When you are on a diet, there is no doubt the hardest part of it is trying to stay strong and resist the temptation to give in to the food cravings that your body appears to be calling out for! Half of the battle is in the nutrition that you put in your body, and the other half about having the mental toughness and awareness to resist the call for unhealthy junk foods! Don’t worry, you aren’t the only person struggling! Here is how to avoid giving in to food cravings throughout the day.
Make sure that eat some protein in the mornings because it will help to stabilise your blood sugar levels and prevent you from crashing before lunchtime. If you can stay strong until lunch, then that is half of the working day successfully navigated thanks to some breakfast protein!
Write out a big to-do list for yourself for the day ahead, and it will give you something to look at and tasks to focus on when you start to get those junk food cravings. Snacking occurs when we don’t have anything to do, so make sure that you always give yourself something to do on the list!
Even if it makes you seem anti-social, try to avoid heading out for coffee breaks and café visits with your school friends or colleagues. If you don’t trust yourself not to indulge when everyone else is, then just take away the opportunity for you to be in the wrong place!
Change your walk home from school or work if you know that you are going to past a bakery or a KFC on the way. The physical sight of these kinds of places are enough to start those intense cravings off, so do your best to eliminate them from your line of sight.
Get into the habit of eating every meal at home at the table rather than sat in front of the TV. Doing this treats eating more like a job than a pleasure activity. If you sit in front of the TV and eat, you are much more likely to overdo things and eat more than you should, along with running to the kitchen for extra snacks!
Push back the time that you usually have dinner, because if you have it too early in the evening, you run the risk of getting food cravings close to bedtime. If you can have your evening meal at 8pm rather than 6pm, you be much less likely to have to wrestle with annoying hunger and cravings later on. And you don’t want to be eating too close to bedtime, because laying down and trying to digest your food is never a good thing!