Satisfy your crazy cravings without (totally) ditching your diet

Play the waiting game

To prevent those crazy cravings from taking over your life, set aside a specific time to enjoy a moderate amount of whatever you crave for, be it ice cream, chocolate, cookies or junk food. Say, if you have a sudden urge to eat a basketful of mojo’s potatoes at three in the morning, tell yourself that you’ll have it at 12 noon. That way, if you know ahead of time that you will satisfy your craving eventually, it would be easier to ignore your desire because you know you have something wonderful to look forward to. When it’s time to satifsy that particular craving hours later, it will not be as powerful as when it first hits you.

This too shall pass

Remember the old saying, “This too shall pass” ? Well, this should be your mantra. Some urges, like ranting about your lousy boss, are best left unfulfilled. Ditto on food cravings. Studies have shown that most cravings go away within 20 minutes. So if you can grit your teeth until that time will elapse, give yourself a pat on the back. If you feel the irrisistible need to chew on something, try keeping your mouth busy with a piece of sugar-free gum. A study reported that people who popped in a piece of sugar-free gum for 15 minutes every hour after lunch ate an average of 36 fewer calories when they snacked later in the same afternoon.

The 5 o’clock habit

If your colleague starts to look like a bag of potato chips in the late afternoon, don’t despair. After a long day, you’re feeling tired and can’t muster enough willpower to overcome your cravings. Your body may be suffering from low blood sugar. If you’re really feeling the hunger pangs, have a healthy, filling snack like an apple or whole wheat crackers to raise your blood sugar back to normal levels. After that, pop in a mint to perk your tastebuds. Raudenbush’s research team found that inhaling a peppermint scent helps give you the pizzazz you need to sidestep afternoon munchies. Bryan Raudenbush, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia. said that subjects who sniffed mint periodically throughout the day ate 3,000 fewer calories over the course of the week. That’s more than a whole day’s calorie intake.

Ditch the diet mentality

Isn’t it weird that when you decide to give up a certain food, like ice cream, it’s the only thing you can think about? Turns out, it isn’t that strange. When researchers forbid women to eat chocolate for a week, they found that the restrained eaters experienced more intense, chronic chocolate cravings and consumed approximately double the amount of the forbidden food when it was finally allowed. “When you cut something out of your diet, you’re more likely to overeat it when you do encounter it,” says Janet Polivy, Ph.D., the study’s lead author. So the more you deny yourself a certain food, the more you’ll obsess over it until the dam breaks and you go on a rampage.

Instead of swearing that you will never touch a cookie again, try scaling down your portions. If you’ve been eating the whole cookie bag, cut it in half. Then start to work your way down. Substitute the artificial sweets you normally eat with something natural like berries, pears and other fruits to appease your sweet tooth.

Attraction distraction

When it seems as if french fries is all you can think about for days, it turns out that your brain allots a specific amount of space to focus on such matters. The upside is that this focus can be shifted and your mind can be distracted from such cravings. The study showed that women who watched a flickering pattern on a computer screen while thinking about their favorite foods felt a diminished desire to indulge. Any new image can bump the urge to eat out of your head, researchers say, but the distraction should be visual in order to be effective. Staring at the mouth-watering quiche at the cafe? Whip out your cellphone and flip through pictures of you in a bikini 48 years ago. Hallucinating about Hershey’s chocolates? Google Earth to your favorite vacation destinations. All these images should take your mind away from all the junk in your trunk.

Accept defeat — sometimes

But even with the best resolve, you have to accept that you can fall off the wagon on some days. But the good news is that the study from Tufts University in Boston found that women who sometimes gave in to their crazy cravings still lost weight. The operative word here is SOMETIMES, not MOST OF THE TIME. The trick is to make those “sometimes” so satisfying that it won’t leave you wanting more. So if you’re craving chocolates, eat the best chocolate you can find. Go ahead, give in to your crazy cravings... sometimes.