. So this may be one of the reasons why we see a difference when people successfully do a weight loss diet, meaning that they reduce their calorie intake for long enough to create a deficit and lose a substantial amount of body weight. This has been said a lot. Their, [00:31:00] cravings for high calorie foods go down, not up. And so there may be a time differential here, whereas you were unlearning conditioned responses and breaking habits. So that nighttime routine of sitting on the couch and eating chips, you've like anti rehearsed it. You've had enough nights go by where you haven't rehearsed it that that craving is like far, far, far, far down. So it may be if we put these papers together, what we can suspect, but not prove, is that Telling yourself or trying to decrease something may increase your cravings for it temporarily, but in the long run, if you do something less frequently, you crave it less. So and this sort of begs the question of why do some people lose weight and have low cravings while other people who tend to report higher cravings Don't successfully lose weight?
Like, is this a case where it's only those special people that don't have much cravings that are able to lose weight on a [00:32:00] weight loss diet? Is it something about them personally that just makes them lucky? Dieters that, you know, get some effect. It turns out when people embark on a weight loss or some sort of healthier eating pattern that they want to ascribe to, some of them have much more cravings than others. And so we've already seen that if somebody's approach includes no carbs, they're more likely to crave carbs, at least in the initial period. If somebody's includes no chocolate, they're more likely to crave chocolate, at least in the initial period. But there also appears to be something to whether they use rigid or flexible control strategies. So for people who aren't familiar with these terms, rigid dietary control Is characterized by having an all or nothing mindset around food. You may think of forbidden foods. Having an inflexible set of rules. Like, I'll never do this, I'll never do this, I'll always do this. Those are very black and white, rigid restraints on your food. Rigid control also typically [00:33:00] has little to no variation in food choices. Unfortunately, this is linked to overeating and binge eating when a rule is broken. So if I say, I'm never, ever, ever going to eat X, and then I take a bite of X, I'm more likely to overeat or binge eat in that occasion because I feel like I've violated some rule and I'll start again tomorrow or start again Monday. A better approach is to think about flexible control. This allows for more choice and more adjustment in day to day food intake. Also, if you're going to If you try and work flexible control, it means there's no off limit foods. You acknowledge everything is available, nothing's forbidden, and we're just going to work with the portion sizes and frequency of foods. So it's not black or white. That flexible control is more associated with the effectiveness of that particular weight loss strategy, which is one of the reasons why all the people that we try to help lose weight, we take a very [00:34:00] flexible control approach to helping them. Flexible control decreases food cravings. Rigid control increases food cravings. And that may be why some people have greater success losing weight with flexible methods. So in statistics terms, they report the difference in success rates between rigid and flexible diets is fully mediated such a statistical term by food cravings. There's some researchers that say food cravings. And the impact of rigid or flexible control is one of the reasons why the rigid diets tend to fail, and the flexible diets tend to succeed. So the next piece of research I was drawn to was more about what do we do? Let's say I tried to be flexible, I tried to not deprive myself, and I'm craving so hard. What can we do? Some Interesting papers compared cognitive restructuring to defusion, and I'm going to explain what both of those are since you may not know what those terms mean.
Cognitive restructuring is changing our thoughts. So, instead of Thinking, wow, [00:35:00] I'm really craving chocolate, people might think, no, I just have a desire to eat chocolate. So it's really just sort of changing the language, changing our thoughts. Instead of thinking, I must have crackers, they're thinking, I would like crackers, but I don't require them to survive. Those are the sort of things that we would call cognitive restructuring. The other technique that they trained a different group of people to do, to see how they fared, was diffusion. And this means basically separating from your craving. So you think, yes, I have a craving, but I'm going to take a step back from it. I'm not going to let it overpower me. I just notice I'm having it. And it's a cooler, hands off approach to the craving. So defusion turned out to be the more effective of the two strategies. They both were better than receiving no training at all on what to do with cravings, so they both were improvements. But the people who learn to say, yes, I'm craving something and I just need to separate from that, it doesn't [00:36:00] have to drive my actions, actually fared the best. There was a second paper that sort of confirmed this and found similar results that acceptance based methods worked better than control based methods. So if you're trying to think, what am I going to do with my food cravings? Don't think about controlling them. Think about just accepting them and knowing that They don't have to boss you around or drive your behavior. So, take home messages. One, our clients most likely crave chocolate, other sweets, and fast foods. So, when we're talking about cravings, those are likely the foods that are on the table, literally. People are more likely to struggle with craving unhealthy foods later in the day. And craving patterns can shift. They peak, they have valleys, there may be Periods of time, as Marie Claire said, where you want more chocolate and periods of time where you're like, I'm just not that into it right now. Of the different craving patterns, people who crave high fat foods and like high fat foods the most may be at an increased risk for health problems. [00:37:00] In particular, if they consume a lot of high fat meats, cheeses, fried foods, sugar sweetened beverages. in scientific terms, we try and steer people toward about 30 or 35 percent of calories from fat, that's sort of where we would say is a moderate fat diet. So if somebody's like, I don't know, am I one of those high fat eaters? I would say you know, somewhere around the 60 to 80 grams per day is what dieticians think. For people listening, you probably don't know in grams how much fat you eat.
So if you want to connect with a nutrition coach, we can. Have a chat with you, find out what you're eating and let you know if the fat content in your diet is higher than ideal or lower than ideal or right about where it should be. Another take home message, intermittent access drives craving and binge behavior.
So we want to avoid doing the sort of give it to ourselves, take it away, give it to ourselves, take it away game. We also don't want to outlaw certain foods, especially if they're ones that you really enjoy. Cause that might just make you desire them more. Remember the elaborated [00:38:00] intrusion theory of desire.
The more vividly and intensely you're imagining something, the more intense your craving will be. So things that might work if you're having a craving would be putting your mind on something else, telling yourself it doesn't matter. Just acknowledge the cravings there. Don't get into a tangle with it. How about some do's, things that will help? Remember that craving does not always have to result in eating. That's a really important thing. You can remind yourself the more that you ride out a craving or decrease a pattern of always doing the same thing in a particular context, the more you can unrehearse a habit loop.
And then it gets easier and easier to do. So in the future. If you stick to a healthier diet for a significant period of time, you're likely to find that your cravings for unhealthy foods decrease, and then it gets easier and easier to continue to eat healthy for the rest of your life. Flexible control decreases food cravings. So try and stay flexible in the goals that you set for yourself with [00:39:00] eating as well as exercising and other things in life. I don't think there's a circumstance where rigid control is a better idea. Reject black or white thinking, and don't forbid foods from yourself. Lastly, when you get a craving, don't force it. The best thing you can do is accept it and step back from it. I would say instead of treating it like a breaking news headline, treat that craving like it's a spam text that just popped up on your phone. Like, Oh, that again, just an idea. Swipe, go back to what you were doing. So I hope this gave you guys some things to think about when it comes to food cravings, food likings, and preferences. If you have any questions or you want to chat more about this, head over to confidenteaters. com. Fire us a chat in the message. It's the three of us that man that message box. So it's not going to go to some robots or stranger. It's, it's going to be us and we'd love to hear from you.