What's Causing Your Food Cravings?

A Living Whole throwback: What your food cravings are telling you.

I am not sure there’s a single person in the world who hasn’t experienced a food craving. If cravings weren’t on the brain, advertisements full of tasty treats wouldn’t be plastered all over billboards, magazine covers, and t.v. screens. We wouldn’t base our next meal on “what we’re hungry for,” wouldn’t eat when we’re full, and where we’re going to eat and what we’re going to eat wouldn’t consume a large percentage of our thoughts.

If cravings weren’t a big deal, you wouldn’t send your man out to the store in the middle of the night to get “the baby” ice cream and pickles. You wouldn’t down a bottle of wine and “have” to eat all things chocolate during your favorite time of the month, and you wouldn’t dive into a bag of salty tortilla chips after work or eat way more carbs than you should while you’re mentally engrossed in a task.

Cravings are annoying and can derail even the hardest efforts to eat healthy. They can make us feel defeated, overwhelmed, and at the bottom of the bottomless pit, we sometimes turn into. But the truth is, there’s a reason and a purpose for that craving, and if you know what a craving is, why you have it, and how to satisfy it properly, you can control your cravings instead of letting them control you. 

What is a craving?

A craving is simply an overwhelming desire to consume a particular food — and sometimes non-food — item. It’s your body’s way of telling you it needs something, such as a vitamin, mineral, protein, or nutrient, to function properly.

The parts of the brain responsible for memory, pleasure, and reward play a role in food cravings, as do imbalances of hormones like leptin and serotonin, which is why cravings are more common when someone is depressed or emotionally upset.

Your body stores an impression of everything you’ve ever eaten — every flavor, texture, and chemical makeup of what’s gone into your mouth. Suppose your diet lacks various foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, quality protein, and flavors (beyond salty and sweet). In that case, it will crave the only source it knows of to obtain what it needs: brownies, cookies, chips, anything fried, and everything bad. 

Because these foods only contain a trace amount of what your body needs, you’ll have to eat more to feel satisfied. For example, one serving of butternut squash might supply you with a day’s worth of magnesium, but it would take an entire box of chocolate brownies to give you just a fraction of the daily requirement. 

This is why you go through a whole bag of chips before feeling “satisfied” and why that craving returns the next day. This is why you’re told to satisfy your craving with something “healthy” — it will take less of that healthy food to make you feel full and can turn that craving off. 

At the same time, your craving may not have anything to do with an underlying nutritional deficiency. It could be due to a chemical imbalance, or you could be eating because you’re bored or sad. When this happens, you’ll typically crave something you associate with positive memories or food that affects your serotonin levels.

What’s causing your cravings?

Now that you know a craving means you’re lacking something in your diet, how do you figure out what you’re lacking? Below is a list of the biggest cravings, what causes them, and the healthy options you can choose to kick them so you won’t demolish a bag of chips or an entire batch of cookies:

• Chocolate
  
  Chocolate cravings are associated with deficiencies in magnesium and copper. Around “that time of the month,” the body uses more magnesium which is why many women experience PMS and chocolate cravings. To curb the craving, try a magnesium supplement and eat more yellow foods like butternut squash, non-GMO corn, apples, apricots, bananas, and nuts. Still want some chocolate? Substitute with carob or raw cacao.