So far in our anti food craving crusade, we’ve covered the single best understood appetite hormone, leptin, and the secondary cast of appetite compounds. We’ve discussed how cutting inflammation, avoiding lectins, and eating less carbs are instant, concrete steps which almost anyone can implement.
But these neurotransmitters aren’t the be all and end all. If you get overly dependent on biological manipulation like a mad scientist, you’re setting yourself up to fail. Common sense will drift away from you, and you’ll be obsessed with making “one last tweak” which removes all the cravings at the touch of a button.
You can’t forget the basics, and that’s why today’s article will cover the murkier world of appetite-controlling strategies.
It’s the realm of psychological warfare, subconscious mind control, and secret hacks and tools which your granny knew all along.
One – keep substitutes around
By their very nature, you can’t instantly suppress your cravings with a single thought. The first 10 days of cravings can be particularly overwhelming, so the solution? Partially satisfy them with acne-friendly foods which don’t derail your strategy.
Sometimes, it’s the mere texture you need to substitute, like reformed smokers who get addicted to sucking things.
Is the urge to eat crisps taking control? Grab a bag of almonds or pistachios and get dipping (almonds aren’t perfect for acne, but are fantastic as a snack). The taste of a chocolate bar can be replaced with antioxidant-rich dark chocolate, which also provides the mood-boosting anandamide, the bliss hormone structurally related to THC, a strong candidate behind chocolate’s addictiveness.
But what if you need the sweetness? Keep a stash of ripe bananas at all times and at all costs. Other fruit like apples, strawberries and pineapple are perfect – sweet potatoes are acne-friendly, but they take 35 minutes to cook.
You should always have acne-friendly craving-quenchers within arm’s length, and a subplot is recipes. More specifically, lots and lots of them, with natural ingredients – you need a constant stream of new and exciting dishes to choose from. You need to mimic the feeling of a supermarket aisle with all the pleasures in the world laid out before you. The feeling of being boxed in, stuck on rigid rails with no escape, is why many people fail diets.
Ideally, when you open your cupboard door, you should be buried under an avalanche of apples. That’s my homemaking tip of the day.
Two – don’t surround yourself with temptation
If you wake up to see a bag of Cheetos on your computer desk, what will probably happen? The Cheeto section of your brain will activate, the happy memories of playing computer games will flood back, and before you know it, you’ll be a meter closer to the Cheetos, they’ll be in your hand, and then the packet will be empty.
Your environment has a huge impact on your success rate. Simply, you must never leave your objects of acne temptation lying around the house, in accessible places.
You can craft a master strategy, but it’s always smart to keep your basic 5 senses on a leash. Out of sight, out of mind applies here.
If you have kids, then never leave cookies and cookies crumbs all over the kitchen. Don’t organise a meeting with your best pal in the chocolate aisle of Walmart. This is particularly hard in places like New York where there’s a pastrie shop on every street corner, with its smell luring you in. If you have to, then dust off the map book and invent some new routes (which might save you 5 minutes too).
Then there’s getting past the lobby at work, like a hospital, with crispy creme donuts everywhere. Blindfold yourself when you walk in at 8am! Your social time chatting to colleagues may traditionally be over a coffee and a bagel. Simply explain to them that you’re trying to dodge temptation.
Likewise for the annual Christmas office feast. Forget the social pressure – bring in your own carrot slices and paint them the colour of choc chip cookies! Or you could take part, but be strategical and eat small quantities of the safest acne food.
It’s hard if you’re a crispy creme donut trucker, and spend all day unloading them, but at home, you should be ruthless. Any treats should be stocked in inaccessible places, like round the back of the cupboard where your plates are piled up. Normally, you’d swipe them into your hand like a gorilla grabbing a banana, but with that slight extra effort, you might find yourself turning on the TV on instead.
If you defrosted a caveman and dropped him onto the streets of New York by helicopter, he would probably walk around grabbing all the pizza and donuts in sight too.
Three – visualise the negative and positive consequences
This is where the advanced mind games begin. The moment you start reaching for a cookie, with a background feeling that it’s hopeless and all is lost, you should picture the future consequences of that cookie.
You should picture the inevitable pimples in the mirror after waking up at 7am the next day. Better, you should picture the historical pimple-covered face of your worst teenage years, and tie it in mentally to whichever food is tempting you.
Be as specific as you can. Imagine p.acnes bacteria scurrying around, chinking their beer glasses together as you swallow the donut. Imagine sugar granules converting directly into pro-inflammatory chemicals with a flash of light, and zooming off to your skin pores to attack like a swarm of flies.
But you should also imagine the opposite, that the celery stalks sitting directly next to the cookie can melt acne the second it enters the body. You should pretend that the rich, deeply purple pomegranate juice physically converts to golden skin glow. Think about shards of zinc raining down on p.acnes bacteria like a meteor shower.
Some advise picturing yourself as someone else. Instead of a person who doesn’t want to eat junk food, think of yourself as someone who doesn’t eat junk food.
Every time the cravings overwhelm you, and this whole dieting concept seems impossible, you should picture the very real future of no acne, no whiteheads, and a skin tone more glowing than you’ve ever witnessed before.
Four – manage treats
One happy fact about an acne-friendly diet is that cutting out every last treat is unnecessary. In fact, because of the hermetic principle, where short, sharp unhealthy shocks make the body tougher, I’d specifically recommend indulging occasionally.
Hopefully, you’re breathing a sigh of relief right now, and feeling more optimistic about your chances, but the point is that you should always plan them.
Many people sitting at their desk, filling in spreadsheets, might glance sideways at a donut. They’ll laugh, saying their donut days are in the past, but then they’ll glance again. They’ll say “well just this once”, thinking that two weeks of cleanliness is enough. 20 minutes later they’ll be slumped against the wall with empty boxes covering their legs and donut crumbs covering their lap.
The solution is to always allocate a day for a treat. You can enjoy your chocolate or candy to the maximum, licking your lips clean, but the timing and quantity should be planned to the letter. Of course, true acne villains like wheat or soybean oil are still forbidden for several weeks – this isn’t a license to eat. This is designed for small treats which instantly trigger massive binges, to keep you in control mentally.
Now, this differs completely for some acne enthusiasts, who cannot eat just one square of chocolate, and that’s that. Even a particle of cocoa landing on the tongue will set off a a supermarket devouring rampage.
However, for a good chunk of people, it’s probably because eating the first square was triggered by extreme cravings itself. In that hungry mindset, an acne-causing feast was always inevitable. Most people will be more controlled than expected if the two squares are probably scheduled,
It’s possible to be disciplined and bring the pleasure, and that’s what I recommend.
Five – boredom!
Simple, but commonly underestimated. Many of our sudden food cravings are actually boredom in disguise.
You want something to cut through the greyness of boredom with a sweet sugary bang. It’s sitting in an office, and realising that filling in spreadsheets isn’t as exciting as advertised.
So you’ve got two strategies. Firstly, simply realising this fact will help you – food isn’t the solution. It’ll put you in control, defogging the mysteries, removing the illusion of a superstitious craving force controlling everything.
Secondly, you should always have a standby activity for keeping your mind busy. If you’re a musician, you could dash to your keyboard and hammer out something whenever the spirit of chocolate possesses you.
Here’s an interesting fact: the average sudden food craving lasts for 7 minutes on average. You could even brush your teeth, or empty the bins, any old basic chore, only for the clouds of temptation to lift once you’re done.
Drinking more water is another overlooked secret. It’s easy to mistake low level thirst, the stage before a dry and parched mouth and fantasies about oases materialising in deserts, as the urge for your favourite chocolate bar. Gulp down a glass of water and you’ll be shocked at how your cravings are washed away, literally.
Six – brain recalibration!
We talked about mental strategies, visualising the consequences. Step two is manipulating your subconscious mind.
After 1 month of quitting gluten, many primal dieters notice intolerable stomach upset after even small amounts. This sounds disastrous, but if you intend to quit gluten anyway, this will hammer down the negative associations in your subconsious mind. The gravitational pull of donuts will begin to decrease.
Likewise, a pancake may no longer taste like a pancake. It will taste like a strange mixture of eggs, flour and milk with sickly sweet quantities of sugar sprinkled in.
Therefore, your goal is to hold onto these feelings. Let them flood your whole brain, and recalibrate your food associations. Do the exact opposite of suppressing cravings – you want to remember the pancake’s taste, the newfound taste of disappointment.
You could also eat an apple instantly afterwards, marvel at the complex natural taste, and hold onto that too. You want to get addicted to feeling good.
After 2 acne-friendly weeks, you will experience the side effects of a clear mind, superior digestion, restful sleep and maybe crazy dreams within that sleep. You won’t want to eat junk food, but when you do, the bleariness will be shocking. You’ll wonder how you ever ate this stuff all the time.
Slowly, your mental associations will change, and while your hormones like leptin and ghrelin won’t change, it will affect your subconscious mind, the bane of many compulsive eaters.
The key moment is peak calorie deprivation, when the brain sections devoted to reward value and psychological hunger are at their maximum. The flavour perception of foods will elevate to dizzy heights, so this is the golden opportunity for positive reinforcement involving an orange or apple.
Seven – go with the flow
This is vital for truly beating cravings in the long run. You should stay true to thy inner self, listening to your cravings, but redirecting every urge into a healthy direction.
Work with your own mind! Say no to a constant war of attrition. You’ll last far longer without this friction, this constant fighting against yourself.
Many craving experts would call this mindfulness, but I call it common sense. There’s no point in fighting against what you are, an animal with various hormones.
So when you have sweet cravings, don’t ignore them, but grab an apple instead. It probably won’t extinguish the cravings entirely, but it’ll keep you on the rails, towards that light at the end of the tunnel (maybe just 10 days away) where everything becomes easier.
Improving your diet will always take some effort. The trap you need to avoid is endless calculations, lingering regrets, trade offs, and insane, convoluted debates worthy of Oxford University about whether one cookie is acceptable. Dieters actually perform worse in cognitive tests, perhaps losing IQ points, and this stress might be why.
That’s another reason to make an acne plan and stick to it – it cuts worry out of the equation. All you need is focus, and optimism. Breaches in the plan should be part of the plan.
In experiments, the perceived complexity of a diet plan massively reduces people’s ability to follow it. There’s probably a small minority who behave oppositely, people who are normally bored, but rise the moment an extremely complex challenge appears. However, it’s always smarter to keep things simple, and ride the wave of being a human being.
That’s the advantage of an acne-clearing diet. You have to make some sacrifices, but there’s enough natural treats like dark chocolate, coffee and almonds that you can give in to these greedy urges, and still have fantastic skin.
Eight – diary
If you’re not careful, then you might stumble through this craving quest in complete chaos, with no deeper understanding, succeeding for 3 days but relapsing for another 2. Luckily, there’s a solution: a cravings diary.
The idea is a complete psychological blueprint of your own mind. You should note down every food that tempted you and what triggered the desire, including the time of day. That includes when all resistance failed – don’t worry, nobody is peering over your shoulder reading it, except the friendly neighbourhood ghost.
Slowly, you will discover precisely why you give in, and therefore illuminate the necessary changes. Maybe you’ll discover that you surrender to your cravings at around 2 o’clock. This could be a psychological relic from when your lunch was a carbohydrate feast of sandwiches and pretzels, causing a post lunch sugar slump which you needed jolting out of. Or perhaps it’s alive and present – it’s when the long slog of the office day finally gets to you. Even if no revelations emerge, you’ll know when the cravings are about to strike and be able to prepare mentally.
You should spill all your paranoid theories and seemingly inconsequential facts onto the page. Training plans are often deathly dull, but this system will be personalised to you and very revealing.
The only problem: the diary might fall into the hands of food companies, who use the info to exploit your deepest, darkest desires!
Nine – there’s light at the end of the tunnel!
Whenever you feel down and all seems hopeless, it’s vital to remember that your cravings will naturally retreat over time.
True, the second you complete a 3 month challenge, your pimples won’t instantly fall off your face and blow away in the wind. However, the first few days on an acne-clearing diet will always be the hardest.
With sugar, your leptin receptors will re-sensitise, the initial dopamine slump will reverse. Your brain will no longer be addicted to its own opioids, and will reprogram to derive less of its energy through rapidly absorbed sugars.
It’s not just your thought patterns adapting, it’s your body itself. It’s a physical process which will happen in almost everybody jumping to an acne-friendly diet.
Simply understanding these facts will make the first days of dreariness easier. You’ll have something to look forward to, a shining acne-free land in the distance. Furthermore, acne-friendly foods will suddenly taste better. Your tongue will explode with a smorgasbord of flavour the second it touches a raspberry.
Mental programming is important too. Eventually, it will become second nature to walk past the cookie jar with a blank expression on your face. This is obviously more elusive than brain receptors reviving, more unpredictable, but it will happen as surely as a dog being trained to sit for a chew.
Playing the long game is true on a smaller scale too. When the cravings arrive, you can simply launch a 5 minute clock in your head, in which you cannot eat chocolate. When 300 seconds rolls around, you can start again, the cravings may have faded, or the rush of satisfaction may strengthen your spirit enough to simply walk away (although this would probably be facefirst into a wall if you’re in your kitchen).
Ten – don’t think too much
Our final strategy has to come at the very end of the article to work, and it’s this – don’t think about your food craving strategy constantly!
If I say to you “don’t think about elephants”, then what image will come to mind? A herd of happy elephants striding majestically through the bushlands of Africa. Whereas before, you probably hadn’t thought of elephants since the latest article about them escaping from the local zoo.
It’s a similar concept with food cravings. Think of guys working all night on a project, making music. Food is so far from their mind that they wouldn’t recognise it.
You might be dreaming up craving strategies, you might be thinking about healthy vegetables. Yet the result is the same: your mind is fixed firmly on foods. The light side thoughts (don’t eat it!) and the dark side thoughts (more, More! MORE!) will be duelling each other in your head, and at some point the craving thoughts will inevitably sneak through the link between your mind and your now uncontrollable, cookie grabbing hands.
However, it’s impossible not to think of food at all. We recommended visualising and understanding your own cravings just now. So here’s the goal: don’t obsess over your food craving strategies when you have no access to food. This will be more relaxing too. Your cravings won’t build up and up, only for the dam to burst when you finally get a sniff of cookies and cake.
Which ties into strategy 2: reduce your access to food. Don’t pack a box of cookies in the car, just in case. Keep your treats under lock and key, perhaps literally.
Earlier, we discussed the physical hiding away of food, and this is the mental hiding away. Reading this very article might have made you starving! Which makes it a good place to stop.
The verdict
Remember these strategies, and you won’t be unstoppable, but the dark forces of food cravings will be in immense danger.
Ultimately though, you have to get the job done, and resist the urges. Endless thoughts and schemes and strategies can be flowing through your mind, but only winning takes care of everything. It’s the only benchmark we can measure.
And that ties into another strategy. It’s smart to make a concrete timetable, detailing what you’ll consume on certain days, and 2 or 4 week cycles for reintroducing treat foods. It’s partly strategical, but when you complete those goals, you’ll also get a rush of satisfaction that only spurs you on.
The momentum will build and you’ll do a fist pump after each completed day. It’ll actually become fun! Plus, this satisfaction comes partially from the neurotransmitter dopamine increasing. It increases via completing goals, gambling (successfully…), having sex, and eating sugar. Therefore, this will counteract part of the sugar withdrawal crankiness anyway.
This is a mere taster of the craving strategy universe. Just look at the endless bestselling diet books! There seems to be one every month, so they can’t all be right. Just in 2014, a company was fined $230,000 for selling caffeine-infused women’s tights. The idea was that the fat-burning alkaloid would diffuse into women’s legs and destroy cellulite upon contact.
In 2013, L’Occitane’s almond beautiful cream claimed to trim an oddly specific 1.3 inches of fat off your thighs within 4 weeks. The FTC accused them of making “false and deceptive weight loss claims”, and ordered them to cough up $450,000 (are these numbers pulled out of a hat?).
As for decent ones, I also recommend this article on sugar addiction, the all-consuming menace.
Thanks for reading!