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Old 03-30-2007, 04:31 AM   #12 (permalink)
ahimel
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Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: Boulder, Colorado
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Several things are true:

Unlike a taste for fat, which can be trained in or out of people, sugar is to a certain extent genetic. The fact that you take after your mother and her sweet tooth is more than just environmental. Some of us just crave sugar. And to the extent that it is genetic, you probably can't rid yourself of sugar cravings entirely. You could learn to live without it, but you could never learn to like it.

But, that being said, a Reese's cup is around 50% fat. A lot of the things we think of as "sweets" are actually filling a fat craving: Reese's, Hershey's kisses, Almond Joy, cake & cookies, etc. So the first thing I would determine is whether hard candy like peppermints or butterscotch would fulfill the craving. If so, get yourself a bag of those; although the calories do add up, a peppermint will last a lot longer than a Hershey's bar, and has a lot fewer calories.

If that doesn't satisfy your desire, then it's possible that you actually have a fat craving, and that can be easily trained out.

Sometimes, I find that I'm just craving chocolate -- I don't know whether it's purely psychological or if there's some chemical in chocolate that helps me, but sometimes that's what I need. In those cases, I get good chocolate - the stuff whose price is measured in dollars per ounce. And I eat it really slowly, a few milligrams at a time. That satisfies my chocolate desire while staying within the bounds acceptable to any diet.

As Holistic pointed out, a lot of times "sugar cravings" are actually just a lack of carbs. Your body needs to burn carbs in order to function -- it can burn fat, but it's not as efficient and makes me feel icky. So when you start burning fat, your body will send a signal asking for carbs. And if every time you eat a Reese's you feel better, you'll start interpreting that signal as a request for candy, rather than the request for carbs that it actually is. So if you even out your carb load - eating whole-grain carbs that take hours to burn out - it will help with the fuzzy head and lack of productivity.

Finally, consider trying meditation. Most people have some ritual that tells their psyche, "OK, now I'm going to concentrate." All basketball players have some set of movements they do before a free-throw. I sit down each morning and plan my day - not because I don't know what I'm doing, but because the planning process is my signal to myself that it's time to work. It may be simply that candy is the signal you've been trained on - until you eat a piece of chocolate, your body doesn't realise that you're actually serious about concentrating. If that turns out to be the case you only need to train yourself to a new signal, and the "cravings" will disappear. There's some golf star who wears a rubber band on his wrist, and when he snaps it against his wrist, that's the signal that it's time to focus on the shot. If you can substitute something like that, you won't need the Reese's to concentrate.

Good luck!
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