Non Diet solutions to permanent weight loss

The body has devised hunger to indicate to us when it is in real physiological need for food. However when we ignore hunger in order to lose weight, what we are really doing is confusing hunger with cravings. Cravings most often have nothing to do with physical hunger.

Two types of cravings are emotional cravings and physical cravings:

Emotional cravings or “psychological hunger” occurs when food is used to escape from an undesired emotion, to deal with stress or provide comfort and ‘good feelings”.
Physical cravings are often linked to some sort of deficiency the body is experiencing as with structured diets where there is the tendency to cut off many foods. This lack of balanced eating can lead to low blood sugar (hypoglycemia) and deficiencies in essential vitamins and minerals. The body may crave foods containing the carbs and other nutrients it is short of.

Dieting is often a major cause of food cravings. When you can’t eat a food, guess what, you want it more. If you were to be told "Whatever you do, do not think of a hot dog.. Absolutely remove the image of a hot dog from your head right now".

Most likely the only image which comes to your mind right now is the very thing the instructions have just told you to avoid thinking of at all cost. This is because you mind must formulate the concept/image of a item before it can be sure what you are referring to.

Having a list of foods which a diet instructs you to "stay away from" has a similar effect. Your mind perceives these black listed foods on many occasions in your daily living. The result is that you quite possibly want that thing which you can't have even more, which causes it to have a powerful effect on you psychologically, and can easily become a craving.

Other potential sources of food cravings include:
1. Low serotonin levels: which may cause cravings for carbohydrate (usually hig sugar foods) which supply the body with tryptophan which is needed to help achieve desirable serotonin levels.

2. Environmental cues: A fast food commercial on TV or passing near the actual building like McDonalds, Wendy’s etc. could create a craving for fast food items. Certain activities strongly associated with a specific food can trigger a craving for that food, eg. Ham around the holidays, candy or popcorn at the movies etc.

So if you intend on embarking on a weight management plan it would be best to first understand hunger and cravings. Identifying and dealing with cravings is an important part of any permanent weight loss program you desire to be part of. Finding other ways to deal with emotional and other stresses is also crucial.