Getting Your Food Cravings Under ControlOne of the problems of the western life style is that its diet is not quite very healthy. Many home made foods are replaced with fast-food or aliments containing a lot of sugar and fats (remember all the snacks in supermarkets?) and this leads to a series of heath conditions. For example, there are many women who have unexplained food cravings for sugar, alcohol or carbohydrates. You should know that these are not real eating disorders. They are warning signs of a hormonal imbalance caused by a lack of healthy nutrition. It may be the afternoon snack, the chocolate bar you always carry around you in the purse, the back of potato chips you eat during a movie or the extra glass of wine you drink at night. They are all signs that your body witnesses a diet disorder and it tries to make you aware of it somehow. It is not about the lack of willpower, it is your body's way of telling you something is wrong and you should take action before it is too late. For example, when we are exhausted we have low blood sugar and a low serotonin level, and the body signals the brain that it needs reinforcements. This signal causes a sugar craving or carbohydrate craving, such a sudden craving for a chocolate bar. Serotonin is the happy-hormone. If serotonin is low, we feel sad or depressed. A low serotonin level can be caused by a hormonal imbalance or a weak digestion. You may feel the need for a chocolate or another sweet at that moment, but such treats only release a short burst of serotonin. You will feel good for a while, but soon after that you will return to your previous state. At this point, you will want another sweet food to give you just another short burst of serotonin and you enter a vicious circle. Eating more sweets is not the answer to this and you should make some changes to your eating habits to find out whet causes this. If you eat a low-fat diet hoping to lose weight, you unintentionally make the problem worse. If, like many million women, you have eaten a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet for many years, or followed fad diets, the odds are good that you have become at least partially insulin resistant. Insulin is responsible for maintaining stable blood sugar levels by telling the body's cells when to absorb glucose from the bloodstream. If your body becomes insulin resistant, it stops responding to insulin. Instead it will grab every calorie it can and will deposit it as fat. No matter how little you eat, you will gradually gain weight. But it does not stop here: your cells cannot absorb the glucose they need, so they signal your brain that you need more carbohydrates or sugars. The result is persistent food cravings. Insulin resistance can have other, more serious, consequences: diabetes and heart diseases. The Atkins Diet or the South Beach Diet are the most famous diets nowadays and many women are following them. While they are an improvement over the conventional low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet, they can worsen your metabolic problems, because dieting itself is stressful to the body. What you need is to first heal your metabolism before thinking about loosing weight. |