5 Myths About Food Cravings

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Full Episode Transcript:

5 Myths About Food Cravings

Hi there, lovely career women. Today I’m diving into a topic that’s probably crossed your mind every time that post-lunch desire to have chocolate comes up – and that is food cravings.

But more specifically, there are some myths about food and sugar cravings that need a little reality check, because they’re potentially making things worse for you.

Awareness that these are just myths and not truths, will leave you feeling so much better about your cravings and leave you feeling like you can start getting control.

By the end, you’ll be looking at cravings in a whole new light and feel so much more empowered.

I’ll be unveiling 5 myths about food cravings with you today that I think are extremely common and also potentially the most harmful. Before I dive completely in, I just want to let you know about the Crushing Bad Eating Habits Free Course and Workbook.

In it, I walk you through 3 specific eating habit challenges that are common amongst career women, plus the simple solutions.

The accompanying workbook helps you apply what you learned, so you can confidently start making small changes to break free from those specific eating habits challenges.

As an Eating Habit and Weight Loss Coach for career women, I’m all about making small, doable changes that fit in with your life, to make it as easy and enjoyable as possible.

So get your free course + workbook with the link in the episode description or if you’re listening directly on my website, you’ll see the link there.

Alright, so let’s dive into those 5 myths about food cravings.

Myth #1 is that you need to fight your cravings.

This is simply not true. Fighting your cravings actually makes them worse.

When you fight your cravings, you are causing that feeling of the craving to persist. A craving is just a feeling in your body. Just like an urge or a desire.

You’re causing the feeling to persist when you fight your cravings, because you’re constantly thinking about it to try to fight it.

And when you’re fighting cravings what you’re not doing is allowing them to just pass through and be on their merry way.

In order for a feeling or an emotion to go away, you have to just allow yourself to feel it. If you continuously think about it or resist it, you are not allowing yourself to just feel the feeling and let it pass on through you.

Also, when you fight against that craving, that feeling, it oftentimes intensifies it, making it much more difficult to not eat the thing that you were trying to avoid. This has happened to you too, right?

It’s happened to me many times in the past for sure. If I can recall correctly, it was mostly with homemade peanut butter cookies.

So you actually do not need to fight your cravings, in fact I highly advise against it. Instead, accept that you’re experiencing that feeling in your body, and then just allow yourself to feel it.

As an Eating Habit and Weight Loss Coach for career women, this is one of the things that I help clients with actually feeling their feelings, because this makes handling and managing emotions so much easier in general. It’s a very useful tool.

And sometimes it takes working with me through coaching to practice this tool and really feel like you have mastered it. But sometimes you can just pick it up on your own and just feel that feeling completely on your own. So give it a try.

But at the very least, just know that you do not need to fight your cravings, so that will save you a lot of time and energy just no longer fighting them.

What to do instead, is just identify that you’re feeling a craving, let yourself know that it is just a feeling or emotion in your body and that it is not harmful, and then just pay attention to what that feeling feels like in your body.

Myth #2 goes along with this and that is that you just need more willpower.

Not true. Willpower is just mental energy that you utilize to try to do an action or prevent yourself from doing an action.

So this is very similar to resisting that urge. Because you don’t need to resist an urge and doing so actually makes it worse, you don’t need more willpower.

You actually just need to relax and let it go, let it pass through you. That is a lot less energy then willpower.

Also, this is one of the biggest things I cannot stand when it comes to the diet industry, and even just anything related to eating habits and weight loss.

So many people, programs, etcetera will lead you to believe that you didn’t succeed because of a lack of willpower. They lead you to believe that the problem is you and that you need more willpower. This is completely false.

The problem is that the expectations for people to completely change what they’re eating in a short period of time or completely change what they’re doing as far as physical activity in a short period of time is outrageous.

To expect someone who is already in the habit eating certain foods and amounts to suddenly do a 180 and follow a diet plan or a food plan that is completely different than what they’re eating currently is setting that person up to fail.

That’s because the human brain doesn’t like change, especially drastic change. So the changes have to be very small and have to be tailored to the person to fit into their needs, their desires, and their lifestyle.

Also, changing the thought patterns and debunking false beliefs greatly assists with lasting behavioral and habit change.

And to expect someone to just utilize all this mental energy, willpower, after a tiring day at work, to resist the pizza and opt for the tiny salad instead is just insane to me.

This really gets me going, because they’re not setting you up for success, you put in all of this effort to try to make these changes, but these changes are so drastic, that your chances of success, especially long term success are slim.

And then because of that you end up feeling like a failure. You feel like there’s something wrong with you. You might even not ever try again. And that is so sad, especially if improving your relationship with food, your body, and yourself will change your experience of life.

So you don’t need more willpower. What you need is compassion, changes that are actually doable, and the proper guidance to learn skills that will stick with you for life. That’s my coaching philosophy.

Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent, moving on to myth #3, which is very much related actually to the tangent I just went on and that’s that there’s something wrong with you if you get cravings.

So cravings are just an emotion, feeling in your body, and we as humans are supposed to experience emotions. Emotions help us to either do or not do something. It’s a sensation in your body that actually either springs you into action or holds you back.

Now you might think that the feeling of a craving does not have a positive action associated with it. But desire is an emotion that is very similar and urge is also an emotion that is very similar and these emotions can result in very positive actions.

Every emotion has a purpose and we can look for the positive in that purpose.

So maybe you find that you’re having a craving for sugar every day after you get home from an exhausting day at work.

Perhaps that craving is letting you know that you need to do something to decompress from that exhausting day at work period now, eating is not necessarily the thing, but it the craving for the sugar might be your body’s way of letting you know that you do need something.

It just doesn’t really know how to tell you.

So maybe you need 5 minutes to just sit in silence. Maybe you need to go for a walk. Maybe you need to cuddle with your pet. Maybe you need a hug from a family member. Or maybe you haven’t hydrated all day, and your body just needs some fluids.

The take away with this, is just know that there’s nothing wrong with you if you get cravings. A craving could be a very good indicator that there’s something else that you’re craving in your life and your body just doesn’t really know how to tell you, so it’s coming across as a craving for food or sugar.

All right myth #4 is that you need to get rid of your cravings. When you have this belief, this is when it leads to fighting your cravings and thinking that they’re bad or harmful.

And so when you keep in mind what I just said about cravings being an emotion and that they just may be presenting themselves to let you know that there’s something else you need, you can actually think of a craving as not a bad thing.

It might be helping you to find out what it is you need.

When you think it’s bad and that it needs to go away, that’s when you start to fight or resist the craving. And that’s when it can start to intensify or at least stay around for long enough that you actually react to it and end up eating the food that you were hoping not to eat.

Though instead of thinking that the craving is something bad and needs to go away, just tell yourself that it is a normal human emotion and all emotions are helpful in some way.

The craving can stay in your body for a little bit, and then it can be on its merry way. Remember, you can always feel that craving in your body for a little bit and allow it to pass on through you.

When you allow it to stay for a while like a little friendly visitor, it won’t seem so terrible. When it doesn’t seem so terrible, it starts to become less of a big deal. You will start to notice over time that your frequency of cravings and your intensity of cravings decreases. My clients have definitely noticed this.

Myth #5 is that cravings are out of your control.

As a craving is just a feeling in your body, you can have control of it with your thoughts.

As you just learned, if you tell yourself that you don’t need to get rid of your cravings, that they are harmless, it takes some pressure off and gives you that little bit of relief to allow yourself to just feel the craving and let it pass on through.

Now this is a skill. This does take some practice, like any skill.

Think about it this way, if you have been reacting to cravings a certain way for many years, it’s not just going to change overnight.

You can however be pretty surprised about how quickly this can change.

One of my clients had this intense craving for chocolate chips after work or in the evening. If she didn’t have chocolate chips in her house, she would go out to the store even if it was 9 at night and get them.

Within one month, she was no longer getting any cravings and was no longer eating chocolate after work or in the evening.

I taught her what to do, we implemented a plan, she practiced the skill over the course of a few weeks, and she strongly feels that that habit has been broken.

It’s been months now, and she has not gone back to it, and this is something she felt like she had no control over for a very long time before we started working together.

So that just goes to show that cravings don’t control you and you can manage your cravings and break that habit if you want to.

OK, so I hope that was enlightening for you, I hope you feel so much more empowered and feel better about your cravings. There’s nothing wrong with you. You don’t need to fight them or resist them. You don’t need more willpower. Cravings aren’t bad, and you can 100% get control of your cravings.

If this is something that you need help with, let’s talk. You can set up a time to talk with me by going to my website katemjohnston.com and booking a free consult. There’s a link in the episode description to book the free consult.

This isn’t like a 15 minute call where I try to sell you on my coaching program. This is a full hour focused on you, where much of it is spent with me asking you questions to learn about you, your challenges, your goals.

Then when I have a good idea of what would help you, I share with you how I would get you from where you are now to where you want to be that aligns with your lifestyle and your values.

And then, if you want to learn more about specifics of working together, I give you space to ask about that. Or, if you do not want to learn more about specifics of working together, then you walk away with clarity and belief that your goals really are possible.

You also walk away knowing what would actually solve your challenges and bring you to your goals effectively.

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