Cravings seem to arise out of the blue and we are overcome with the need to eat the craved item, often sweet things for women. Well, the key thing to know is that like a screaming child, if you ignore them, they eventually stop, and if you keep ignoring them, they will stop for ever altogether.
So how to ignore cravings.
Well, one way is to identify what is triggering them. It is not hunger. It could be your routine. For example, if you have always had a snack at 3.00pm your cravings will arrive on the dot. If you always eat in the car on the way home, they will be there too. If you walk past a sweet shop and always buy chocolate or crisps with your paper, you will repeat the actions on and on. So these are environmental and habit-based triggers for cravings. Change your route, have no food in the car, stop snacking at 3.00pm. And if the trigger is boredom, develop a portable hobby so that you can distract yourself. And if I might bang on about this again, if you always munch away at chocs and crisps in front of the telly, just turning the telly on turns your belly on.
Changing behaviour in these relatively small ways is quite easy. You don't have to deal with everything all at once. One or two a week is quite enough. Then what?
When cravings come, ignore them. Distract yourself. This could be by going for a walk, phoning a friend, washing the car. Just tapping your finger onto your hand for a few minutes is also quite distracting.
Cravings disappear in only a few minutes. You can handle that!
www.carolinebrowntherapy.com
Showing posts with label environmental cues. Show all posts
Showing posts with label environmental cues. Show all posts
Monday, 8 February 2010
Thursday, 10 December 2009
It's the environment making us fat
There is a new term, which came along in the 1990s. It's the obsogenic environment, which means that our whole environment is geared up to getting us overweight. Just knowing this can help us manage our weight better.
It is hardly surprising that we get fat. We have been designing our environments to expend as little energy as possible. All the shops are gathered together by the car park, so we don't walk to the shops. We don't even get up to turn the channels over on the telly.
And we are given food messages all the time. The TV channels are stuffed with them, not just adverts, but whole programmes. Magazines, even slimming magazines, are stuffed with food messages. And the presentation of food in the shops, as well as the kind of food they sell, gets us thinking about eating.
There are more subtle environmental cues. Food packages have got larger and suggest that larger portions are fine - we didn't ask for it. But we have got used to it. When we go out, it is more often to a restaurant or bar than to play bowls, dance or do a communal activity.
One way to control your eating is to control your own environment. We tend to want to eat when we see food. Research by Brian Wansink has shown that if food is in opaque packets we eat less than if it is in clear packets. And if we have to make an effort to get at the food (even a walk of just a few yards) we eat less. So, here are some good tips to modify your own environment:
It is hardly surprising that we get fat. We have been designing our environments to expend as little energy as possible. All the shops are gathered together by the car park, so we don't walk to the shops. We don't even get up to turn the channels over on the telly.
And we are given food messages all the time. The TV channels are stuffed with them, not just adverts, but whole programmes. Magazines, even slimming magazines, are stuffed with food messages. And the presentation of food in the shops, as well as the kind of food they sell, gets us thinking about eating.
There are more subtle environmental cues. Food packages have got larger and suggest that larger portions are fine - we didn't ask for it. But we have got used to it. When we go out, it is more often to a restaurant or bar than to play bowls, dance or do a communal activity.
One way to control your eating is to control your own environment. We tend to want to eat when we see food. Research by Brian Wansink has shown that if food is in opaque packets we eat less than if it is in clear packets. And if we have to make an effort to get at the food (even a walk of just a few yards) we eat less. So, here are some good tips to modify your own environment:
- Watch less telly - get another pleasurable activity into your daily routine
- Avoid magazines with loads of food ads
- Shop with a list and get out quick
- Don't buy and store in the house foods that you know you can't resist
- Keep biscuits and other stuff in tins or opaque boxes
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
