In a Facebook discussion I started regarding the ideal diet (as a precursor to the Week #2 Diet post), one of my friends (thanks, Amanda!) mentioned she started basing her diet on cravings. This approach to dieting is one of the first diet strategies I tried years and years ago, and it worked fairly well.
The idea is simple - you eat what you crave.
The most common logic for the strategy is equally simple - You crave certain foods because your body is deficient in something. Could be micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) or macronutrients (carbs, fat, or protein.) Or it could be something else we need but aren’t getting.
Anyone who has been pregnant or been around women who are pregnant is familiar with crazy-weird pregnancy cravings, which seem to be based on the needs of the developing fetus. A few hypotheses have been tossed out to explain the phenomenon, including the nutrient hypothesis above. But the actual data on the matter is weak, and points to a more valid, reliable, and surprising explanation - pregnancy cravings are driven by social and psychological factors.
Basically, pregnant women eat a lot of weird (or often decadent) food because it makes them feel good, and pregnancy is a convenient rationalization to indulge.
So what does this mean for those of us who aren’t pregnant? Should we use cravings as part of our eating strategy, even if the data doesn’t support the common rationale? Let’s start by taking a step back and exploring how we normally refrain from eating anything and everything.
Willpower and Diet
Willpower is defined as “… the drive, resilience, and perseverance to pursue your long-term goals and honor your core values despite short-term temptations, distractions, and emotional impulses.” (Max and Miller, 2015) I like this definition. A lot. I also like the solution proposed by Max and Miller: Develop a compassion mindset.
Let’s say we want to eat a jelly-filled donut. Most of us most of the time have an inner monologue that works something like this:
Me: “Man, that donut sounds really good right now!”
The little devil sitting on my shoulder: “Fuck yeah, man, imagine how good that will taste!”
The little angel sitting on the other shoulder: “No, Jason, you know that’s going to sabotage your diet. Do you remember how tight those pants were this morning?”
Devil: “Dude, you’re going to work out tomorrow morning. Besides, you had a stressful day so far; trying to find matching socks and all. You deserve that donut.”
Angel: “Gaahhhh! You suck.”
So we eat the donut. Then beat ourselves up for the next few hours. And the next time we try on our fat pants.
The point - we frame “willpower” as a battle between good and evil. Society tells us successful people let the good side win because those people don’t eat the donut. That means the rest of us fat, gluttonous fucks are losers because we let the bad side win. And we hate ourselves for that. Even if we let the “good” side win, we still feel like we lost because we denied our craving. This way of making decisions creates a moral dilemma where, no matter what we decide, we always lose.
In the framework of food cravings, this is a potential recipe for disaster. If we revisit the reason for those pregnancy cravings, we remember the cravings are just a rationale to indulge. This can be the pitfall to relying on cravings to determine what (or how much) you eat. If we crave that donut, we’re just giving the Devil on Our Shoulder a better, more convincing argument. We’ll still feel the same guilt, shame, and sense of failure for eating the donut after we’ve devoured it.
This is where Max and Miller’s compassion mindset strategy comes in. The idea is to feel empathy for your future self a year from right now. This aligns perfectly with his project because we’re on a year-long journey to becoming our best selves. Ask “What would I do today if I really cared about the self that I’ll be a year from now?”
Using this mindset, we’re turning down the donut because we really like our future self and we want to help them. And our future self will be grateful for us making this decision today. We’re not using willpower to deny ourselves, which leads to frustration, disappointment, and a sense that we’re somehow oppressing ourselves. We’re using willpower to create a better version of ourselves we really care about. We have better things to do in the future, and our future self will be incredibly grateful for our decisions today.
This simple Jedi mind trick is something I’ve just started implementing, and I have to say, it’s magical. It completely changes my decision-making matrix for the better. I’ll write a lot more about willpower in future posts. Back to cravings.
The Problem With Cravings In Modernity
In our modern world, we have an abundance of delicious foods. At least in the United States, it’s really, really hard to starve to death and really, really easy to be morbidly obese. Our ancestors likely developed cravings for certain foods to compel them to eat foods required to survive. Or they developed a “taste” for the foods they ate as they evolved with their environment. Whatever the explanation, we developed cravings for tastes like saltiness and sweetness. We developed cravings for fats and savory flavors. That drove us to eat the foods we needed to survive, even if they were rare and difficult to acquire in our ancestral environments. We’re not very good at regulating these; we’ll keep eating them as long as they’re available.
Now, we’ve developed the ability to mass-produce foods that are super-sweet, super-salty, super-fatty, and so on. Thanks to the snack section of Walmart and the drive-thru at McDonald’s, they’re cheap and easy to acquire. We can eat an unlimited number of french fries, Snickers, and bags of Spicy Nacho Doritos, to the point where we’ll become morbidly obese.
Normally, we attempt to limit this free feeding of junk food by exercising that angel and devil version of willpower, and we often fail. In this way, following our cravings can be an unmitigated disaster. Because we always crave the garbage.
In the distant past when I used cravings to guide my diet, I got around this problem by setting figurative “guardrails” on the foods I ate. I only ate particular foods, most of which followed the rules I discussed in the main diet post. That worked pretty well, but I still had cravings for processed foods, especially carby, sweet foods (like jelly-filled donuts.) And I went through that predictable angel/ devil internal struggle.
So how about combining the “guardrail” idea with the “willpower” idea?
The Ideal Solution
The big idea - follow the five diet “rules” I discussed in that original diet post. Within the context of those rules, let your cravings determine what you eat. When you crave something outside those five rules, use the self-compassion willpower trick by thinking about how avoiding that craving is going to help your future, better self, and how that future self is going to be grateful for the decision you’re making today.
That’s it. A simple solution to an incredibly complex problem.
When you give this try, let us know how it goes by posting in our Facebook Group!
If you think this willpower hack could help others, please share this post far and wide!
~Jason
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