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The urge to eat high-carb foods like pizza, bagels, and sweet treats isn’t always a matter of willpower — it could mean your body is trying to tell you something. A lack of essential nutrients, stress, or too little sleep can make you reach for comfort in the form of processed carbs, but indulging too much means trouble for your health. This blog will:
Everyone knows what it’s like to crave carbs, and there are many different reasons why carb cravings occur. Sometimes a nutrient deficiency or a hormonal imbalance can have you dying for foods high in sugar and other carbohydrates. Other times, it might be because your blood sugar or insulin levels are uneven. Or maybe you just have a powerful psychologically-driven sweet tooth.
Whatever the reason carb cravings strike, giving in to them can do more harm than you realize. Learn what those cravings mean – and how to beat them.
How Cravings Work
It’s common to experience cravings when your body needs a specific food or nutrient. For example, if you are craving chocolate, you might actually be craving the micronutrient magnesium. Studies show that a magnesium deficiency can lead to sugar cravings, and chocolate is a rich source of magnesium. If you crave pizza, your body might be signaling that you need more calcium. And both stress and eating too much sugar can deplete your calcium and magnesium stores, worsening your cravings in both cases.
The hormone leptin – or rather, resistance to leptin – also plays a factor. Leptin is the “stop eating” hormone because it’s a sweet-sensing suppressor that contributes to the process that regulates food intake. Since leptin has been shown to target taste receptors on your tongue, it helps reduce cravings for sweets. It might be the lack of leptin or your body’s failure to respond to it causing your carb cravings. When you become leptin resistant, your body can no longer read the messages telling you to stop eating, burn fat, and maintain good sensitivity to sweets. As a result, you’re always hungry, craving sweets, and storing more fat.
Leptin resistance can occur if your diet is high in sugar and grain. The sugar gets metabolized into fat and stored into fat cells, which then release bursts of leptin. Over time, your body is exposed to too much leptin and will become resistant to it.
In several weight loss studies, participants who followed low-carb or low-fat diets experienced decreased cravings for those specific nutrients. Such studies suggest other factors, such as hormones and habits, have a greater influence on your types of cravings than simply lacking that specific food. Your carb cravings might be intense, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you need more. Instead, you can curb them by balancing out your hormones and training your body to crave healthier, more nutritious foods.
Why You’re Craving Carbs
One of the most common reasons you crave specific foods is simply because they bring you comfort. We all have our go-to treat when we’re especially stressed, tired, or upset. In fact, the American Psychological Association reports that 38% of adults admit to overeating or eating unhealthily because they’re stressed.
Processed foods like French fries, cupcakes, donuts, and pizza rank high among people’s must-have comfort treats. Why? Because they’re addicting. The ingredients in processed foods are so far removed from their natural forms that they hijack your body’s reward-seeking loop. Processed carbs, especially sugar, trigger the release of dopamine, endorphins, and serotonin.
When you’re craving carbs, your body might just be seeking those rewards. If you’re chronically stressed or sleep deprived, the resulting hormonal imbalances can make it easier for junk food to take over your cravings. Even worse, that chemically-infused, high-carb junk food won’t actually satisfy you or your craving.
How to Own Your Cravings
Overindulging on carbs — or any food, for that matter — is bad for your health. Reducing your consumption can produce several important benefits. For example, eating less refined sugar helps lower your body’s inflammatory reaction to it, balances out your sugar and insulin levels, and promotes a stronger colony of healthy gut bacteria.
In addition to decreased risks of diabetes, avoiding refined sugar also increases your body’s ability to burn fat. When there isn’t enough glucose in your blood to burn, your body will naturally start turning fat into ketones for energy. Over time, you’ll get used to not indulging on processed carbs, and your cravings will decrease.
Knowing that you aren’t craving carbs because your body is in dire need of them can help make it easier to curb and eliminate those cravings. These six tips can help you succeed:
1. Test for deficiencies.
Tests such as the hTMA (hair tissue mineral analysis) can reveal most mineral imbalances that could indicate various conditions, including nutrient deficiencies. It provides a holistic view of your body’s chemistry, including metal toxicity and the speed of your metabolic rate. Before you set out to lower your carb consumption, test for any deficiencies or conditions that you should take into account.
2. Build up your strength.
Food is fuel, and how you burn it can play a significant role in your cravings. Exercise is imperative to staying healthy, but strength training in particular can help you lower cravings so you can manage insulin and blood sugar more efficiently. Building muscle strength also lowers cortisol levels and can help you reset the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis that governs your body’s stress response and management.
3. Balance blood sugar with proteins.
Reducing carbs and building muscle strength are important, but your body might still need help balancing out your blood sugar. Give it that help by incorporating more protein and healthy fats into your meals. They slow the release of sugar into your bloodstream, which helps prevent rapid spikes and drops in your blood sugar. Otherwise, abnormal blood sugar levels will cause your body to crave more energy from carbs.
4. Carb cycle with complex carbs.
One of the biggest problems with processed carbs is that they are broken down quickly. They provide carbs but little or no other nutritional value. Therefore, they can quickly enter your bloodstream and raise your blood sugar and insulin levels, yet they won’t satisfy your craving or your body’s nutritional needs. Instead, cycle through complex, non-processed carbs that also provide fiber, protein, and healthy fats.
5. Sleep more and stress less.
An imbalance in your hormones, or an inability to balance them, can also be a significant factor in unhealthy cravings. Excessive stress and lack of sleep can wreak havoc on this balance, and that can influence what your body craves throughout the day. For example, chronic stress can create a craving for serotonin. Learning to de-stress and supplementing with magnesium can help you naturally increase your serotonin and dopamine levels without having to consume additional carbs.
6. Supplement your diet with glutamine.
Glutamine is the most abundant amino acid in your body, and it acts as a food source for your brain. As such, it can help you satisfy cravings for carbs and sweets that are often associated with a low mood. Foods high in glutamine include beef, chicken, fish, milk, eggs, parsley, spinach, and cabbage. The essential minerals and nutrients found in these foods will also help you feel satisfied, further reducing your carb cravings.
Carb cravings don’t always send a clear message; sometimes, they’re just a product of habit and unhealthy hormonal imbalances. With these tips, you can address most of the potential factors behind your cravings and make it easier to cut simple, processed carbs out of your diet. If you need some help sticking to a diet that will meet your needs, consider how a prepared meal delivery service could help.
