As common as they are, anxious eating seems the new way that many people feed their body, many times justifying that due to hectic schedule, others trying to kindly reward themselves more than once per week, and several distinct reasons to fall in the trap of marketing and just go with the labeled "healthy" options when in fact many times turns out to be the same than a processed food option just with a less synthetic flavor!
Our perfect bodies, because internally they're perfect, until you start disrupting that order and synchronicity with poor diets or quick choices and fixes, they are designed to work with pretty much every kind of fuel (macronutrients and micronutrients) some of them of course will be a better choice and will in fact allow your internal machinery to work seamlessly and beautifully.
What kind of factors contribute to raise the "craving lifestyle"?
However a general rule for everyone's body is that we need a lot less food than the one we are consuming and of course the aggressive switch that we have been victims of with additives, preservatives, synthetic sugars, and all the range of chemicals to "preserve" food or many times to make us sick has been also a huge factor in why we're constantly being driven to consume certain types of foods.
Internally our bodies have a perfect time to receive, digest and process food that goes in synchrony the daylight and time of the day, those rhythms are known as your circadian clocks which particularly will dictate at what time of the day some type of hormones will be in a higher quantity than others. This factor together with the psychological component that is being turned on due to the excessive marketing campaigns, radio, tv, social media announcements that bombard your senses to choose their "healthy" choice or to be biased to consume certain types of foods is what mainly awakens the craving nature of many people nowadays that are being more intoxicated by food than by many other types of "drugs" although it is not categorized or measured as it should be!
Ironically dieting without follow up, without a proper guidance or with the wrong people just for the sake of loosing weight, fitting in a dress or satisfying an aesthetic outlook leads you to take choices that eventually will just do more damage than good, and that is another factor that has been contributing to increasing the number of people that sadly get disappointed, frustrated or many times become ill due to lousy advice or "good marketing".
Being enrolled with a person or program that disrupts your metabolic synchronicity, that mess up your internal clocks and hormonal balance is one the main causes of ending up craving again toxic food choices or consuming products which are just eventually the easier, known and comfortable option after ending up disappointed and sad because you think you're just a lost case that will not be able to handle his/her nutrition properly!
Homeostatic hunger is defined as a “biological state of acute energy deprivation or the subjective state presumably reflecting an actual or impending state of energy deprivation”. Others define hunger as the absence of fullness (1).
Although hunger has a physiological basis, it may be influenced by environmental or cognitive factors like availability or habitual meal patterns. Thus, homeostatic hunger does not necessarily lead to food intake (e.g., a person is hungry, however, no food is currently available, or the person is on a diet). Apart from such homeostatic processes, food intake can also be driven by hedonic process. In this context, the concept of food craving has gained prominence. Food craving has been defined as an intense desire or urge to consume specific foods and is sometimes compared with drug cravings in addiction. Although hunger and food craving often co-occur, food cravings can also occur without being hungry; that is, without an energy deficit (e.g., craving a desert after a satiating meal) (1).
Rephrasing and going deeper into the idea stated above hunger doesn't always mean you're literally empty or you need to overload your system (body) with more food, which usually during those craving moments is not a healthy choice of course, we are balanced by various complex mechanism that will activate our hunger "signals", nevertheless many of those "triggers" are just a product of the same compulsive behavior and disruption of your clocks, your poor food choices and excessive eating!
Additionally and as mentioned above as well, there has been since at least the TV commercials, radio spots a persistent draining force to constantly program our minds to believe first that we have to eat pretty much 12 hours of the awaken cycle, as well as of course feeding ourselves with the ultimate food that as seen in the marketing ad give you the life that you need!, the people around you that value!, the satisfaction to have more energy!, and many other slogans that just drive your brain nuts and seed you with a "mantra" to consume, consume and consume ...only to lead you to diseases that then can be handled with the perfect "drug" in the market and both industries (food and pharmaceutical) obtain their perfect end product another client for life!
All chronic diseases are just a byproduct of poor food habits or excessive compulsive eating behaviors linked many times to emotional distress and mental fogginess created by those two industries that have been allied since probably they were born. Of course, maybe there could be an exception, when drugs are designed to help trauma, or alleviate other illnesses such as epidemics or "rare" genetic inherited traits.
Without the purpose of just evidencing both industries and make this article a "gossip", stakeholders, owners and directors of many of these huge enterprises should start reassessing their purpose, their quality standards, and of course aligning their mission, values and vision to a healthier society not just to earn more money and raise the price of their actions.
If we ever start to see that some of those industries are really doing their job, using their research funds and improving the scientific basis of their products based on the welfare of patients then we will finally arrive to what their "true purpose" should be the "healthcare of the patient" not just the happy face and full pockets of the stakeholders!
Going back to the idea of creating the chronic diseases through a massive marketing of food choices and backing it up with a drug prescription, now it is also a reality that this "amazing duo" is responsible of crashing economically and productively many countries, filling their healthcare systems with people that is sick, sometimes disabled due to the chronic illness, and in the best case scenario they're just being surpassed by the amount of cases that they have also causing that many of the physicians in charge are having the same symptoms that the patients excessive amount of stress, poor diets, low energy, compulsive eating, drinking or smoking to ease the overwhelm and to be able to stand the stressful schedules and incredible amount of workloads!
What is the solution, what are some of the strategies to apply to break cravings?
So, the "craving lifestyle" is not a superficial issue, is one of the realities that many people don't want to see because they're also either part of the problem as providers or because they're clients of the craving style.
The only possible solution to end this huge toxic cycle on a social level, is to address the problem by the root, which in my humble point of view, is to educate people to empower them to understand what is happening in their metabolism, to cultivate the awareness of questioning more their choices, to help them end the "addiction" to food to gain "peace", comfort or "happiness" and to generate a set of tools that will enable them to replicate that healing cycle, not as professionals, but as mindful, conscious and aware parents or individuals that know their bodies, that care for their bodies as much as they care to keep their phones updated, their cars tuned, or their gadgets synchronized with the latest and of course best software and hardware.
If we start dedicating more time to know how our bodies work, how to control those compulsive and craving moments with a deeper knowledge of our metabolism, we will surely arrive to a healthier society that can become as well a lot more conscious in their other aspects of life and that finally will regain control to demand a proper food industry that cares for them and stop lying under the label and using technical names to confuse people.
We will be a society that also demands proper treatment for diseases that can't be controlled or alleviated by other means, which will be the lesser, and that eventually will release the overwhelm of physicians allowing them to move their practice to a more holistic approach that really treats patients with a more integral solution, that care more for the individual story and emotional wellbeing instead of just prescribing to comply with "quote" demanded by the industry to justify their position!.
On an individual level and a more scientific standpoint, what can we do to address those craving food lifestyle and start regulating our metabolisms? to become more empowered, less biased and more conscious:
- First, start addressing and listing the type of foods that you're craving more, processed fats or sugars? What is the main "comfort reason" to pick those foods?
- Without going super deep into the ingredients of those food choices, read the label of three of them and look for technical names either of fats or sugars that you're not familiar with and google them so you can see the side effects of them, mostly you'll find a better search result if you look in webmd or if you look for consumer reports or science sources. For example: let's say that in the ingredients you find "hydrogenated vegetable oil", write it exactly as it is in google and in the more reliable search you'll find a small article of Mayo Clinic that clears your knowledge and gives you a general outlook on why not consuming too much of these oils is a healthier choice! You will repeat this procedure for 3 to 5 technical names to increase your awareness and knowledge of them! You can also, if you handle more technical things go in the scholar mode of google and type the name and you'll find research articles of the same component;
- Start being aware that your hunger hormones, which mainly I will just name three for the sake of being practical and direct to address their function, insulin for instance as you've probably heard or read about it is the primary hormone to allow glucose to be phosphorylated and introduced to your energy metabolism allowing your blood levels of it to be reduced, this hormone also interacts with another one close relative, leptin, which is mainly liberated by adipocytes and it is responsible of disrupting, in excess, your satiety centers in the brain as well as inhibiting the use of your energy when you feed, therefore maintaining a big reserve of fatty acids in storage producing you to feel always hungry and gaining weight, and finally ghrelin which is in charge mainly of triggering your hunger, by inhibiting the release of insulin and regulating two main pathways of producing glucose by your body, however when it is dysregulated due to an excessive ingestion of processed foods rich in hydrogenated fats and sugars, it acts also coupled to leptin blocking the satiation centers and allowing you to store more fat as well as leaving your blood glucose levels high;
- Finally, understanding the concept that we were not designed to be hungry all the time, but in fact to we're more designed to be "hybrid" designed, we should allow our bodies to rest from food intake, and the give ample time to use all the resources that the body has, this particular fasting state is not just a trend, is a scientifically supported measure that of course has to be installed and followed up under the proper guidance, to biochemically prove that your most relevant parameters are in a normal or even in a low range, without of course lowering them too drastically or dangerously and allowing all of your profile of hormones to be balanced, lower your craving situation, and giving you a huge mental clarity!
Summarizing, it is not about stop eating until you starve, it is not leading you to be now overwhelmed by the fact that you're not allowed to eat "anything", it is more to guide you, educate you and reprogram your body and brain to empower your metabolism under a scientific holistic approach that will enable you to gain clarity, energy, consciousness and flexibility of what, when and how you feed yourself with!
References.
1. Reichenberger, J., Richard, A., Smyth, J. M., Fischer, D., Pollatos, O., & Blechert, J. (2018). It's craving time: time of day effects on momentary hunger and food craving in daily life. Nutrition, 55, 15-20.
2. Ortega D. “Is Intermittent Fasting for You or Not?”. https://www.davidortegab.com/post/is-intermittent-fasting-for-you-or-not August 27th, 2019.