When people diet, they tend to get hung up on the snack foods that they eat. They tend to go to extremes, either depriving themselves of snacks completely or eating junk food. Such habits create addictions and sabotage your diet, as opposed to concentrating on healthy snack foods that kill cravings. Here we will discuss cravings and their causes as well as how you can combat them.
What Is a Craving?
A craving is when your body seriously desires something that it perceives it wants, usually for energy purposes. When you have a craving, it is normally for sugar or starch in the form of carbs. This is because when you diet, several things happen. First, you tend to restrict calories and deprive your body of carbs and sugar, so the body goes into craving overdrive in an attempt to get revved up enough to work out or even function. Normally, people fight such cravings until they finally respond by binge eating on the wrong things.
How to Combat Cravings
Combating cravings for sugar and starch is done by placing good sugars and good starches in place of the bad. This not only tells your brain you are perfectly satisfied with the good sugars and starches but also provides you with better nutrition. Fighting cravings requires a bit of preparation and awareness; but if you go about it in this clever way, you won’t miss the unhealthy snacks, and soon you’ll be eating better than you did before.
Healthy Snack Foods That Kill Cravings
If you are an avid candy eater, then you will do well to carry some raisins, either white or black, on your person. These will provide healthy sugar and stabilize blood glucose as well as push back your sugar cravings. You would also benefit from carrying around some sweet potato chips to address your cravings for salt and starch carbs. The taste and texture of sweet potato chips will kill your potato chip cravings.
Dried fruits of all kinds are a staple for healthy snacking, just be careful with certain dehydrated fruits, especially pineapple, because they may have an added, non-natural sugary coating–pineapple being the biggest culprit. The best dried fruit option is dried apricots. You can also make sweet potato fries in the oven and eat them warm.
Raw vegetables are another of the healthy snack foods that kill cravings once you get used to them. They are yummy, but watch what you dip them in or put on them. A sugary dip like ranch dressing can severely undermine your weight loss efforts.
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