One of the toughest parts about going on a diet and improving your eating habits is trying to handle food cravings. Indeed, food cravings are a major source of stress. Stress makes you cheat. Then you feel stressed since you cheated and so on and so forth. Luckily there are things you can do that can help stop food cravings and keep you on course with your diet program. In this article we will share a few of those things with you.

Know where the craving comes from. Usually a food craving arises because you encounter a specific situation or external trigger. That’s why it’s smart, before you start any diet, to keep a food and craving journal. This way you will be aware what causes your hunger pangs and when. This will certainly make avoiding food cravings so much easier–you can see precisely what causes the craving and then find other, better ways to avoid or deal with that stimulation.

It can be quite beneficial to develop a thought that you think to yourself for comfort and to distract yourself when you feel a craving for food pop up. Among the motivations behind cravings is the coaching we do on our bodies to think of particular foods in specific situations or at specific times of day. When you come up with a better way to focus your thoughts when you come across those situations or times of day, you will ultimately train your body and not have to face those cravings anymore. Overtime, and with lots of patience, you can re-train your brain and stop food cravings dead on its tracks.

Food cravings generally occur because the body’s blood glucose levels change–especially when they get low. When our blood glucose gets low, we typically start to want sugary and fatty foods because our bodies want to increase the sugar levels as fast as possible. The simplest way to handle these sorts of cravings is to keep your glucose levels as steady as possible. This is easy enough to do if you’ve got healthy eating habits. This is why so many people believe that five small meals throughout the day is much better than three huge ones if you are trying to diet.

Feelings of deprivation are usually at the root of the cravings we sense when we are on diets. When we diet, we usually eat significantly less than we generally do because we want to reduce the amount of calories we take in (because then we can exercise away the extra pounds we’ve been packing). Luckily, it is more than possible to eat enough to feel full without taking in too many calories throughout the day. You just need to go for whole, natural foods and avoid sugar-laden, highly processed foods and drinks as much as possible. The even better news is that taking in the proper foods can help you feel full for longer time periods which can reduce the food cravings that might have been causing you to snack.

Food cravings are the scourge to any dieter’s life. They are generally at the bottom of most dieting flops. By discovering where the food cravings come from and why they happen, you’re boosting your chances of dieting successfully!