Temptation and Cravings

By Heather Hamilton, PhD., LMHC, NCC, DCC | ©2022BreakThrough!

We need to understand how temptation, emotions, and cravings cause diets to fail, When we do, then we can develop the knowledge and strength to make healthy choices.

BreakThrough! helps us understand our biological, psychological, and social/environmental triggers for emotional eating. If we want to succeed and achieve our goals, we have to have a plan, commitment, and usually some accountability. So…The goals

The Two Primary Goals for Weight Management

1) Reducing the health risks associated with obesity

2) Maintaining a desired long-term body weight [1]

For most of us, lifestyle changes are required to sustain or maintain successful weight management. Yo-yo cycles of dieting are directly related to energy management and set point theory. Diet-induced weight loss leads to changes in energy expenditure and the activity of appetite-regulating hormones. Although it’s different for everybody, when we diet, for a while our body will try to return to its original pre-diet weight.

The Reward Value of Food

One of the challenges we face in implementing long-term change is to retrain our perceptions of the reward value of food. We can overwrite the High Fat Sugar pleasure/reward response with accurate and realistic thoughts and expectations. This helps us reduce our HFS intake and avoid cravings that lead to our temptation to overeat (Stice & Yokum, 2016). We can start that process now!

Now, Let’s BreakThrough!

Visualize a plate of fries as what it really is before cooking: a potato and a quarter cup of vegetable oil. How do you feel about chopping up a potato and downing it with a glass of vegetable oil? Think about it…what would happen to our body if we regularly swallowed a quarter cup of oil? Eventually, it would clog our arteries, restrict circulation, we’d experience an increase in blood pressure, and…as our fat cells expanded, our clothes would feel miserably tight. Sometimes to build resistance, we just have to play through (or visualize) the consequences of a quick fix.