Brush Your Teeth to Avert Food Cravings
Studies have shown that social isolation can cause individuals to eat too much as well as triggers a desire for increased sugar intake. When you feel bad, it is easy to eat badly, which makes matters worse. If you’ve gone through most of your life using food for comfort, or as a mechanism to numb out from stress, your brain may be conditioned to reach for food when a stressor or anxious feeling hits.
Plan on managing your food choices and portion sizes. If you’re reaching for a snack, choose high-energy, minimally-processed, low-carb options that will satiate you. Lack of attention span is closely linked to the onset of food cravings when performing a repetitive or monotonous situation.
Feeling like you need to nosh on something?
If you are not giving your attention to what you are doing, you are much more likely to feel bored and opt for boredom eating. Here’s some guilt-free options for managing boredom eating:
- Brush Your Teeth – Although there is no quantified evidence that brushing your teeth triggers satiety hormones, it is a good distraction and anything you eat will taste funny.
- Do Something Fun – You know there are all sorts of habits that you live with every day. Snacking is just one of them. If you need to better manage boredom eating, find something fun to do that will keep you busy and boost feelings of excitement.
- Make Sure You’re Hydrated – When you begin to feel hunger, your first impulse is to find food. Mild dehydration is often mistaken for hunger pangs, so stay hydrated.
- Add a Protein Snack – Make sure you eat the right amounts of fiber and protein at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Don’t give in to low-nutrition snacks or fast foods that add a lot of calories to your daily intake.
Learn to fend off bad food choices by being more mindful…
Food cravings can strike suddenly, when the easiest options available are likely to be bad for your health. Appetite is your desire to eat food like justifying a quick trip through the closest drive-thru. It is distinct from hunger, which is the body’s biological response to a lack of food. This explains why you can have an appetite even if your body is not really hungry for the food you crave. Eating a high protein diet can help you control your appetite by increasing the release of hormone PYY, which has been shown to reduce hunger. It has also been shown to reduce the hunger hormone ghrelin.
At MRC, we understand you may not be able to control when you feel bored or excited by a situation, but you can control your reaction to it. Let the creativity that boredom naturally triggers work in you favor. This includes identifying non-food distractions.
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