Dealing With Snack Cravings
You know how it is. Your day started off great. You did your morning exercise, ate a healthy breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but the sun is setting, you’re lounging around the house, and from the depths of your stomach, the snack monster stirs. And he craves cookies, cake, salty food, greasy food—the crappier the better! What do you do? How do you quell the beast?
Dr. Fuhrman acknowledges how difficult cravings can be, it’s easy to succumb, but with the right mindset and preparations you can subdue the beast. In Eat to Live Dr Fuhrman offers up some advice to help you show the monster who’s boss:
Dr. Fuhrman acknowledges how difficult cravings can be, it’s easy to succumb, but with the right mindset and preparations you can subdue the beast. In Eat to Live Dr Fuhrman offers up some advice to help you show the monster who’s boss:
Implement strategies to prevent temptation and exposure to sedentary activities or social eating. The most important stimulus-control technique is structuring your environment. This means removing temptation from your home and stocking your cupboards and refrigerator with the proper foods. Eat only at the kitchen table, not while watching television. When you finish dinner, clean up and leave the kitchen area, then brush and floss your teeth, so you are not tempted to return and snack again. Try not to make food the center of your life. Keep active with interests that keep you from thinking about eating.Now if Dr. Fuhrman’s advice doesn’t strike your fancy. Get a load of these from The Wichita Eagle, they seem destined for success—insert tongue in cheek. I don’t know about the lottery ticket idea, but brushing your teeth sure seems like a good move. Kathy Manweiler reports:
Just breathe: The munchies like to attack when I'm stressed out. Taking slow, deep breaths for five minutes works as a good stall tactic and helps calm me down.
This time-out gives me a chance to try to talk some sense back into my taste buds.
Give extra calories the brush-off: To reduce the risk of late-night snacking, I brush and floss my teeth and use Listerine as soon as I've hit my calorie limit for the day. It's rarely worth it to me to mess up my squeaky-clean teeth with a snack. Besides, no food on Earth tastes good with the aftertaste of Listerine.
Find a payoff: Every now and then, I buy myself a Powerball ticket when I win a battle against the munchies.
Who knows, maybe someday I'll become an instant millionaire just by passing up a plate of nachos.
My odds of hitting that jackpot are one in a gazillion, but even if I never win the lottery, I know that it still pays off to put up a fight against cravings.
