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DO YOU CRAVE FOODS? DO THIS. · No Forking Nonsense - The Nutritionist UK

• 0:00
  @paulthenutritionist: Welcome to no forking nonsense. The podcast that slices through the nonsense and serves you straight talking nutrition advice that actually works. I'm Paul, a registered nutritionist and your host. And every episode, I'll be debunking diet myths, breaking down confusing food advice and giving you practical science backed tips to help you eat better, feel better and get your edge back. There'll be no fads, no shite, just real talk that makes sense.
• 0:28
  Let's get stuck in. Hello and welcome to another episode and today we are going be talking about cravings and hunger and the difference between them and what do cravings actually mean and what is your body actually trying to tell you and I always say that when you have a craving, there's usually a reason. How can we get over cravings, how can we prevent cravings, how can we manage our cravings and ensure that really we change our mindset about them, because cravings are not just a lack of willpower. Most people think that they mean that you re weak or you re off track, when actually cravings are biological signals, not a character flaw in you. So this is about turning cravings into useful information and not something to fight about.
• 1:11
  So I want to start by talking about the difference between hunger and cravings. So what is the difference? Well quite simply, is a physiological need for energy or nutrients, whereas cravings are usually a specific signal. So often tied to a change in blood sugars, often you will say, every time I'm stressed, I crave sugar or perhaps you, I remember when I was working with, when I was working in the NHS and I sat in an office with a load of nurses and they had this habit of every I think it was every Tuesday, every Thursday, every Friday, someone would bring in cake and they were in this routine of having cake and so it became this kind of weird craving that they had conditioned themselves to have. And most cravings actually sit somewhere between physical hunger and psychological triggers.
• 2:08
  And I think what's really important is that there is we kind of have a clear distinction of ignoring or not ignoring I should say the difference between hunger and cravings, because your body doesn't randomly just fancy chocolate for a laugh, there's always a reason for craving things. So what we're going to do is we're going to break this into some kind of really simple sections if you like. So one of the most common causes for cravings is dehydration. So even mild dehydration can trigger hunger like signals. I m going to give you a real time example.
• 2:51
  So back in 2021, I was training for my first Ironman, that was in 2022. Me and my best friend, we decided to make our training interesting, we were just going to do some really weird things, like we decided to walk to Birmingham one day, which was 30 miles. We decided to do a week's workout in a day. This absolutely did not help our Ironman training. And we also decided to do three back to back virtual spin classes.
• 3:20
  So Les Mills spin classes are really, really good and they last for an hour and we decided to do three of them back to back, which was absolutely stupid but obviously I'm a real heavy sweater and when you sweat that much, you lose a lot of salt and that's a separate conversation but afterwards, I got in my mate s car and he happened to have Mark, he s a big snacker, he trains really hard, s got a really physical job and his appetite is crazy. Then he had these Mark's and Spencer pork, what do they call it? Pork pies. I ve never had a pork pie in my life and when he said do you want a pork pie? I ve never ever wanted a pork pie in all of my life and it was the greatest thing I ve ever put in my mouth in all of my life because it was full of salt, it was full of like dense calories and it was amazing.
• 4:11
  And that there is a prime example, I was probably dehydrated because I'd sweated so much, I'd lost a lot of salt and the problem is that when we are dehydrated, thirst and hunger share the same brain pathways. So often if you find yourself really hungry and craving certain types of usually salty foods, you can find that when you have like a good drink they'll often disappear. So have a good drink of water, cravings I'd say eighty percent of the time will disappear. How many people try to diet harder when actually they're just under hydrated? The amount of people I speak to and you know they say I just can't lose weight or I always find myself snacking or my energy is on its arse and I'll often say and if you've listened to the very first podcast on this feed, how much water are you drinking a day?
• 5:00
  I don't really like water so I'll have about two cups of tea in the morning and maybe I'll have 500 500ml. And I say to him, you know you probably should be having two to three litres of water a day. Just by doing that, you find that you lose maybe anything up to three kilograms I have seen in some cases. Again I don't want get into that because there's an episode at the start of this feed where you can kind of explore that in more detail, but one of the most common causes of cradence is dehydration. Second one, long gaps between meals, so blood sugar dipped will often lead to urgent carb heavy cravings.
• 5:35
  Remember when you work on nutritionists it s pretty boring and I said this a lot, but what often happens is that you either have cereal or some high carbohydrate breakfast in the morning, you won eat till lunch, then you're absolutely ravenous, and that's the blood sugar response. Or you'll leave big gaps between meals, or you skip meals which trains your body to essentially panic later on, so you end up turning to hyper palatable foods. Hyper palatable foods are foods which are really easy to eat, so I don't know McDonald's, crisps, foods that don't actually require too much digestion. This is why often afternoon and evening cravings are so common, because the timing of our foods are wrong, what we're eating is usually probably not ideal, and this is why I wasn't hungry earlier turned into I could literally eat a horse. So second thing, long gaps between meals, we want to be consistent.
• 6:33
  We want to make sure we're not giving our body any reason to kind of have an up and down roller coaster of blood sugar responses. Not enough protein or fibre, again this is something that is really really common in people when I first start working with them. Protein drives satiety hormones, so your ghrelin and your lectin. Fibre will slow digestion and stabilise appetite. What we don't want is foods which can be digested super quickly, which will cause this kind of blood sugar response and then inevitably we're going to be hungry later on.
• 7:05
  The way to kind of flip this and explain it to you is there is a reason why we might have bananas before we do a hard activity, it s because they are quick digestion, we get a spike in blood sugar and we re going to utilise that energy. Now if you have that when you re just sat in your office, what s going to happen is there s got to be a response to that. Low protein meals is still a problem. When I was working at a kind of governmental level, I would be banging the drum when I worked in paediatric nutrition. I would constantly be banging the drum about how the NHS has to update its guidance, but it is so in this country, I don't even want to go into this spider's web of nonsense, but the NHS guidelines when it comes to protein are far too low, when all of the research I could show you thousands and thousands of research papers which tell us that we probably at the very, very least you listen to this now at the very, very, very least the bottom requirement that you need is probably 1.4, maybe 1.5 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight.
• 8:12
  If you're super active, you're talking 1.8, maybe two grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. Low protein meals will just cause a faster hunger rebound. If your meal digests in an hour, your hunger will be back in about an hour. Next thing, too many refined carbohydrates. There isn't a problem with carbs, we don't need to avoid carbs, but as I said, you will get a blood sugar spike if you have too much simple carbohydrate that will crash you and then you'll end up craving foods, usually carbohydrate later on.
• 8:43
  Especially relevant with cereal bars, pastries, sugary snacks, cereals. So it's really important that swapping carbs isn't necessarily the goal, as in like deleting them, but grading them in is. So we want complex carbohydrates, we want to pair them with a source of fibre, we want to have it with a source of protein. It s not carbs causing the cravings, it s the crash after them by the type of carbohydrates you are consuming. One of my favourite topics: sleep and recovery.
• 9:11
  So poor sleep will literally disrupt ghrelin and leptin, which are your hunger hormones. This then increases appetite, especially for hyper palatable foods like sugar and fat. Good example of this, I ve said before, if you re an alcohol drinker and you go out and you have a big night out, your seat's impacted, you're hungover, the next day, suddenly those hyper palatable foods, so those high calorie foods, sugar, fatty, salty foods become really appealing. That is quite literally your body being deprived, your nervous system being deprived of energy and your body just trying to claw yourself through the day. It s the same for overtraining.
• 9:53
  Overtraining and stress will amplify the need for hyper palatable foods. You cannot out discipline a sleep deprived nervous system. The fifth thing: emotional and physiological triggers. So stress, boredom, habit, routine reward patterns. I think I'm in the press this week or the week after where I'm talking about how working from home post Covid, we've seen the impact of obesity increase, that's because when you work from home, you have less distractions.
• 10:28
  You don have less distractions but you do, if that makes sense. So if you re in an office, you be talking, you know, you have those water cooler moments, whereas when you re working at home on your own, you ve worked solidly maybe for an hour or two and you just kind of walk around your house and you might make a cup of tea but you ve had about three cups of tea so then you like what else shall I do? You ve scrolled on your phone for a large period of time and you know you get to the point where actually you're probably looking for a distraction and you're looking for some kind of procrastination, so inevitably what you'll do is you'll reach some type of food or as I say if you're stressed you want that reward pattern, that serotonin release, that dopamine release. Alcohol and social settings also lower restraint as well, so you know if you're at a party or you're at a wedding or a birthday party or if you've had some alcoholic drinks, you went in with the best intentions of having two drinks and then suddenly someone wheels out some beige food, you know, your restraint has been lowered.
• 11:33
  But there is a difference between emotional eating and failure, and sometimes you re not hungry, re just kind of done with the day and you end up just reaching those things. Really important to recognise that. Common cravings and what they actually mean. This is going to be a bit of a cheat sheet for you. Every craving has a meaning and a reason, so if you're somebody who feels like you need sugar, usually chocolate, and I'm looking at ladies at certain times of the month, they're usually because there's a blood sugar crash or a long gap, Your body is craving some form of carbohydrates, some high energy hit.
• 12:11
  Sometimes in women, if you crave diet chocolate, it can be some kind of magnesium deficiency, but it very rare. I just want carbohydrates, usually that s low glycogen, so under fuelling, especially with training, if you find yourself being like I just want carbs, you usually probably not got enough carbs in your body, you ve low glycogen. Especially when training or overtraining. If you are starving, that tells us that your overall intake is too low, or your protein or fibre is too low. The aim is that every day you should never be hungry.
• 12:42
  You should constantly feel, never be hungry, never be too full and if you want to lose weight, you should still be able to lose weight whilst never being hungry and never being too full. So usually it means that your intake hasn t been sufficient enough or your protein and or fibre is far too low. If you just sit there and you think I just want something quick, usually that s tiredness, dehydration, a bit of decision fatigue, which is why I say it s always helpful to plan what are you going to eat, what s the plan? What are going be eating this week? When you plan your shopping list, plan what foods you re going to have out of that shopping list, what meals you re to make, so that you don have that decision fatigue.
• 13:18
  Ve said a number of times, I have not got time and I know that I will not be asked tomorrow to decide what I m having for lunch, so I don't bother. What I'll do is I'll make an extra portion of dinner and I'll have that for lunch next day. If you think comfort food would hit the spot, usually that's a stress or an emotional load, perhaps poor sleep, because comfort food is typically higher in calories and that tells us that probably your body is wanting those kind of additional calories, those extra calories, because you're deficient somewhere along the line when it comes to your energy, you haven't fuelled yourself properly. Cravings are not random, they are quite literally patterned. So how do you respond to cravings without spiralling?
• 14:03
  So I have a framework which I'm going to give you the option to have for free at the end of this podcast, listen till the end. But the rules are, well they're not rules, it's more of a framework, when you feel like you have cravings, pause before reacting. Remember hunger usually passes within twenty minutes. Check your hydration, think to yourself how was my sleep, how was my stress, how long was it since I last ate? Eat something balanced first, so protein and fibre.
• 14:32
  And if the craving remains, just enjoy it mindfully, don't feel guilty, just enjoy it, reflect later, don't punish yourself. The goal is not to never crave, it's to just kind of respond better and essentially get a plan in so you're not feeling like you're a complete failure. Restrictions will make your cravings worse, if you undereat, that will increase your hunger hormones. The same with mental restriction will increase food obsession, we never want to cut foods out, so if you're someone who loves a hobnob, then you can have a hobnob, it's just where does it fit in with our days eating. People who diet hardest often binge the hardest eventually.
• 15:14
  So we all know people who will go on stupid diets for a sustained period of time and eventually it catches up with them and they haven got a choice in it. And that is quite literally what I see all the time. You might be somebody who s like, Yeah, I cannot eat for a week. And then never to be somewhere down the line, you end up overeating. Or somebody s like, I m always on a diet, I m always cutting out foods, but they're still overweight.
• 15:38
  That's because at some point their body can't show up and they overeat. Your body doesn't learn discipline, it learns how to panic. It's a really important point. The long term goal is to reduce cravings without fighting them. We do that by structuring our food, so not relying on willpower, eating those regular meals, prioritising sleep, hydration, listening to our body s cues of recovery.
• 16:03
  When cravings lose that urgency, not because you're strict, but because you're fuelled. So the calmest eaters aren't the strictest, they're the most consistent. So we don't want to add loads of rules about what you can and can't eat and demonise food, we just want that consistency. So it's okay to have a pizza, but it's not okay to have a pizza every single day. So it's about just being consistent as possible, remember it's really boring when you work with a nutritionist.
• 16:32
  So to conclude, cravings are messengers, they re not your enemy. Listening first gives you control and ignoring them usually hands back control back to biology. So I want to leave you with a free hunger and cravings toolkit. If you want it, I d like you to email me paulthenutritionistuk dot com or you can message me on Instagram and just say to me I d like the free hunger and cravings toolkit and I will send it to you. It is just for clients typically and it is one of my newest resources.
• 17:12
  It s a whole toolkit which goes through how to manage cravings, why cravings happen, it s a bit of a cheat sheet and it s really, really helped my clients. So if you want that, email me paulnutritionistuk dot com or send me a message on Instagram and I will ping that across to you. I hope you found this useful, it s a little bit longer than usual, but there s loads of valuable info in there. Any questions let me know and I shall speak to you next week. That s it for this episode of No Forking Nonsense, where the fluff gets binned and the facts get served.
• 17:44
  If you found this helpful, share it with someone who could do some clarity from an expert. That's me, by the way. And make sure you hit follow so you don't miss what's coming next. And if you want more straight talking, no nonsense advice, come and find me on Instagram Paul the nutritionist. Until next time, eat smart, feel human again, and stop falling for the forking nonsense.
• 18:04
  See you next time.