After a lifetime of experimenting with weight loss, ultimately I found it wasn't about what I wasn't eating, weight loss was never about simply not eating. I eat. I eat all sorts of things. Things that are high in fat, low in fat, high carb and low carb. I eat all hours of the day. I follow a simple CICO routine.
But the hardest challenge for me has just been sticking to it and not feeling demoralized by it
I've always like to tell people, "how do you quit heroin when you have to shoot a little heroin every day". And what I've realized lately is that not all food is heroin, there's just heroin in some of it. I've been through a few cycles now, during my weight loss journey, where I would treat myself with one thing and end up eating a lot of other similar things, saying yes to more and more things. Never dropping my goals or giving up, but struggling to lose weight because I'm stuck on those food cravings. So I just kinda maintain and try to make them stop so I can keep pushing on. I've managed to beat them a few times, enough that I'm seeing a pattern emerge
I'm not strong enough to test myself to see specifically which foods cause the most cravings (I would lose my damn mind) but there are a few super obvious ones and almost all of them are processed food based.
- Any and all stereotypical 'sweet treats': candy, baked goods, soda. Sugar. Goddamn. Five minutes of happiness five weeks of nagging food cravings.
- Salty processed foods: salt and vinegar potato chips--we like to joke that they're addictive......but they kinda are? They often add sugar to salty food to balance it out or add an extra note
- regular processed food - shelf salad dressings, bag salad kits, freezer aisle dinners, cans of soup. I eat a few of these and I don't just want to eat more of those specific items, I want sweet treats, and salty treats. They add sugar or whatever, my body goes "did someone say sugar, yeah man let's get some more of that" and then I have to fight myself to turn down buying more treats
- Granola bars and 'healthy' cereal - the sneaky! Switched to these after I got rid of treats in my diet, I considered it a good compromise for a treat. That the nuts are good for me and if I have a craving, a granola bar is a good way to feed it without giving up and eating the bad stuff. Nope! Just as bad. Makes cravings worse. Even the good stuff still has grams and grams of sugar. Anything over 6 grams gives me cravings (and realistically under 6 does too, I just aim for as low as possible and 6 is for some unknown insane reason the lowest I can find) and perpetuates me wanting more of the bad stuff.
- Takeout, especially fast food. I'm a chef and no stranger to restaurant food, I recognize that even in higher end restaurants the food we eat uses processed foods that we process further. I call it 'half scratch'. Soup bases, canned or jarred sauces like ketchup or chili sauce, these are just ingredients for us. We save hours of time by not making these from scratch (labor is expensive!!) so everywhere except the finest dining restaurants ($$$-$$$$) use these. And many supposedly fine fine dining restaurants will even use them, especially the old school ones. Private clubs etc, if the menu looks like it came out of the 70s, y'all, abandon ship.
Cravings are subversive. I don't recognize I'm having food cravings, I only tell myself 'it's okay to be kind to yourself', 'it's fine to live your life', 'you are capable of eating this small thing and then not falling off the bandwagon' 'CICO' 'you're still within your calorie budget'
And all of those things are true! But the thing about weight loss is that it's mentally exhausting. Food cravings are exhausting. It's like a crying toddler in my brain and the only thing that shuts him up is the one thing most detrimental to my personal health. It's like negotiating with terrorists. It wears me down.
Weight loss doesn't have to be exhausting! It's just navigating a minefield around things that will make it more exhausting. It just starts with saying no one time. I don't have the strength to cut out everything that causes cravings at once (withdrawal is REAL!) so I just say no when I can, my strength builds as time goes on. My food cravings are in my head, throwing a tantrum on my brain's kitchen floor, begging for sugar. Eat a peach. Eat strawberries or an apple instead. Fill my stomach with sauerkraut if I have to. Then it's easier to eat something I made for breakfast instead of the cereal I want. Then it's easier to turn down the candy at the check out aisle later. Then it's easier to drink water instead of soda. Then its easier to turn down the cake at the staff party. Then I can walk past the pastry aisle with my eyes forward. Then I can wake up in the morning without feeling sad that I have to eat the healthy option. Then I eat my lunch at work without thinking twice about what it is or what I really want to eat. Then I eat my homemade dinner and feel good about it and don't want more after. Then I don't even think about how I don't give a fuck about the pastry aisle.
It takes about a month for me to one by one pull it all out of my diet. This month is a really great month! I got my husband on board with helping me eat only food that we make, as much from scratch as possible. The lack of food cravings is astonishing this month compared to last month. This is like the fourth time in a row I've managed to cut cravings down but this time I am cutting out more takeout and restaurant food than I ever have before (this is hard for a chef!) and it's like I can hear the silence. It is deafening. And it's temporary, because avoiding sugar permanently is a pipe dream. But at the very least, I know how to manage the cravings.
If you struggle with food cravings, it's about the baby steps away from the things that propogate the cycle.
It's not about holding yourself to a seemingly impossible standard of discipline, it's just about realizing the full gravity of your choices. Sometimes I do say yes to the treat, but I do it knowing it's an iceberg of cravings. It's not just the treat, it's awakening the toddler and putting him back to bed later.
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