Episode 219 - Psychology : Why restricting food makes you crave it more (and what actually works)

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:06

Welcome to the Ayurveda and Psychology podcast. I am Charlotte Skoxberg, psychologist, Ayurvedic practitioner, and yoga teacher. This is a space where we explore the path of self-realization through the physical, mental, and spiritual spectrums. In each episode, I share practical tools from the ancient wisdom of yoga and Ayurveda, as well as the modern approach to the human mind of clinical psychology. In order to help you reconnect with yourself, understand your nature, and live with more awareness. In this episode that focuses on psychology, I want to continue on my quest around cravings and why we eat really. I want to speak about what we could call the psychology behind cravings. Hey there! Are you listening to these episodes because you're interested in Ayurveda and or psychology? Have you signed up already for my newsletter? Did you know that there's a whole community behind Ayurveda and psychology? If you sign up for the newsletter today, you will get a free gift from me. I have an Ayurvedic Lifestyle cookbook, and if you sign up right now, you will get a free recipe sent to you from that cookbook. You find the details in the show note. Basically, if you are human, you most probably have cravings of some kind. When it comes to cravings, let's say, food-wise, often we even use the expression of eating your feelings. So what's behind that? Is it how it works? Is it so that whenever we have cravings, it is a question of some kind of emotion that we don't want to feel? Well, let's see. So today I want to continue where I started, kind of last week actually, on this idea that when we ruin our metabolism, we do it through our misaligned behaviors around eating. If we would only ever eat for the original reason to eat, none of those conditions or the problems we get would actually happen. There wouldn't be all these metabolic disorders that they speak of today. We wouldn't have problems with weight gain. We would not create issues in our digestion that would lead to an impaired digestion that progressively over time leads to all kinds of chronic health conditions. I want to clarify something before I continue, because I believe that this is really important and interesting to understand. When it comes to the various problems that we have with food, with eating, with our metabolism, it's really very similar to the kind of problems that we have when we speak about self-image. What it tends to be is that there's this sea of ingrained ideas about who we are and what we should or should not be doing that then dissociates us from something that would be quite spontaneous, quite intuitive, and dare I say, just organic way of being. Well, to answer that question, to open that uh can of worms, I would say yes, in a perfect world and probably 200,000 years ago, that would be the reality of things, but the way the world functions today, I wouldn't say that what we crave is what we need. Let's be very clear on something. Your body is not asking for a specific emotion in a coded way when you have a craving. However, your brain is really selecting from learned reward pathways that have been successful in shifting your emotional state in the past. What do I mean by that? We are no different to animals in that sense. It's basically conditioning and neurochemical effects. It's not necessarily that food has this uh intrinsic emotional meaning. It's more complicated than that, I have to say, because there is an aspect of balancing something out within the craving, in the fact that if we would look at it from an Ayurvedic perspective, each and one of the tastes so a taste, right, like sweet, sour, salty, pungent, bitter, astringent, is built up of something. And Ayurvedically, this means that the tastes are built up of the elements. For instance, the sweet taste is a combination of the element of earth and water, the two most dense elements. We could therefore understand that when we crave grounding, when we crave something that makes us feel a little bit more settled or actually bring heaviness into our system, we can tend to crave sweet things. Indeed, we go for sweets when we have high levels of stress and we need to really soothe our nervous system. In the past episode, I mentioned that there's actually a biological need to stimulate the vagus nerve in order to shift from, well, fight or flight to towards rest and digest. That happens when we eat, which is also why we can feel this craving of putting something into our bodies when we're feeling stressed. We might also tend to reach for something that's more like salty or even crunchy when there's a different kind of emotion. Maybe there's anger that we're trying to actually suppress, maybe there's frustration. But the reality is that we all have our own ideas of what it is we need at what time. And we have kind of a comfort thing, right? A comfort food, which will depend 100% on your past experiences, your conditioning. Maybe have you heard of Marcel Proust, the author, and the famous Madeline cookie, or it's not actually a cookie, it's a small, soft kind of cake ish thing, like a sponge cake, but ooh, if the French would hear me when I say this, a Madeline is much more than a sponge cake. Basically, Proust and his Madeline is a direct association with a beautiful memory from childhood, which he goes instantly to when he smells even, I think, or at least eats a Madeline cookie or cake. And so the conditioning that we have that is linked to some kind of food is going to be the determining factor really, not so much if you if you crave this, it means that, if you see what I mean. There is also, though, an aspect of the time of the day, and for sure, for women, time of the month, of their cycle as well, that will tell us something about cravings and also, more importantly, have us indulge in the craving or not. I would say that the further down the line towards the end of the day that we go, the more we have a tendency to lean into our cravings and maybe also feel like we need some kind of thing. We have more insulin sensitivity in the morning, which makes it so that we are less prone to reach for something because our blood sugar is really very stable. And so I would say that our tendency towards feeling cravings happens more in the afternoon and in the evening than in the morning, but they can happen in the morning. And I would actually say that, now, this is not necessarily 100% scientifically studied what I'm about to say, but in my logic of if I understand how we function when it comes to our metabolism and our insulin and even just our cortisol, which are all of these important aspects of having cravings, in the early morning, in the early part of the day, if we are experiencing cravings, I would more link this to high levels of stress. So for instance, if you wake up in the morning and you're already quite stressed, when your cortisol naturally should be high, but that it's very high, it means that you probably need to regulate your cortisol release in the body. And so if you're experiencing cravings at that part of the day, I would link this to high levels of stress. If we notice cravings more specifically in the mid-afternoon, I would link this more to, let's say, an uneven flow of energy, right? So the crashes in the mid-afternoon tend to be therefore linked more. It's it's once again, it's stress levels, but in a different way, right? So for instance, I will experience crashes in the afternoon, which will tend to create cravings around maybe caffeine or sugar or fat to get the energy up, if I do not have a good sleep, and maybe also if I am eating things that my body is struggling to process. Typically, a mid-afternoon or late afternoon craving can actually come from the fact that you ate something at lunch that created very a very high kind of rise of blood sugar in the digestive period after eating that then will make you crash and crave something to pick the blood sugar up again. And the later that we go into the afternoon, the evening, and the night, I would more tend to think that cravings are associated with dusk and the arrival of the night, and so the potential of rising of anxiety. Now, each and one of these, maybe if you paid attention, are all very much connected to stress hormone cortisol, whether it's a question of impaired cortisol, let's say early in the morning too high, whether it's due to that, but there's a crash that comes in the afternoon, or that in the evening, because we don't allow ourselves to prepare nice and gently for the night and go to bed early, cortisol is going to rise all of a sudden again. So our stress levels are really a key when it comes to why we have cravings and how to deal with them. Now, I have said before on this podcast, and I might have said it in a different way, so let me turn it again in a new way. Only when we are aware of something can we actually do something about it. This means that as long as you keep doing something, even if it's not serving you, there's something in it that you are not yet grasping, that you're not really conscious of. And so you need to shine the light of awareness on onto it, and then you can start to make changes. And this goes, of course, for our behaviors around cravings as well. And the good news with that is it really is quite mechanical. We can repeat a pattern that we are not really aware of. Maybe we're just aware of the outcome, right? Like so, for instance, addictions and why do I keep smoking, why do I keep uh drinking, or whatever it might be, because we're not really aware of the actual procedure of how the behavior comes. And we can repeat that for many, many, many, many years, and it feels as if it's impossible to do anything about it. But as soon as we shine the light of awareness on it, when it becomes clear, it is just a question of choosing something else to do so you don't trigger the behavior. It really is the Pavlovian dogs in that sense. Earlier on, I mentioned that it really is quite similar to the whole idea of self-image, because actually, when it comes to all these behaviors and therefore our personality as well, it's kind of this collection of strategies that we have developed at some point in our life when they served us, right? And if we become aware of a mechanism that we have, something that we keep doing, we can look at it, change it, and have a different outcome. Kind of narrows down to just positive and negative reinforcement, right? This conditioning. Now, it sounds very simplified when I say it that way, and it is, but of course, being humans also means that it is also quite complex because the way we function, right, is that the more we do something, the more habituated we become with it, right? It's something that you practice is something that then becomes easier to do. So when it comes to learning something, we've nailed that one and understood what that means, but when it also comes to something we do unconsciously, it functions the same way. This means that we also become very habituated into feeling a behavior that we have as being who we are. It's actually called a subjective bias, if you will, the yogis would call it ignorance, right? It's it's the idea of the tinted glasses that we wear that colors the reality that we have, but we've forgotten that we wear those tinted glasses. So for us, it's just this is just what reality is. And of course, it confirms itself, which is why it reinforces it. So for instance, this is how the whole addiction functions, and I've I've spoken about addiction several times. For instance, there's my episode number an early one, number 25, I believe, that specifically speaks about the habit loop, how that works. And I also have the episode number 73 that then speaks about this, but with food and control. And so if you want to tap into those a little bit more, you can after this go and listen to those two episodes there. So keep in mind that the way you look at yourself and the way you look at reality and the convictions that you have when it comes to your food intake, let's say, is not necessarily an objective reality, but more the perception that you have developed as if you've had pink-colored glasses on. Now, if in that perception you are, for instance, convinced that you will fail, then you will not put a lot of effort into things because you're convinced of this failing. And of course, then since you don't put effort into it and you fail, you take that as proof that what you thought was indeed the truth. Except that actually what was going on was that you took actions that went in alignment with the conviction that you had. And that is the only reason, actually, that it had that same outcome. And so there are certain things when it comes to cravings that can be exactly these convictions, except that we're not speaking about the failing, but it can be, for instance, that I eat cake when I am sad. I seek stimulants when I'm frustrated. Actually, one thing that I think I've said this before, and it comes to mind whenever I speak about it, is just how influenced we have been from the Hollywood scene over the years, right? So I'm sure that many of you recognize this image of some kind of movie about heartbreak, where the person who is feeling heartbroken sits on their sofa with a big jar, right? Because it's Hollywood, so it's like these huge jars, like a pint or more, whatever, of ice cream. And that's what they do when they are heartbroken, is that they eat ice cream. Now, this is something that purely comes from the Hollywood scene. Yet I am quite certain that a lot of people out there, having seen this over the years when they were growing up in all the movies, started developing that same behavior. And so it became a thing, maybe even before it became a thing for themselves, that quote unquote, eating ice cream is what you do when you feel heartbroken. Just like when there's some kind of situations. Of frustration, which can be now what comes to mind, same thing, right? The Hollywood scene. And for me, what comes to mind more specifically is very much the series Mad Men, because it was such a beautifully made series, like aesthetically, of the drinking a whiskey, having a cigar or a cigarette, and drinking whiskey. And that was kind of linked to business situations, right? Or it could even just be that the worn businessman who goes into the bar, right? Into those what you see in the movies, like this typical American bar, and then they ask for a whiskey and whatever that comes after. And so people associate this, and then almost, even though maybe it didn't exist in them before, because they've seen it so many times on the movies, it becomes this action that they would take when they feel certain emotions. That can be frustration, or it can be maybe even just feeling lonely. What do I know? So the way our cravings work is indeed linked to biological things, but it is very much a question of this conditioning of the way we see ourselves, what we believe to be true, and that being also a memory of what those moments have given us in the past. Why do we crave more easily sugar than broccoli? Yes, there's ways of explaining this with the sugar and the dopamine and so on and so forth, but of course, how much have we not been conditioned to have sweet things either when we are upset as children, because it's soothing, or of course linked to some kind of happy event like a birthday party. And so when it comes to cravings, the way we function with this, this habit, this conditioning, is not new at all. And maybe, did you know that the tobacco companies bought up a lot of the food companies because they know perfectly how to create an addiction. And so we become addicted to eating things. And I'm not even going to say addicted to food because often it's not actually food. So there's a part of your cravings that is absolutely outside of your control, honestly. When I say this, it's to also tell you that often we hate on ourselves, right, for not having enough willpower. But it's actually far beyond willpower when it comes to why we have cravings and why we have them at certain moments. But it doesn't mean that there's nothing you can do about it. On the contrary, the reason I'm telling you this is because the negative thoughts that we have about ourselves when we believe that it's about willpower and that we can't do something, we can't stick to our like go with our willpower, right? Is that it tends to actually reinforce the habit loop in itself. You see, a habit, which is what the craving is, really, has a triggering event, then comes the behavior, and then comes the reward, which is exactly what we're looking for. Now, if we therefore then feel as if we failed something and that our willpower is not strong enough once we've indulged in it, actually what that is in itself is to restart the trigger in the first place of something that makes us feel a way that we don't want to feel. So by just acknowledging first and foremost that your willpower doesn't have that much to do with it, that there's forces far beyond what you can do yourself in the moment that play in when it comes to cravings, might also make you feel a little bit kinder with yourself when you actually do it. And instead of focusing on doing it again, looking at what are the steps that I can take in order to break this habit, because that's really very much what it is, and I will speak more about that. So, having said this thing about that we might feel bad about what we do, which will therefore reinforce the trigger and so we start doing it again, brings me on to another layer of this whole thing that makes it even more difficult, and that is restriction. The more we restrict, actually the more we want. It is a crazy concept, but it's absolutely true, and it's true in all areas of our lives. It's been highly used, of course, in marketing. The more expensive something is, the more desirable it becomes, right? The more difficult it is to just reach for it, the more desirable it becomes. In love, of course, you know, we say the that the distance uh makes the heart grow fonder. Or even more clearly explicit, the French have the saying that fuis-moi and je te suis, suis-moi et je te fui, which means basically run away from me and I will follow you. Follow me and I will run away from you. And so, of course, the recipe for disaster is when we restrict something that we at the same time emotionally have linked to well-being. And so basically find ourselves somewhere in between a rock and a hard place. You know what I mean? It's really anything that you are addicted to, but that you also know is not good for you. It creates attention inside of us. This is important to remember. And what more recent studies, actually, when it comes to behavior in the human brain and so on, has shown neurobiological and neuropsychology, is that the quite traditional ways of getting rid of an addiction are not very effective. The relapse rate is usually really quite high. And that is because this is not the best way to change a behavior. So let me also then biologically explain why this idea of restriction is not very effective. For me, there are two reasons. Firstly, our brain has not changed, right, over the past 200,000 years, which means that restriction only in the brain can mean one thing, and that is that there's not enough to go around. Scarcity. If there's not enough food, for instance, we will therefore be heightened in our vigilance when it comes to finding food and then also keeping it to ourselves. So today, when we restrict, it's not because there's not enough around, but that's how the brain functions. And so that's absolutely not going to make it easier to stay away from something. But then, secondly, by just removing the item from your site, we only really deal with the addiction in the short term. Because unless we really deal with this craving, the chances are that the next time we're presented with something that we've restricted ourselves from, we will go over the top. Those cookies that I make sure that I don't have at home, and then all of a sudden, because I've been restricting, restricting, restricting without actually trying to understand anything behind it, and then I'm presented with those same cookies, I will eat 10 of them. Look at your love life. Just because you've had failed relationships, it's not necessarily gonna be the right solution to say, I'm staying away from the opposite sex or whichever gender you are into, it doesn't matter. I'm staying away from the kind of people that I'm attracted to. It's not gonna solve anything because at some point you are going to stumble upon a person who corresponds exactly to those trigger points, and that tends to spiral into even more difficult relationships. Can you relate to that maybe? Alright, so there are solutions for this actually, and brace yourself because you'd be surprised at just how simple it is. Um I was about to say easy, it's not necessarily easy, but it's simple. And so first and foremost, understand this. You might have heard it before. We tend to go for and uh be drawn towards what feels good and move away from what feels bad or what feels painful. So that's uh the survival part of our brain, simply to do so. We don't want to feel pain, which is why we reach for anything that makes us feel the opposite of that. And with that very simple statement, researchers actually started using mindfulness to change people's behavior. It's not a new thing in itself either, because of course, if we look over towards the East and with Hinduism and Buddhism, these are practices that have been used as long as humans have been around, basically. It is to learn to tune into what is going on inside of you, this kind of interoception that you feel what happens in your body, you will soon actually begin to notice that certain things or situations have a direct impact on the inner state. Those of you who've read the book or watched the movie Eat Pray Love might remember the instruction that she gets when the meditation master in Bali, I think it is, tells her to smile with her liver, right? It's it's kind of this idea that through these practices one learns to go inside of the body and actually feel the organs, feel everything that's going on inside of the body. Now, you don't need to get to that point because that probably takes quite a lot of practice to learn how to smile with your liver, even though I just love the phrasing of it. However, what you can do is that you can become aware of two very simple reactions of your system to one situation or another, and that is when something feels like contraction, or on the contrary, when it feels like openness and release. I am certain that when you think of something that really makes you feel negative emotions, like a bad memory, or even something that you do not look forward to, you can feel how your whole being kind of braces itself, right? There's a contraction there. And then if you would all of a sudden think of something completely opposite to that, maybe you think of someone that you love, or let's say you think of your pet, right? Your loving dog, for instance, or just something, the idea of being on a beach on a tropical island, all of a sudden you notice how the body reacts as well, just to the thought of it. Actually, these conditionings, which is really what it is, right? Because we've learned how to react to them because the body is actually preparing itself for something, are the basis of what is used in most behavioral therapy techniques, even things like hypnosis. And it's used to reprogram basically how we relate it to something. When you try really hard, right, when you struggle to do something, you notice that a sensation of the contraction, the kind of right, that you know the when you go to the gym and you're lifting something heavy and there's this like ooh, right? There's there's a effort in there, right? Remember the word effort. That is the contraction. When there is something that comes with ease instead, something that has no effort whatsoever in it, you notice the release of tension and a sensation of just vast openness. This is actually something that I use with my patients in psychotherapy as well. For instance, if we are gonna go and deal with a feeling that we have that is linked to a situation from the past that is uncomfortable, we can use a positive thought, memory, sensation, as a way to be able to deal with the emotion that's still kind of stuck in the past from the present moment because as we go into thinking about it and we can feel the contraction happening in the body, and then all of a sudden we make ourselves reminded of the present moment, of what is actually going on now, there's an automatic release of tension, there's an openness that happens. Depending on the therapeutic tool that's used, this could even just be called to reframe, right? To to change the way we look at something. And in each and one of those kind of techniques, it's actually comes down to this one same simple thing. It's the holding, the contraction, the effort, and then changing the narrative, if you will, and noticing how it creates a sensation of openness. And the thing is, your brain will always prefer openness to contraction. For the simple fact that, well, it's easier. And a craving is a promise of openness as opposed to the contraction that we feel when we experience the trigger to the craving. Do you see? Let me interrupt the episode for just one second and draw your attention towards your own well-being. Have you considered therapy? Have you thought about it and not sure if it's for you? Well, I have the perfect formula for you. You can actually sign up for a free discovery call with me first and foremost, and then choose if this is something that would work for you. From there, you can choose to commit only to one session at a time, or you can get a discounted prize as you sign up for a five-pack or a ten-pack of therapy sessions. Find all the details and even buy them straight away, if you wish, in the show notes. So, why do I say that this is a solution for us? Well, first, once we understand what it actually means to crave, we become aware of our behavior and the reaction of it, right? So remember how I said when I started out today that things that we keep doing that might not be good for us, quote unquote, but that we keep doing it means that there's a part of it that escapes us that we haven't understood, that we haven't integrated, that we haven't looked at with awareness. So as soon as we shine the light of awareness, the fact of understanding this is what happens when there's a craving, we already have a little bit of distance to it. It has a little bit less of control and a grip on us. So first and foremost, just understanding what this craving is and the idea of the contraction and the openness changes a little bit how much the craving might control us. And secondly, actually, the exercise that I want you to understand is going to help you in that moment, is that it's the same exercise as with a lot of things. It's learning how to be with discomfort. If there's one thing that is going to create more resilience in us, whether it's in our physical muscles or learning how to do that exercise day in and day out, even if it's uncomfortable, whether it's the emotional resilience to situations where we might be in a conflict, or something mental of let's say that it's a question of studying, the more we can learn to embrace that discomfort and not trying so hard to get out of that place, the more resilient we become. So when you learn that a craving is a moment where there's a trigger that creates contraction inside of you, and that the craving in itself is a promise of openness, all of a sudden you can look at what's happening with a little bit less of this urgency to do something about it. No, it is not necessarily that you absolutely need that piece of chocolate. It is that there is something in the now that creates tension and contraction inside of you, and the idea of the chocolate is a promise of openness. All of a sudden, there you have a little bit more of a space, you know? Like the saying of Viktor Frankel. Between a stimulus and a response, there is a space, and in that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. So, one of the things that I find, and this is a kind of um a tip from me to you, an advice on how to deal with cravings and how to learn maybe how to remove them or at least change our behavior with them, lies in exactly this understanding. When there is a craving, tell yourself you can have it in 20 minutes. You can even put an alarm, right? What that means is that during those 20 minutes, there's a whole lot of stuff that's going on inside of you, and it It might ever even be so that once you come to the end of that 20 minutes, the craving is gone. A very simple one that I have practiced without knowing that this was uh linked to this kind of understanding, right? Is the fact of saying that once you've finished a meal and you might want to go straight away saying, ooh, shall we have some dessert? I have always been told, because it's also part of the eating process, right? Wait 20 minutes and see if you still feel like having dessert. Simply due to the fact that what they say, right, is that when you eat, it takes about 20 minutes for the satiety signals to go to the brain and say, actually, I'm satisfied, which is why when you eat too fast, you tend to also overeat more easily. Anyway, when you've finished a meal and you go, hmm, I'd love some chocolate pudding, I'd like some dessert, wait 20 minutes just to see once the satiety signals come to the brain, have they come actually? Or can do you have room for more? And it's the same thing actually as when with a craving. And this is the same thing with the craving, whether it's putting something in your mouth that might be sweet, salty, whatever, as for instance, going for that cigarette or having that drink. Can you wait 20 minutes? It's also very useful when it goes to I want to send a message to that person right now. Can you wait 20 minutes and see if it's just as urgent in 20 minutes? So this idea of what cravings kind of come from is a conditioning, it is also biology, and it is an understanding of how to deal with tension inside of us. So it's not so much about willpower, and it's actually also more than being mindful, it is about learning how to be with yourself in moments when you would wish to check out from yourself, learning how to be with discomfort, allowing yourself to learn how it is to feel safe, maybe in a moment where you would want to escape and then actively choose a different response. It's kind of teaching your brain that it doesn't have to escape, it doesn't have to run away from something. Nothing's urgent right now. And one really good tool from the ancient practices of Ayurveda, when it comes to this, and it goes for all kinds of these cravings actually, is the hunger satisfaction meter, which is something that I use in my program with people, because one of the very first things that we start doing as soon as we start working together, no matter what your condition or issues are, is your relationship with eating, your relationship with hunger, and the kind of items that you choose to eat. And the hunger satisfaction meter is a mindfulness actually tool where you are evaluating your hunger levels before, during, and after every time you sit down to eat something. And I know that I've said this on the podcast before, but one of the incredible things is that when you start doing this, it begins to affect other areas of your life. Like my famous patient who all of a sudden reduced her smoking just because we were focusing on her food in this sense, and I didn't even know actually that she was a smoker. And so there you go. Your cravings are not in control over you. And it's not that much about like your body needs this right now. It is far more emotional and condition-based when we go for one thing or another. Thank you for joining me in this episode of Ayurveda and Psychology Podcast. If this content resonated with you and you feel ready to go deeper in your healing journey, you can book a personalized session with me or explore my programs at the website. You find the link in the show notes. You can also follow me on Instagram at iurveda.psychology where I share rituals, tips, and weekly reflections. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with someone who might need it or leave a review. It helps this community to grow. I'll see you next Friday with a new episode. Take care and stay grounded.