About Food Cravings
A food craving is an intense desire to consume a specific food. Explanations for food cravings include low serotonin levels, hormonal changes, and emotional management needs, such as the desire to reduce stress. Thus food cravings may often be related to emotional eating and stress eating.
Stop Food Cravings with Mindful Eating
Mindful eating can diminish and even stop problems with food cravings. This works in several ways, specifically, by helping you:
- Satisfy a craving with less of the food you crave
- Recognize that certain craved foods may not actually be that appealing when eaten mindfully
- Disrupt the link between your urges and eating behaviors
- Recognize that cravings are often fleeting, and may disappear even when you don’t act on them
Food Cravings and Mindful Eating – Exploring the Research
Mindfulness-based strategies can effectively reduce food cravings in an overweight and obese adult population. This may be due to “prevention of goal frustration, disengagement of obsessive thinking and reduction of automatic relations between urge and reaction.”1
1Hugo, J.E.M., et al. (2010). Coping with food cravings. Investigating the potential of a mindfulness-based intervention. Appetite, 55:1, 160-163.