Munch Moods

Do you experience times during your day when your body craves food? What do you reach for? Is it the nice crunchy apple or the biggest bag of refined, over-processed junk that you reach for? Given our recent conversations I would hazard a guess - that you, like most of the rest of the population reach for the latter. The question is why?

Actually there are lots of reasons -
you want to!
your blood sugar level has dropped and your body has gone into panic mode.
you've hit the alcohol and because alcohol is a depressant it depresses your normal "will power" and you can't help yourself.

So what can you do about it?

Well if you are restricting your calorie intake each day, your body may think it is starving - so will self sabotage your efforts to lose weight. If you think that missing meals is the way to go, your blood sugar will hit rock bottom and you will need to hit yourself with rather large doses of "sugar" to raise it again. The problem with doing that is the body then reacts by injecting large doses of insulin to counter the sugar increase and so the cycle begins again.

So how do you get off the sugar merrygoround?

Eat foods that release the sugars slowly into your bloodstream. For instance - eat some nuts or cheese with an apple. The protein and fat found in the nuts/cheese will slow down the absorption of the fructose contained in the apple - the blood sugar doesn't spike and your insulin can breath a sigh of relief.

You should also aim to eat some form of protein/fat/carbohydrate every 2-3 hours. Small "meals" more regularly will ensure you have more than enough energy to get you through the day. And if you can restrict those occassions when you hit the munch moods (ie., don't have a beer with your dinner) then you can stop the late night snack attacks. Note - if you can't burn off the carbs it will be stuffed into your fat cells - and you'll probably have trouble sleeping too, it makes me wonder why we continue to put ourselves in the situations. Control your munch moods and you are more likely to control your weight.