When trying to lose weight does your sweet tooth always get the better of you? Does a meal feel incomplete unless its accompanied with a few slices of bread?
Don’t worry you aren’t alone. The hectic times we live in have many of us addicted to bad foods by making us ‘conditioned’ to think of carbs as our primary food.
A typical daily diet for a working man might go something like:
- Bowl of cereal or toast for breakfast
- A biscuit or chocolate bar mid morning “to keep us going”
- A sandwich and a coke from the delhi for lunch
- Grab a pizza/Chinese/Indian/Burger take-away on the way home for dinner
The more you eat of these refined carbs the more your boby craves them and the harder weight loss will become. That cereal the TV adverts tell you is so good for you quickly stimulates an insulin response to give you a buzz but then within an hour or two your blood sugar levels drop leaving you wanting more.
By 10am your body needs its next ‘hit’ and that biscuit or bar of chocolate is the ‘fix’ it craves.
Two hours later you are looking for your next hit and on it goes. This why you should consider it a food addiction.
Think of it this way – You know when you are absolutely stuffed and you can’t eat another thing but that chocolate cream cake looks so good and you just can’t resist it?
Your stomach is screaming “I’m full, for gods sake man STOP!!!!” but you force yourself to satisfy that sugar craving.
This simply doesn’t happen with low carb good food. Your stomach says ‘hey dude, I’m not hungry anymore’ so you stop and leave what’s left.
Have you quit smoking? I did about 10 years ago. As a lifelong smoker it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. What made it difficult was that you don’t see or feel any instant benefits to keep you give you the motivation to carry on.
When you are addicted to bad foods kicking the carb addiction is a piece of piss (I was going to say cake but thought better of it) compared to breaking most other addictions because you see the benefits literally within 24 hours!
If you cut out most of those carbs today, tomorrow you will weigh less than you do today, its as simple as that.
Plus, once you do kick the carb cycle the craving goes very quickly. I’m talking days for some, a week or two for others. Certainly not the months the cravings for cigarettes stays with you.
Like most addictions, the first step to freedom is to admit you have a problem. Keep a diary of what you eat throughout the week and don’t cheat, the only person you are fooling is yourself. At the end of the week take a look at what you have eaten and if you are addicted to bad foods, do something about it straight away to protect your health and avoid obesity down the road.