I make it a daily habit to view a variety of websites with diet and fitness news not only for my blog, but also to potentially add to my weight loss knowledge. Today I stumbled across an article on MSN fitness that talked about ways to beat the nighttime food cravings. They had some good suggestions, but the article seemed to miss the mark from any number of directions. If you're craving, you're doing something wrong with your diet. The trick is to figure out what you're doing wrong in order to prevent the cravings in the first place or else you'll never truly stop them.
Since I've been on the Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle diet, I haven't experienced cravings for anything, and I'm happy to report I've lost 15 pounds on the program, and a total of 27 pounds overall. I wish I had discovered this plan the day I started the diet - I'd probably be much further along towards my goal. It is truly the most common sense diet I've ever been on, and I know I can stick to it and adapt it to local foods when I enlist in the Peace Corps later this year.
So what makes this diet different that you don't experience cravings? The eating plan is based on ratios (similar to the Zone Diet) but you have complete control to customize the food - you are no longer subject to eating a food you can't stand, which was always my problem as a picky eater. I hate grapefruit, but it always the breakfast of choice in every diet in the 1980's and 1990's! I choked, gagged, and gave up because the diet had no possibilities for substitutions. That's not a problem for me on the BFFM plan, and I'm thankful!
Based upon the ratios of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, you start off with a basic formula and then customize it according to the results you are receiving on a weekly basis. You might find your weight loss is stalled and then discover your diet is carbohydrate heavy; you change the percentages slightly to discover where your optimal fat burning is, which may sound complicated or hard, but it's not at all. In the appendix you will find all the calculations done for you in easy to read charts that tell you how to eat for your body.
The second secret of this program is eating multiple mini meals during the day instead of three big ones like most people do because that's the way we were taught to eat. You have to understand the percentages and then learn to create a menu based on your nutritional ratios. If you learn what to eat and when to eat it, your body can't help but burn fat as the preferred fuel. On this plan, your body will not fall into the insulin drops that trigger the cravings in the first place because you're always eating and providing the exact fuel it requires.
There's no real trick to this other than to control your insulin drops while preventing it from spiking and kicking your appetite into overdrive. If you're eating right and still experiencing the cravings, add ¼ teaspoon of cinnamon to a drink or your food and it will stabilize your blood sugar for hours. Some claim vinegar will do the same thing, but one certainly tastes better than the other! You might have the willpower of a monk, but if you're not feeing your body the preferred fuel, you will never shake off the cravings.
Another reason people experience cravings is because their daily caloric intake is too low to support their basic metabolic rate. I wrote about a woman who was eating less than 1,000 calories a day and she said she was always starving. I told her to up her calories to at least 1,600 and she nearly dropped in horror.
I saw her today by chance and gave her the formula to determine how many calories she should be eating for her weight and she was shocked to see she was still very low. “I eat that many calories in three days!” she cried. Then I asked her what happened when she added a few extra calories to her diet. She admitted she lost weight and couldn't understand why. I reminded her that 600 calories a day was starvation, and no woman should eat less than 1,200 calories a day. She was completely shocked and it made her think because what I said worked. I gave her my phone number and told her to call me if she needed help and wanted to talk more about her diet problems.
Cravings are the body's way of telling you it's missing some kind of nutrient or it's generally crying out for additional calories. If you didn't have cravings, chances are you wouldn't eat! It's a build in safeguard to keep you from falling into starvation mode, which stops your body from losing weight. The goal of every dieter should be to eat enough calories to meet your basic metabolic rate, perform daily exercise, and with the combination of the two, the weight will safely come off your frame. Unfortunately, most people would rather starve than do a sit up, but the problem is cutting calories too low will turn on the starvation response. The longer the body's defense stays on, the harder it becomes to shut it off and retrain the body to safely lose weight.
Learn to listen to what your cravings are whispering and examine your diet for simple flaws. The best way to stop the cravings is…never to get them in the first place. Forget a strong defense - that means you're already in trouble; take your diet on the offense for a change!
If you don't like trying to find all the segments of this series, you can locate the links to them here and they will return you the exact spot on the appropriate site.
quazen.com articles by this writer can be found here
socyberty.com articles can be located here
relijournal.com articles are here
picable.com photographic images are here
