Why You Need to Stop Food Craving ?
Food and sugar craving is often a symptom of serious health conditions like hormonal imbalance, vitamin D deficiency or others. Food craving makes you over eat and eventually gain fat. The main purpose of this article is to stop food craving by fixing the cause instead of treating the symptom.
Factors and Habits Makes You Crave Food and Sugar:
The most common bad habits that ruin our hormones and make us crave sugar and food all the time are:
Stress & Lack of sun exposure.
Multiple Meals
Multiple meals and snacks are for bodybuilders and fulltime athletes who requires consistent nutrition to fulfill their needs. Regular people do not require that much of complexity. Eat only when you are really hungry.
Even if you have healthy meals or consume only proteins and vegetables, too much meals will make you gain fat because it creates a routine of eating as a habit not when needed. Check this blog post (Which Diet is the Healthiest) for more details on multiple meals, fasting, insulin resistance and athletic performance. Try to have as much time as you can without eating. 2 or Maximum 3 meals a day are enough. The more time you keep your stomach empty is better. You can hack this by delaying breakfast as much as you can and have it afternoon.
Any diet with more than 3 meals a day will eventually put you in a craving mode and triggers the hunger feeling almost every hour. On the other hand, more meals means more effort and preparation needed which is not practical for a long term daily routine. The main purpose of this guide is to live normal life without calculating calories or preparing bunch of meals every day.
The concept behind reducing the number of meals is resetting your hormones which ultimately reduce hunger and craving frequency. If you find it extremely hard to have only 2 meals a day, you can use some tricks like drinking non-sugary beverages in the morning like coffee or cucumber water so you can delay the first meal as much as possible. However, you can add a third meal in between but i has to be zero sugar & very little carbs. Best option for this can be a protein shake or small amount (like 50 grams) of nuts.
Multiple meals can be applicable for full time athletes who completely dedicates their time to achieve the best physical performance which is obviously not the case for lot of people. Instead of preparing 5 or more meals a day, you can prepare 2 big meals that includes 30% Protein, 30% Fat, 30% Carbs. Any small change to this percentages is not important. Make sure to time your second meal close to your bed time so you can sleep properly. Also it is important for the second meal to be satiable. The first meal can be consumed whenever you want but it is better to delay it as much as you can so you don not feel hungry between the two.
Sugar
Why to cut off sugar from my diet?
You might wonder why there are plenty of controversial advices on diet in general. Before jumping to conclusion, the same advice or recommendation can be completely inapplicable if your main goal is to build muscle or strength. In other words, diet recommendations should addressed individually as per each individuals goal. However, the main discussion in this article is how to lose fat fast.
The type of sugar we are talking about here is the refined sugar (the common table sugar whether it is white or brown sugar). Refined sugar is also commonly used in processed food. This type of sugar not only contributes zero benefits to your health, but also creates an addiction that makes you crave more of it especially if you do not exercise.
On the other hand, sugar content in natural food like dates, honey, fruits and others has also the same negative effect but it is way more better because it does not peak your hormones like the refined sugar do as its absorption is slower. Since honey, whole fruit and other natural sources comes with other ingredients like fibers, minerals, vitamins and antioxidants, it is clearly obvious why you should target your sugar needs only from it.
Cutting out sugar completely (including fruits and other natural sources) would be the fastest way to stop food cravings within days and reset your hormones. But if it is hard to do for some reason, it is recommended to consume little of fruit or honey once a day especially after your last meal if that makes you sleep better.
High Quality Nutrition
Once you start feeling the control over your appetite and cravings, keep the same life style and start replacing traditional carbohydrates like rice and wheat bread, with bulgur, whole grain bread (like barley bread) and satiable veggies like broccoli.
Consider adding coffee and cinnamon to your diet as these two components helps a lot in improving metabolism. Remember we do need our metabolism to be optimal because it represents our ability to utilize nutrients and get the most efficiency of the food we eat without having to eat more.
Does Sleep Affects Weight Loss?
High quality sleep is also crucial for better hormones, specifically cortisol. Sleeping late (after 11:00 pm) or sleeping less than 6 hours results in less focus, more hunger and eventually uncontrollable appetite. Avoid caffeine after noon as it is the most common reason for sleeping late. Although less sleep is one of the common reasons of craving foods and obesity, sleeping too much (more than 8-9 hours a day) on the other hand may also disturb your hormones because of the fact that some hormones are release early in the morning, and you need to be awake at this time to maintain the hormonal balance.
Sedentary Lifestyle
Sedentary lifestyle includes long time of sitting, watching movies, playing video games and other habits that makes you want to eat more not because you are hungry but because it brings you more joy. An active life style on the other hand is very beneficial to fat loss because it keeps you busy and distract you from thinking of food all the time. Furthermore, It enables you to burn more calories.
Adding some physical activity to your routine is easy to achieve through some regular daily movements like walking and climbing stairs instead of using the lift. Some body weight exercises can be done like air squats and push ups.
This type of activity is better to be distributed over the whole day especially for beginners. If you find it hard to perform full workout, try to do small amount of reps (5 -10 reps) every hour. This technique is very easy to apply if you are very busy or extremely over weight.
Hydration
Drink more water! Dehydration is one of the factors that initiate fake hunger and eventually makes you think you need to eat while you actually need more water. This mostly happens in the evening when you had very little of water through out the day and instead of drinking water before you have your dinner, you end up eating more food just to end the hunger.
Stress & Lack of Sun Exposure
Without getting to the scientific details, The important relationship between hormonal imbalance and fat gain is best explained through environmental factors like lack of sun exposure, and stress.
Lack of sun exposure reduces your vitamin D levels which negatively affect your hormones like Serotonin causing bad mood, depression, hunger and others. Stress causes your cortisol to go up which it self increases appetite. As a result, the long term of such conditions eventually leads to fat gain.
The previous step might be the hardest step because it targets the real reasons of getting fat instead of covering the symptoms like other methods does. You might not see any fat loss results during this phase but what you will notice is a huge improvement in appetite control, energy, focus, and overall performance. These results can be noticed in 2 weeks.
Other tricks to stop food craving
Fast
A great way to keep your GH levels high is to fast. Fasting 2 days a week will fight back the negative effect of unhealthy meals and reset your hormones so you can keep your hormonal balance and still burn fat.
Stay busy
For most of us, craving food is just a habit, and we often have it once we get bored. It is important to change our mindset toward eating in general. Feeling the hunger in between meals is often a result of having much of free time.
Limit unhealthy options when not necessary
The whole purpose of the above fat loss approach is to reach a level that enables you to enjoy eating in family or friends occasions, while you travel, and other situations without worrying about gaining fat. In the same time, you need to make sure that your overall life style is closer to the healthy options in order to maintain what you achieved.