How to Overcome Cravings?

Are you eating enough? I no longer crave because I eat more than when I first started on MFP. Opening your diary would be helpful, otherwise all anyone can do is speculate.

It can take time to ween yourself off of junk food and sugar so I can relate. It will get better though!

I agree with everyone. I also wanted to add, if you are having artificial sweeteners they can cause HUGE cravings so you may need to cut them out, also. Personally, I take the supplement L-Glutamine twice daily for cravings. When I take it, I lose better and I don't have killer cravings like I do without it. Good luck! :flowerforyou:

pray

I went off sugar for a month with my family. The first week was extremely difficult, and the last couple of days were hard as well. But the cravings did fade. Just try not to replace say, a sugar addiction for a sodium one (I have to watch my salt intake now that I don't eat as much sugar). However, after that month, my over all craving for sugar has gone down quite a bit.

Treat yourself once a week. But watch the numbers on your diary, if you're seeing red everyday, I'd suggest cutting portion sizes (which is really hard) or making flat out substitutes for certain foods. I agree with the post to have a healthy snack always prepared to eat for when you have a bad craving.

Also, drink a full glass of water before you eat any junk food, it might curb your craving as well.

drink a lot of water it will help

i chug water and chew sugarless gum. and it gets easier. mind over matter

Substitute what your craving for something healthy. If your craving something like ice cream, make yourself a fresh/frozen fruit smoothly. If you want chocolate, instead of eating a whole Hersey's bar, eat one Kiss or one piece of dark chocolate. DO NOT keep anything you crave in the house! Write everything down in a food journal including what you drink (do not cheat your food journal: it only hurts yourself) and add your calories at the end of the day. Review what you ate, what you did good and what you could have gone without. It's SOOOOO hard to not give in to eating unhealthly in the beginning. Esp. if your family and friends don't eat healthy. Go a week and review your journal again, add up all calories for the items you think you could have gone without. All those little bites here and there that didn't seem that bad really add up fast. Example: you drink one Pepsi a day, every day at 150 cals: if you cut just pop out you would lose about 1/3 a pound week for that alone. Do your research..... go online and look up how many calories are in the things you eat. www.caloriecount.about.com is a fantastic site!!!! You don't have to join, you can just type in your food and it will give you the nutritional facts and grade for the food. It helped me a lot to determine how bad I was actually eatting! Sometimes it's a simply switch that makes the a huge difference like choosing sea salt over table salt or fresh/frozen green beans over canned/salted green beans. All those little choices make the biggest difference. It's has a lot to do with your will power and consiously making the choose to eat it or not. Everytime I crave something I think about how many calories I would consume. Sometimes I can compromise by adding extra time on to my exercise at the end of the day or I can choose to cut out my bread from another meal and other times it's just simply not worth eatting it! There's so many other options you can choose and not feel guitly about than sitting down to a bowl of ice cream or candy bar. Look up how many minutes it takes to burn off what you just ate or are about to eat.... it's crazy! One candy bar can takes a good 45 mins walk to burn off. SO not worth it!!!!