How Do I Curb My Cravings? Try Scheduling a Cheat Day

This is a question common to dieting and the answer for many has been to use a little know strategy that is gaining popularity which is to add a "Cheat Day" to your weekly diet plan. This article shows you why you suffer through cravings and how cheating can help you overcome them.

Cravings can be both physical and mental and we will look at both.

Physical cravings are most commonly a response to blood sugar levels in your body. If you eat a sugary snack or a refined carbohydrate (white bread, baked goods, certain cereals, etc.) your body takes the sugar and moves it into your blood stream. This raises your blood sugar level which is a state of imbalance for the body and your body then releases insulin into the blood to clear out the excess sugar. This insulin response is often too efficient and empties out too much sugar leaving you with low blood sugar.

When you are in a state of low blood sugar your body tells you it needs more sugar/carbohydrate and it tells you this by causing cravings for these foods. This is how physical cravings begin.

But when answering the question, "How do I curb my cravings" you must also take a look at the mental side of cravings.

When you diet or restrict certain foods you often need to rely on willpower to avoid eating them. Willpower is a short term solution and if you have a large amount of weight to lose it can be difficult to sustain. Before long every dieter's mind starts to entertain thoughts of quitting the diet because they miss their favorite foods. This often leads to diet failure.

So what solves the craving problem?

You see that cravings can be physical and mental and the solution to curbing them is to diet smart and in a way that keeps your blood sugar levels steady and also gives you regular breaks from your strict plan.

The answer proposed by Joel Marion, creator of Cheat Your Way Thin is eat a diet high in protein, good fats and complex carbohydrates for 6 days of the week and then on day 7 have a "Cheat Day" where you happily indulge in any of your favorite foods without guilt: pizza, ice cream, potato chips, you name it.

The benefits are that during the week you are preventing blood sugar spikes and controlling physical cravings and on day 7 you are completely satisfying your mental cravings.

Can this work?

This is not just some crazy idea Joel Marion came up with, in fact this approach of "cheating" has been very heavily researched and proven to be effective in both the lab and real life (I will share a way to view before and after photos with you at the end of this article). The key is that the cheat day not only wipes out your cravings but it also boosts your metabolism in a big way and this added metabolism actually creates more weight loss during the week than if you were to suffer through without a break.

So I encourage you to learn more about how to schedule a cheat day, it might just be the answer you are looking for when you ask yourself, how do I curb my cravings?