What Are Your Food Cravings Telling You? Break Free From White Knuckling and "Being Good" With This Exercise

Your relationship with food is a direct reflection of the relationship with yourself.

Even deeper, it's a window into your unconscious habits, beliefs, and deepest desires (including the ones you may not have allowed yourself to be honest about or to explore). 

If you’re restricting, judging, or totally ignoring your relationship with food, you are missing a huge opportunity to learn more about yourself and what you need to live a life that adds pleasure, energy, and fulfillment instead of drains them.

Here's the thing...

When you tell yourself you can’t have something, it guarantees that you will want it. Your brain can’t work in negatives.

So if I tell you, “don’t think about cake”, in order for your brain to understand what it’s not supposed to do it has to think about cake. You are basically giving yourself a hypnotic suggestion to “think about cake”. 

That’s why telling yourself you can’t do something or have something makes you want it even more.

You’ve probably experienced this if you’ve ever had fasted blood work. Say you normally eat dinner at 6 pm and have breakfast around 8 am. Did you find yourself desperately wishing you could have breakfast as soon as you woke up or craving a snack at midnight even though you never think about food then typically? That happens because you told yourself, “I can’t eat after 7 pm”. Your brain heard, "eat after 7 pm". 

If you’re thinking, “yeah…I'd love to not restrict, but if I let myself eat whatever I want I'd never achieve my health goals”, I get it. But that's actually not true (more on that below).

If you’re tired of the cycle of trying to be good and then finding yourself at the drive-thru or at the end of a bag of chips or going for the second serving of ice cream feeling disappointed with yourself that you caved again, you have to loosen the reins and start trusting yourself if you really want to feel good inside and out. ❤️

If your healthy food is stressing you out, it's not healthy.

What if instead of resisting those cravings you trusted your body and what it was trying to tell you?

The cravings you’re judging and resisting hold the wisdom that will change your life - if you let it. Here's how. 👇

Enjoy the food you want AND gain a lot of wisdom in the process with this exercise!

Give yourself permission to enjoy whatever food you have the hardest time resisting while being fully present.

No robbing yourself of fully enjoying the experience with multi-tasking or judgment, k? That means no talking, no watching TV, no letting your mind wander to something that’s stressing you out or that you have to do later today.

Enjoy being fully present so you can collect as much data as possible and actually enjoy the experience.

If you’ve already lost interest because you only want to eat cake while watching your favorite show, that’s already helpful info!

That tells us the craving isn’t just about cake, it’s about the experience of cake while watching your favorite show (for example). There’s a desire to be distracted/to escape or numb instead of being in the present. 

Start watching for a pattern for when this impulse happens.

Is it at the end of the day when you’ve been “good” for too long? When you’re stressed/angry/sad and don’t want to feel those emotions? That's helpful to start becoming aware of when your nervous system starts to say, "things are feeling too hard and overwhelming"and starts shifting into "shut down/freeze" mode.

In this case of multi-tasking, you’re also dopamine stacking which means that you’re making it harder to have a sense of pleasure, motivation, or satisfaction from other things throughout the day. It’s the same thing that happens with sugar and taste buds. If you’re consuming a ton of sugar (and often it’s hidden in savory foods like crackers, salsa, meats, spice mixes, etc so you don’t even realize it), then your taste buds get used to unnatural levels of sugar and something that is naturally sweet like fruit doesn’t register as sweet or satisfying.

For more on that topic, listen to podcast episode Ep. 56 | How To Not Want “Bad” Food

If you’re game for being fully present for eating the food, focus on these things:

What is it about eating this food that makes it so amazing?

Observe all the details of the experience that you’ve never fully noticed before. What is it about the taste that’s so good? The texture? The temperature? The flavors? The way you eat it?

This is helpful data to compare to the food you think of as healthy. What are the differences between the two? 

Now let’s dig a little deeper with the experience and observe the feeling you get when eating that food.

Pleasure? A sense of effortless fun? A pause in your day? A brain vacation/getting to zone out and not think? Being bad/a break from doing what you “should” do? Is it nostalgic? Do you feel connected to a person or point in your life?

What other times in your day do you have this feeling other than when eating this food?

Once you’ve taken the first bite, get curious. Do you want to take another bite? Observe how long this experience is enjoyable.

As long as you’re being present there will be a point when something changes so that it’s not as desirable. Maybe the taste will stop being as exciting or you’ll get bored or you’ll start to feel full or sick to your stomach so that the experience isn’t as enjoyable anymore.

While you may think you could eat it forever, notice how that’s not true.

If you feel discomfort (like a stomach ache) but want to keep eating, that’s more helpful data! Get curious about why.

What happens when you stop eating that is more undesirable than a stomach ache? What are you avoiding?

The more you start allowing yourself to see what you’re trying to escape from, the more you can start giving yourself what you truly need.

When you’re finished, keep collecting data on how you feel afterwards!

Are you satisfied or stuffed? How does your body feel throughout the day (energy, gut, head, etc)? How is your mood and focus? How do you sleep? Do you have other cravings? Do you like how you feel?

This helps to update your brain so that when you think of this food you think of the entire experience versus the “off-limits-epic-food-I-love” label.

If you like the way the food makes you feel while eating it and throughout the day, get curious:

Where did the belief that you shouldn’t have it come from? Is it from someone who profits from you having that belief? What about this good feeling is missing from when you eat “healthy”? Ex: Maybe you feel satisfied when eating this and you always feel hungry when eating “healthy”. Maybe you've lived with the thought that carbs are "bad" but it turns out your body really thrives when you incorporate nourishing carbs and you have way more energy for workouts. 

Your body is always trying to take care of you. As long as you are thinking that your body is the enemy that you need to control, maintaining healthy habits will feel hard because the judgment prevents you from connecting with the message from your body of what is truly missing. 

It’s never just about food. ❤️

If you’ve struggled with getting on and off the bandwagon when it comes to being healthy, that means there is a limiting belief about what it means to be "healthy" that's getting in the way. You probably have a belief that you need to restrict and “be good” in order to get results because there have been periods in your life when you did that and you felt really good. 

"Being good" totally works if you are ONLY interested in having a certain physique or number on the scale for a temporary period of time. 

However, notice how that has never worked long-term (otherwise you wouldn’t still be in that cycle). 

When you imagine life once you've achieved your health goals, you probably don’t imagine still controlling and restricting yourself, right? You probably feel energized, confident, proud, and trust yourself. You’re probably able to eat food you love.

That image of the healthy-you can never happen unless you release the restriction, "being good", and self-judgment and learn to trust and love yourself NOW. That means finding a way to work towards your goals in a way that loosens the reins and is kind and gentle with yourself so that you can stop equating healthy habits with something that is hard and less desirable than unhealthy options.

Addressing the things that you really need can feel pretty darn intimidating. It’s easier to…

• turn to food for comfort instead of addressing the uncomfortable emotions you’ve been avoiding

• to keep telling yourself, “I’ll be good” instead of addressing the fact that you always put others' needs before your own because you only feel good about yourself when you feel needed or get external validation from others

• to keep judging yourself instead of starting to love yourself unconditionally without needing to earn it 

• to continue to try to control everything in order to try to feel safe instead of practicing sitting with the discomfort of not being able to control others and being willing to start learning how to trust the body you’ve been judging for as long as you can remember

It's easier, but it’s not comfortable. It feels safer and easier to keep doing the things you’re currently doing even when they are making your life so much more uncomfortable, exhausting, and disappointing than if you started to address what your body is really desiring. 

That’s why I walk you through the process one doable step at a time with my 6 month mentorship program at the pace that is right for you.  We get to the real root of what has been getting in the way of making sustainable healthy changes in a way that lifts a weight off your shoulders. 💗