According to recent research, you can actually train your brain to keep temptation under control. Health.com explains how. You’re sitting at your desk during the workday, and out of nowhere, you get the urge—no, need—for a giant bun. You’re salivating just thinking about the frosting, butter, and cinnamon. Is it just you, or is your heart racing?
WILLPOWER
This is when the deal-making begins: I’ll just have a snack and put the rest aside. Or maybe I’ll eat half – I’ve been good today – no, I’ll eat it all and not eat tonight…
Food cravings. Research is just beginning to shed light on why so many of us give in to them. While scientists are still figuring out exactly what happens when you’re in the throes of a craving, they do know: Every craving starts with a cue. The cue for a sugary bun could be something as simple as catching a whiff of its buttery aroma as you walk past your favorite bakery or catching a glimpse of a commercial. “Any cue that’s repeatedly associated with high-fat or sugary foods can trigger a craving,” explains Ashley Gearhardt, PhD, a psychologist and food addiction expert at the Yale University Center for Food Policy and Obesity.
In other words, if you like to celebrate the end of the workweek with a pint or a margarita, you’ll eventually crave it automatically every Friday. If you grew up subconsciously associating comfort with your mother’s pirozhki or charlotte, you’ll likely crave it whenever you’re having a bad day.
The signal activates the brain’s pleasure center, causing it to release dopamine, a neurotransmitter that pushes you to seek out the exact thing you crave, Gearhardt explains. Over time, that pleasure experience will repeatedly signal the brain, making you more likely to crave that food again in the future.
What’s more, when you’re in craving mode, your brain convinces you that you’re hungry, making it even harder to resist food. “Your brain starts pumping out ghrelin, the hunger hormone, and your insulin levels drop, making you even hungrier than usual,” says Gearhardt. As a result, it’s very difficult to satisfy cravings through taste alone.
It seems unfair that cravings can increase hunger. You assume you’ll satisfy your craving for a candy bar by eating one, but research shows that the opposite will happen: Instead of paying attention to physical cues of hunger and fullness, you’ll be driven by a rush of dopamine that will drive you to find a candy bar (now!). And then another.
This also explains why you may find it hard to resist dessert, even if you just ate a steak with sides and bread. “Dessert, and the spoons and forks that are placed in front of you, are cues that you should eat,” says Mark Gold, MD, chairman of the department of psychiatry at the University of Florida and an expert in addiction medicine.
The dopamine signal comes immediately when you encounter a stimulus, but the satiety signal that tells you to stop eating comes much more slowly, 12 or more minutes after eating. “Your brain can always find more room for food, even after you’ve eaten it, so can your stomach,” adds the doctor.
YOUR BRAIN AND CAKES
Believe it or not, cravings originally served a useful purpose: They were necessary for our loincloth-clad ancestors to survive. “They had a strong craving for high-calorie foods that they had to forage for with their hands in order to survive and reproduce,” says Eric Stice, Ph.D., a senior scientist at the Oregon Research Institute.
Of course, our predecessors didn’t have to deal with high-calorie temptations at every turn. Today, we’re simply bombarded with food advertising (on average, we watch 7,000 food and drink ads on TV a year). And we don’t have to spend our lives trying to get food every time we get hungry. We just open a cabinet at the office, use a vending machine, or go to the store.
It’s not just that these high-fat, high-sugar, high-sodium foods are convenient, they’re actually designed to be addictive. “These foods have an effect on the brain that’s much more powerful than anything you hunt or grow,” says Dr. Gold. “Fast foods like French fries give you more dopamine than a tomato from your garden.”
It’s just that the complexity of flavors, aromas, and textures of processed foods stimulates the brain more than what’s grown in the ground, he explains. Plus, you get a dopamine hit every time you try a different flavor, so you get the reward over and over again.
“The fact that you can have a hamburger today, a burrito tomorrow, and chicken wings the day after means we live in a sea of dopamine stimulants,” says the Doctor.
BORN TO LOVE CHIPS
That explains part of the puzzle, but not all. New research suggests that your food preferences—and thus your cravings—may have been shaped not just as a child, but in the womb as well. “One theory is that pregnant women begin teaching their babies what’s safe and healthy to eat while they’re still in the womb,” says Annie Murphy Paul, author of “How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives.” So if your mom ate a lot of chips and French fries, you may be programmed to crave the same kind of fatty, salty foods.
Moreover, if you associate certain foods with pleasant moments from your childhood, then most likely, when you want these foods, you want to get positive emotions. This happens because most often we crave not the foods themselves, but the emotions that we associate with them. In other words, you want to get not only your mother’s chocolate cake, but also those warm feelings that you experienced when she gave you a piece of cake.
“By associating foods with specific feelings or situations, we create associations between the experience and the food,” explains Michelle May, RD, author of Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat. “What you really want is to feel safe or to remember a time in your life when things were simple and easy.”
Emotional cravings tend to happen because we’re often unaware of the connection between what we eat and how we feel. For example, if you’re craving a glass of wine and a plate of pasta in the middle of a busy workday, you might not realize that what you really want is to feel relaxed and carefree, like a bachelorette party at your favorite Italian bistro.
MANAGE SUDDEN HUNGER ATTACKS
If you can identify the emotions that are causing the craving, then instead of sinking your teeth into a 500-calorie sugar bomb, you can try to find other ways to solve the problem. For example, you could email to schedule a meeting with your boss to discuss the assignments you’ve been given and the unrealistic deadlines.
“If this seems impossible, then perhaps you really need a vacation and looking forward to it will make work more bearable,” says Dr May. “Take steps to satisfying your need by taking small steps such as making a list of the top 10 places you’d like to visit, spending 15 minutes surfing the web to find places you’d like to go to. Even closing your eyes and imagining yourself on the beach while you breathe deeply in and out can help.”
SMART STRATEGY
Regardless of the source of your cravings (whether it’s a natural cue or an emotional need), another tactic that can work is to focus on short-term and long-term health goals .
In a recent study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers studied participants’ brains during cravings using fMRI and found that paying attention to goals, such as getting in shape, activated the prefrontal cortex, which inhibits the reward region.
This technique is very effective. In addition to dulling cravings, it also increases your ability to resist temptation. It can even free you from rationalizing or negotiating with yourself.
Here’s how to make it work for you: Write out a detailed list of the goals you want to achieve. If you’re trying to lose weight , list your current weight and how much you want to lose. “It makes sense to be more specific because you’ll be providing more detail that will help you say no to yourself later,” says Dr. Gold.
For example, when you know you need to lose 500 calories a day to lose a pound a week and that eating ice cream will interfere with that, you’ve already engaged your prefrontal cortex and thereby stopped the release of dopamine. When the craving hits, remember those numbers to resist the urge to eat ice cream.
It’s also important to keep a journal of everything you eat throughout the day, especially if you’re trying to lose weight. Often motivated by cravings, we tend to devour food and quickly forget about it, says the doctor.
Knowing that you’ll have to return to that journal can reduce your desire to eat. “With practice, over time, your ability to resist temptation will become stronger, like a muscle,” says Gearhardt. Your prefrontal cortex will quickly begin to shut down dopamine production and, of course, stop you from craving food.