If I were to ask you what meals you crave for, assuringly most wouldn’t be very healthy. I trust they would be pizza, potato chips, burger, ice cream or things along those lines. Even now, in your mind, as you’re reading this, you are presumably thinking about food that isn’t good for you. Well, are you not? Halt for just a moment and think about it.
You can modify your cravings by changing how you reason.
Everyone that walks into my office to consult on weight-loss has a ‘craving problem.’ But I don’t view this as a problem at all. Rather I see it as the solution. Cravings get an unnecessary buzz. They are a mumble jumble, and they shouldn’t control us. Ice creams and all sorts shouldn’t control us, we don’t have to be tempted by these unhealthy foods, but watermelon, apples, etc. can lure us.
Deem this to be absurd? Well, it is not, and you’ll get to see why.
During my first session with my clients, where they talk about their eating habits, I take in everything I need to know about what they eat and how they eat them. The culprit most times turns out to be binge-eating, snacking on unhealthy food, plainly over-eating when I ask them what vegetables and fruits they fancy. I’ve in fact not seen anyone who hates every other fruit or vegetable on this earth. Finally, I ask how often they eat these fruits and vegetables, and it is less consumed than the sick stuff.
Following all this information, we do our thing. My clients are made to recline and close their eyes. I’ll then direct their thoughts to a peaceful place, and within a few moments, they will be relaxed than they had ever been. After this, I proceed to talk to them about their favorite vegetables and fruits.
I’ll ask them to imagine sipping their preferred juicy, ripe fruit and to feel the juices stimulating their taste buds. I’ll say to their mind, “from this moment on anytime you have a yearning for food, you will think of having a juicy, ripe piece of fruit.”
Bingo!!!. It works. These exactly become the kinds of foods they start craving.
Why?
Because each time you close your eyes and bring yourself to a quiet, untroubled place, your subliminal mind emerges, and it is this section of the mind that checks on your cravings. Replace your thoughts, and you’ll replace what you crave quite easily.
Let’s try to see from another angle.
Let’s assume pineapple is your preferred fruit. Imagine you are sitting right next to me right now, and I offer you a tasty piece of it; you would savor it thoroughly. And you’d want more, right? Of course. Now, let’s say I reached into my fridge, take out a piece of cake and said, “pick one.” Most likely you would go for the pineapple because you just had a little piece of it, which would make you want more. The point of this is that you enjoy your preferred fruits just as much as you like your preferred junk foods, you just think otherwise.
Cravings are so over-rated.
The irrelevant mention of that word always seems to bring up images of high calorie, high-fat foods, because these are the foods that get shown to you by the media. You subconsciously get used to this thinking not knowing any better. Change the images you imagine, and this will change what your cravings.
Following is a 5-minute quick mind-exercise you can do to help you change how and what foods you crave:
Step 1
Look for a comfortable and quiet place with no distractions where you can relax. Breathe in deeply until you feel relaxed by way of counting backward from 10-1, slowly. And with each number, picture your mind drifting in deeper and deeper.
Step 2
Once you get done the counting, picture yourself being at your favorite place; a beach, a grassland, etc. imagine yourself feeling relaxed and peaceful.
Step 3
In this step, imagine a basket full of your best, freshly-picked fruit placed just right next to you. Visualize this vividly, the feel, the color, the taste, everything about that fruit. Then imagine yourself biting into it and enjoying it as you’ve never had.
Step 4
Say to yourself from this moment on, each time I think of eating, I instantly crave for a fruit’. Say it repeatedly say, ten times.
Step 5
Count slowly from one to five, upon getting to five, open your eyes.
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