How To Curb Your Sugar Cravings
While many people believe stronger will power is the answer to curbing sugar cravings, the truth is that sugar cravings are caused by a physical process inside your body rather than mental thought. Many people try to lose weight with popular diets, but most fail in large part by giving in to sugar cravings. When your body craves sugar, you can turn to everything from sweets like chocolates to complex carbohydrates like those found in cookies, doughnuts, and even crackers and breads to satisfy cravings.
What’s Going On? To understand why you are craving sugar, you have to look deep inside your body. When you diet, or even when you are under stress or feeling anxious, the combination of low blood sugar and low serotonin levels in your body come into play, making you feel sad and low. These low levels send a message to your brain that essentially causes a sugar craving. Once you cave in to your sugar craving, your body gets that sugar pick-me-up it needs to stabilize blood sugar levels and serotonin levels in your body, and you feel better. Unfortunately, over time your body builds up a resistance to increased levels of insulin, making you need more sugar to feel better.
Long Term Effects. The list of long term effects from a diet high in sugars and complex carbohydrates is lengthy. Health problems associated with your immune system, pancreas, heart, lungs, skin, and more. Diets high in sugar also increase the likelihood for various types of cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular problems, and more. Physically, a diet high in sugar can lead to reduced eyesight function and premature aging.
Making A Change. One of the biggest problems with popular diets is that they offer a short-term solution. Once your diet is over, whether you’ve reached your weight loss and health goals or not, most people inevitably go back to their previous eating and exercise habits, which are the same habits that caused the weight and health issues in the first place. In order to see a long-term weight loss effect and long term health benefits, you need to make changes to your lifestyle.
Perhaps some of your most entrenched life habits are your eating habits, as these have likely been ingrained in your since early childhood. You may not think twice about grabbing a candy bar for an afternoon snack, because this is what you have been doing for years. Making drastic changes to your lifestyle usually only last for a short period of time, and then inevitably prior habits win out. To make lasting changes to your eating routine, you should start slow. Make small adjustments to your diet, such as switching from white bread to whole wheat bread. Once you have adjusted to this, then switch from sugary sodas to unsweetened drinks such as unsweetened tea, black coffee, or water. Then eliminate your sugary afternoon snack with a healthy alternative. When you make small changes to your diet over time, rather than large and drastic changes, you provide yourself with time to adjust naturally. Eventually these small changes to your habits will become habit themselves. Simply start with one aspect of your diet that is high in sugars or complex carbohydrates, and make a non-sugary alternative.
If you find that you have difficulty making even small changes to your diet to curb your sugar cravings, you can talk to your doctor about safe prescription medications that can safely help you.