How to control cravings
9/10 people are at the gym because they want to lose weight and diet down. One of the most common reasons people fail on their diet is due to letting the cravings take control. A diet is more of a mental battle than a physical battle.
Here are a few ways you can get around cravings and keep the consistency and adherence on your diet.
- Depending on what you're craving and where your up to on your diet you can allow yourself some degree of flexibility. So if its chocolate you crave, and you restrict yourself for 4 weeks and then suddenly you find that you buy half of the sweets isle. What you can do is install a little bit of chocolate in your diet every day. A bag of malteasers are around 186 calories. This is around 20g Carbs, 10g fat and 2g protein. There is no reason what so ever you couldn't include these on your diet, this could potentially help you from having a huge binge out.
- One other trick you can use is intermittent fasting. This can be incredibly helpful if you find you have most cravings in the afternoon/evening. Cravings come about more when your hungry, thats a fact. There would be no reason you could have your first meal of the day at 12pm, your second meal at 3pm, your third meal at 6pm and maybe your fourth or a snack at 8/9pm. Eating after 6pm won't cause you to put weight on despite the rumour. The first part of your day you'd have to mentally bare with but bulking your calories in the afternoon/evening would help with your cravings.
- Water intake is something many people underestimate. If you have a meal and still find yourself hungry, try having a pint of water after. This will help with digestion and actually fill you up a little more also. 50% of the time your actually dehydrated rather than hungry...
- Lastly a lot of the diet comes down to the psychology. Are you mentally in the right place to start a diet, or are you doing it because your friends are? At some point in a diet it will become a little more restrictive and you have to mentally be in the right place to control cravings and not buckle under the slightest bit of stress.
