Things that help...

So... for most of us... weight loss is no fun. I used to be especially bad at giving into whims and cravings... any single one that came up. I sometimes feel like my cravings and food wants are a 3 year old child, whining, crying and pestering, with no cognitive ability to understand the "why not" towards desire fulfillment. And its' as though that child has been whining for 2 hours straight. It is not so easy to distract, it's fairly undistractable. Withholding just feeds the strength of the craving, and makes it harder to resist.

Mostly my tactic is to find some low calorie substitute. The old.. "no you cannot have a cookie but you may have an orange" technique. Sometimes it works. Barely.

Cerebrally I know of a few techinque to use, and hopefully, as I use them more often, the cravings will be re trained. My my mother did a few courseloads worth of nutrition and health studying while my father was combating cancer. I'm likely to mention her often in my postings. She happened across a company called (at the time) Enrich, who dealt in high quality, sold only through dealers nutritional supplements. They invite anyone to become a rep, and my parents did so, going often to nutrition health talks and presenting their story at small, local public seminars.

This company empowered their clients with more nutritional information, and reading lists of reputable books for those who cared to do further research. This is actually quite important. When you want to learn about a new topic, often we turn the Wikipedia and the web, and some to a book store or library. Sometimes you'll turn to a friend or relative for information. But really, how do you, or they, really know how accurate and reliable any information is? At some point I'll put a reading list on here for anyone interested. The one book I will mention here, rather, tomb, is a reference book called "Prescriptions for Natural Health". There are variations such as "Prescriptions for natural remedies". Brand new, they are close to $50+. I found mine in a used book store for $15, so it can pay to look around first.

From all this research, one golden nugget of info learn was that whenever we have a craving, it is our body trying to get certain nutrients that it is missing to do it's job. But it's a stupid system. It doesn't necessarily know what foods contains the missing nutrients.. it just says "Eat!! Eat something.. and maybe I'll get what I need!!" The trick is, once you have some idea of what you might be deficient in, or what it is your body needs, (Asian holistic medicine can easily help with this.. sometimes all you have to do is evaluate the color of your tongue for clues) you can then feed yourself what is wanted from your system. Overtime, I believe that your body starts recognizing which foods give it what it needs, and you start craving those items.

I've also heard that once you wean yourself off of sugars, and fill your diet with wholesome foods, you will completely loose all cravings for chocolate, sugar, and the like. A hard concept to understand, I know!

So... to deal with cravings, you first need to understand what your body needs. The introduction on vitamins and minerals in the book I mentioned above is an excellent source, as it debunks common mis-representations in our currently accepted food pyramid and in magazines and health info everywhere. For instance, your body really does need 6 - 8 cups, as in measure cups of water, every day to properly do it's duty. And that is pure water, as in, tea, coffee and juice don't count. If you're not a water person... get into the habit of just chugging a glass back every few hours, and get it over with. I will try to find the source for this online soon.

Till then... till next time.