How to Get Rid of Unhealthy Food Cravings, Lose Weight and BE HAPPY

To get rid of unhealthy food cravings, lose weight and BE HAPPY is not an easy task but somehow, I DID IT! And I am proud of me, so if you are questioning yourself how to stop eating junk food and lose weight, take 21 minutes of your time and read carefully.

Dependence on processed foods is undoubtedly one of the main factors responsible for the alarming rise in obesity and other related diseases. Even many people who “know better” have difficulty keeping their hands out of some chips.

Sweet and salty cravings are usually considered responsible for the assault on unhealthy products, but how can we stop them?

The truth is that processed foods include precisely chosen flavors and other sensory factors intended to be incredibly addictive. This is in harsh contrast to whole foods whose taste and consistency were created by nature and therefore work with your body to satisfy hunger and nutritional cravings.

As explained in a previous article, junk food manufacturers have taken flavor science to incredible levels, and the artificial ingredients used to achieve that “bliss point” can create a real confusion for our body’s metabolism.

For example, the sweetness from non-caloric artificial sweeteners tends to confuse your metabolic response to real sugar, thereby exacerbating obesity and diabetes. The body simply isn’t fooled by sweet taste without calories, so it keeps sending signals to your brain to keep eating because the point of satisfaction has not yet been reached!

Fortunately, there are solutions to get rid of unhealthy food cravings. One of the most effective known strategies is the intermittent fasting along with some dietary changes to help regulate metabolism.

Another useful technique, which addresses the emotional aspect of food cravings, is the Emotional Healing Technique.

What triggers the processed foods and snacks addiction? Most Addictive Food Ingredients

Before speaking of solutions, let’s have a look at what are the causes of these cravings. Perhaps you know that sugar creates a higher dependency than cocaine, but is not the only culprit for food addictions.

Another reason comes from the way food manufacturers combine different flavors and textures to create an addictive product. This CHEMISTRY is used not just for chips, cookies, and soft drinks, but for all processed foods, from spices to pasta sauce.

Food industry researcher Steven Witherly has studied taste and addictive aromas for the last two decades. In his report: “Why Humans Like Junk Food,” he shows a wide range of specific foods that evoke our senses and taste buds. For example, the reason people love corn chips is that of the following combination of factors:

• Corn chips contain lots of “taste-active solutes,” such as salt, sugar, MSG, and others
• Spices trigger a strong salivation
• The chips melt quickly in your mouth, intensifying “dynamic contrast and evoked quality”—two parameters that contribute to the sensation of pleasure
• Corn chips have a caloric density
• Cheese proteins create pleasurable and addictive casomorphines when digested

Other Unhealthy Food Trade Secrets

Two main factors make the experience of eating food enjoyable. The first factor involves taste, and how the food feels in your mouth. The second factor is the macronutrient content of the food.

As previously described by investigative reporter Michael Moss, author of the book ‘’Salt Sugar Fat’’, food manufacturers make significant efforts to find the perfect combination of salt, sugar, fat, and additional flavorings to excite the nerve receptor in the brain, thereby assuring that we continue to consume.

Besides this, the food industry also uses other strategies to increase addiction to their products. These include:

• Dynamic contrast. It happens when a blend of contrasting sensations produces pleasurable sensations, such as biting through a crunchy chocolate shell filled with a soft, creamy center.
• Salivary response that triggers taste and feelings of pleasure. Examples of foods and/or ingredients that produce salivation include butter, chocolate, ice cream, and mayonnaise.
• Fast food meltdown and low caloric density. Foods that immediately melt in your mouth trick your brain into thinking that you eat less than you have eaten, despite the fact you’re eating lots of calories. A prime example of a snack food that has achieved this is Cheetos.
• Sensory-specific response. Repetitive aromas, or over-flavouring, tend to diminish sensations of pleasure. In short, you “get bored” of eating the same flavour. Your palate can even tire of a taste after a short few minutes. Food producers are by-passing this, by creating even more complex flavors and sensory combinations.
• Calorie density. This is achieved by combining the ideal ratio of calories to prevent satiety signals to go off.

The greatest successes, whether drinks or foods, owe their “Oh, I crave this!” to formulas that stimulate your taste buds just enough, without overwhelming them, thereby overriding your brain’s inclination to say “enough.”

So How Can We Get Out Of The Trap Set Up by Junk Food Manufacturers?

First of all, like any other program to eliminate dependence, the less you eat, the less you’ll want to eat as your body ‘’escape’’ from the clutches of these addictions. Increasing quality nutrition is an essential factor.

If your body is receiving all the essential nutrients it needs, it will send the proper signals to your brain to STOP eating when your body’s nutritional demands have been met.

Intermittent Fasting – One Of The Best Ways To Eliminate Sugar Cravings

One of the most practical ways I know of to eliminate sugar cravings and get rid of unwanted weight is intermittent fasting, as this will help reset your body to burning fat instead of sugar as its prime energy source.

When sugar is not the primary energy source and sugar reserves in the body decreases, the body will not ask for sugar.

There are many variations of intermittent fasting. If you are part of that 85% of the population with insulin resistance, my advice is to fast every day by simply scheduling meals in a shorter interval of 6-8 hours.

I believe that this method is more straightforward than 24-hour fasting, twice a week.

Once you’ve regained your ideal body weight, and do not suffer from diabetes, high blood pressure and you do not have problems with cholesterol levels, you can be less rigid with your fasting.

However, perhaps the best thing is to resume to scheduled eating from time to time, to make sure you don’t revert to old habits.

To know how you can fast daily while still eating every day, you need to understand some basic things about your metabolism. Most people need between 8-12 hours for their body to burn the sugar stored in your body as glycogen found especially in your liver and your muscles.

Most people never deplete their glycogen stores because they eat three or more meals throughout the day and are in the state of permanent “eating” mode. This teaches your body to burn sugar as the prime source of energy and completely inhibits the ability to utilize fat as an energy source.

Therefore, in order to work, the length of your fasting must be at least eight hours. For example, you can restrict your meals between 11 am and 7 pm. Basically, you’re just skipping breakfast and have lunch as the first meal of the day.

These means daily fasting of 16 hours—double the minimum necessary to deplete your glycogen stores and switch into a fat burning mode.

Remember that although most people manage to switch over to burning fat after few weeks of intermittent fasting, you may need few months to educate your body to use the fat burning enzymes that allow the body to burn fat as the primary energy source. So, do not give up!

Again, once you’ve become adapted to fat burning and you have regained normal weight, without high blood pressure, diabetes, or high cholesterol, you only need to schedule your meals occasionally.

Once you maintain your ideal body weight, you can return to eating three meals a day if you wish so.

Whole and Unprocessed Foods Instead of Processed Foods

Replacing processed foods with meals composed of whole ingredients is ideal and essential for optimal nutrition. This will automatically eliminate most refined sugars from the diet, processed fructose, preservatives, dyes, and many addictive ingredients, allowing your body to rely less on sugar and more on fat as a primary energy source, provided you eat enough healthy fats. As a result, you will not crave the sugar to keep you going.

Please keep in mind that nutrition becomes more important when you fast and reduce calories, so it’s good to review your food choices before attempting any fasting.

The main elements of a healthy diet in order to help you get rid of unhealthy food cravings are:

• Avoid refined sugar, processed fructose, cereals and processed foods
• A diet rich in whole foods, ideally organic, replacing the processed carbs
• As much good quality healthful fat as you want (saturated and monounsaturated). Many would have health benefits if they took as much as 50-85% of their daily calories from healthy fats.
• Large quantities of good quality locally grown vegetables, organic and preferably greens grown in your garden
• Small or moderate amounts of quality protein (spirulina, pollen, seeds and nuts)

Although it may seem like a lot, consider that, regarding quantity, the most significant portion of your plate should be occupied by vegetables, since they contain so few calories. Fats, on the other hand, are very high in calories.

For example, just one tablespoon of coconut oil has about 130 calories—all of which are healthy fats. Healthy fat sources include coconut and coconut oil, avocados, nuts. Also eat a high-quality source of omega3 fats, such as flax or hemp seeds.

The emotional aspect of your food cravings

If you are inclined to eat sweets or cereals amid emotional problems, I highly recommend consulting a specialist in emotional healing. This simple and effective technique can help you quickly regain your control over emotional food cravings.

Many people do not understand that the emotional wellbeing is essential for their physical health. In fact, regarding dieting for weight loss, unresolved emotional issues – whether small or severe traumas from the past – is the main reason for not being able to maintain the weight following a diet regime.

If your feelings and thoughts about you are negative while you’re trying to improve your body physically, you probably will not succeed.

Adjusting to a ‘’positive’’ brain frequency is necessary to obtain optimal physical health. Unfortunately, many people deny this notion, not because it doesn’t make sense, but because the medical industry made them believe that they’ll be spending many thousands of dollars for traditional psychological counseling.

While conventional psychological approaches may sometimes work, emotional healing proved to be a better solution, especially as it is much cheaper.

“Real food” is the answer

The combined efforts made by food manufacturers to make their products as addictive as possible has the unfortunate side effect of stimulating your metabolism to burn carbohydrates as its primary energy source. As long as you’re functioning on consuming carbs, you will continue to want to eat these kinds of foods.

The solution is to reduce the amount of processed food you eat and replace them with good quality whole foods. Remember, you should replace carbohydrates with healthy fats to successfully achieve this metabolic change.

Intermittent fasting is one of the most effective ways to get rid of junk food cravings, especially for sugar and cereals.

No matter how skilfully combined these flavors in the food are, your cravings for them will dramatically decrease, even disappear altogether, once your body starts burning fat instead of sugar.

My advice is that you should spend 90% of the entire food budget on whole foods, and only 10% or less on processed foods. Unfortunately, most people do the opposite, which explains in part why so many are struggling with junk food cravings.

Do not forget that virtually all processed foods are designed to develop a specific addiction, and it’s challenging to find products that do not contain significant amounts of addictive sugar or carbs.

If you’re on a limited budget, switching to a whole food diet may seem difficult. Here are some strategies that might help you:

• Become resourceful: This is where your grandmother, if still alive, can help you with tips because older generations know much more about how to use up every little bit of food. What I mean is you have to go back to the basics of cooking –using food for as many meals as possible.
• Plan your meals: If you fail to plan, by default you are planning to fail. Ideally, preparing your meals will involve walking through the markets which should have lower prices on seasonal products, and you can plan your meal according to this, or you can use the same principle for price reductions in supermarkets. Generally, you can anticipate your meals for an entire week in advance; you can purchase all the necessary ingredients and prepare something in advance, so dinner will be easy to make if you don’t have enough time in the evening.
• Avoid wasting food: According to recent studies, people usually throw away the food equivalent of a big meal every day. If you follow these simple steps, you’ll reduce food waste.

Are you still here? Did you just read my entire article? Wow! You are terrific, and I hope I helped you a little bit. Now do your part and keep up with everything you read here. Maybe even share my ideas with a few friends.

Oh! And don’t forget to comment down below if you have any questions.

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