Use positive methods to stop cravings and break old eating habits to lose weight.
Craving carbs and sweets can become an addiction as strong as alcoholism or drug addiction. Eating junk food is a way of self-medicating when your feelings are too much for you to handle, whether they are positive or negative feelings. You can become addicted to food mentally, physically and emotionally.
Food doesn’t have to be the central focus of life though, and you can break bad eating habits if you work consistently at forming a healthy relationship with food. When you stop using food to settle your emotions and fully explore what you are feeling and needing at that moment, you will be able to stop the cravings.
According to Rena Goldberg, the way to stop cravings is to examine your basic needs (The Craving Cure, McGraw Hill, 2007). Goldberg puts emphasis on identifying emotional eating habits and advises people to take inventory of their need for love, need to feel safe and need to feel powerful. Happiness only comes when these needs are fulfilled. Food is never the answer. Eating carbs and sweets only creates a craving for more of the same.
Ways to Stop Cravings:
- Learn to love yourself. Give up on unrealistic expectation you’ve placed on your body and how it “should” be.
- Acknowledge your successes. Stop beating yourself up for every little mistake. Reward yourself for all the good things you accomplish (though not with food!)
- Adopt a positive attitude. Until you change your thought process, you will always have difficulty treating your body with enough respect to stop cravings and lose weight.
- Create a list of positive affirmations and post them where you can see them. Repeat the affirmations daily.
- Discover your core values and prioritize the things in your life.
- Visualize yourself thin. If you see yourself with a big weight loss, you start to believe it is possible.
- Use hypnosis to send your subconscious positive thoughts. Self-hypnosis is effective, yet easy and inexpensive.
- Let your true emotions come through. See what it’s like to feel and experience them without self-medicating with sweets and carbs.
- Find your motivation. What will it take to make you stick with a weight-loss plan and stop cravings?
- Devise a list of things you can do instead of eating when your emotions are too much for you to handle.
- Use breathing exercises to reduce stress and avoid binge eating.
- Avoid trigger foods as much as possible.
- Learn to accept and love your body.
Once you analyze your craving thoughts, according to Goldberg, you will find freedom from compulsion around food and break the bad eating habits.
