#55 Why You Always Crave Food (And How to Regain Control)

Are you constantly craving food, especially sugar and carbs? Feel like you have no control over your eating habits? In this episode, Max Lowery and Shane Copeland dive into the real reasons behind food cravings—and it’s not about willpower.

We break down:
🔥 Metabolic Inflexibility – Why being stuck in sugar-burning mode keeps you constantly hungry
🔥 Emotional Eating – How stress, habits, and mindset fuel food obsession
🔥 Practical Solutions – Simple strategies to regain control and make fat loss effortless

If you’re tired of yo-yo dieting and want to finally break free from cravings, this episode is a must-listen.

Watch my The Cravings & Fat-Burning Masterclass:  https://www.neverdietagain.uk/register-podcast

Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/max.lowery/

Book a Food Freedom Breakthrough Call: https://www.neverdietagainmethod.uk/call-ig

Transcript

Max Lowery (00:00.015)
Do you feel like you're addicted to food? No matter how much you try, no matter how much willpower you have, you just can't stop yourself from eating sugar and carbs. If so, you are not alone. Most of the women I work with feel out of control with their hunger and their relationship with food. They obsess about what they should and shouldn't eat. They are hungry all the time. And when stress hits, food is the first thing that they turn to. Here's the shocking truth. Your cravings have nothing to do with willpower.

So if you're constantly thinking about food, if you feel like you need to eat every five seconds, if you feel hangry when you miss a meal, it is not your fault. Today, I'm going to break down the two biggest reasons why people crave food all the time. And I'll teach you to regain control so you can finally find food for you. So let's dive into it.

Max Lowery (00:47.662)
Hello, welcome to today's podcast. I'm Max Lowry, weight loss coach. I've been helping women over 40 lose weight and keep it off for the rest of the lives for last 10 years. I'm joined by Shane, who is the head coach and head of client success of the Live 360 program. Hello, Shane. Hello, Max. Good to see you, Yeah, so today we're talking about why you always crave food and how to regain control.

Because I've realized that this is actually a big topic that a lot of our clients, a lot of the women that I've spoken to the last 10 years essentially feel like that they've got no control with food, that they are obsessing about what they should and shouldn't eat. And they're always craving sugar and carbs. They also seem to have a habit of turning to...

food in times of stress and negative emotion. And it ends up kind of feeling like that they're addicted to food and some of them have used those words specifically. So Shane and I wanted to dive into that topic today and share exactly how we help our clients regain control and ultimately find food freedom to make dieting effortless, to make losing weight effortless and staying the way that you want much, much easier and maintaining it for the rest of your life.

What we're going to cover today are essentially the real reasons you feel addicted to food and what are the two main culprits behind constant food cravings. We're also going to give practical strategies on how to regain control and feel free around food. But I want to stress here before we get into it that lots of people believe that to lose weight, it's all about willpower, motivation, and discipline and basically putting loads of effort in. And this belief ultimately is going to stop you from

taking action potentially, especially if you failed so many times, because if you failed so many times, you've got two things going on. You've got this underlying fear of failure. Like you've just got the stack of evidence you can't succeed. And then you also think this is really hard to lose weight. I have to punish myself. I have to cut up my favorite foods. And essentially what happens is nothing happens. It's just a lack of action. And you blame yourself for having a lack of motivation when an actual fact, the fact that you believe

Max Lowery (02:48.885)
It's too hard means you're not going to do it. And the fact that you have got so many, so much evidence of failure also means you're not going to do it. So this is not about willpower. Long-term weight loss is not about motivation and willpower. It's about addressing the real reasons why you're stuck. And we're to be going deep into that now. So the most fundamental reason that people end up craving food is because their bodies are stuck in what's known as sugar burning mode, which isn't really a scientific term. I'm going to.

I'm not going to lie. The more kind of scientific term would be metabolic. They're metabolically inflexible. And this is something that I've been talking about for a long time. And you may hear other people talk about it in the realms of keto, but I really want to stress here. This isn't just suddenly about cutting out carbohydrates and going keto. This is not, that's not going to fix your problem, but essentially if your body is stuck in sugar burning mode, it means that you're going to be dependent on a constant stream of food.

to function, have energy levels, to be productive, to feel good and not to feel hungry all the time. And the Western environment and the Western lifestyle has essentially promoted this kind of problem where there's a constant stream of food, the snacks left, right and center, there's food like products, you go to the petrol station, there's all the food next to you, there's snacks in the office. It's a big, big problem. And for us, I don't know what you think, Shane, but snacking and constantly grazing on food

is problematic for a number of reasons. I'm interested to hear because I have experience with this. I can think back to a specific period, but have you, do you think you've ever experienced being metabolically inflexible? I think when I was working in finance as a stockbroker, I was definitely heading down that route. I mean, if you look at photos of myself, then I was putting it beginning to put a bit of weight. was looking quite tired and essentially I was eating

a breakfast snack, lunch, snack, dinner, and probably even more than that. Like there was a culture of excess in our office. We'd be doing eating competitions. I remember I was paid a thousand pounds when I was 19 to eat like a whole chunk of wasabi, which was pretty full on. So yeah, I definitely started and I was drinking kind of not Coca-Cola. My go-to was the lemon San Pellegrino. So good. but yeah, I definitely started to feel hungry all the time.

Max Lowery (05:15.338)
And I was putting on weight and my energy levels were all over the place. My productivity was all over the place. My focus was all over the place. How about you? Yeah. I the same thing actually back when I was a vegan, which isn't bashing on the vegan diet works for some people didn't work for me. think a combination of being vegan, very, very high carb diet, not enough protein, and also trying to put on weight and following the old bodybuilding advice of eating like six or seven times a day. Meant that anytime I went more than two to three hours without food.

like cognitive function gone, energy levels just tanked and I just needed that constant supply of food on hand. Otherwise I, I wasn't really functional. Yeah. So essentially in this modern lifestyle, it is possible to eat regularly throughout the day. And there's also been a bit of advice. I think that was a dietitian in the eighties who said, if you want to lose weight, you should essentially eat little and often so that you never experience hunger. so

There's combination of reasons and societal and environmental factors that have led to people eating every five seconds. And ultimately that means that they are constant on a constant stream of food and they're not able to tap into their stored energy, which is body fat and glycogen, which is stored energy, stored carbohydrates. And to put this into perspective, I remember I did this equation when I had a low body fat percentage, I had like 8 % body fat.

Right. And I think that was like seven and a half kilos of fat throughout my body, which roughly equates to, think, 30,000 calories worth of energy that I've got to tap into in the form of fat that lit. You know, if I didn't eat for a month, I could probably survive off of that. And I have a low body fat. So the more body fat that you have, the more energy you have to tap into. And that's why we've got to this stage in human evolution. Ultimately is because of that capacity, but

Our bodies are nearly always going to prioritize the food that you're eating. If you're getting a constant stream of food, it's not going to tap into your stored energy because why would it? harsh times might come. That's a last resort. So when you're not able to tap into your stored energy reserves, if you go through a few hours without eating, you're going to have an energy crash. You're going to have low focus, low productivity, low mood. You're to feel hangry. I hate that term hangry.

Max Lowery (07:33.994)
I really do. think it's, it's become socially accepted and normalized. That's, that's like, that's a thing. I've never, I don't think I've ever experienced hangout. I have. Not anymore, but big time in the past. I mean, maybe having like a long time ago, but it's not just me, you know, I'm not some kind of special case, but this is exactly the same thing that ends up happening, having with our clients. I just.

don't feel that obsession about food. I have to eat. Like, yeah, gets to like lunch time. I'm like, yeah, I could eat now. And I'll go and like take my time and prepare a nice meal. And even if I, for whatever reason, don't have any breakfast, lunch, and I end up just having one meal that day, which doesn't happen that regularly anymore, when I do eat, again, it's not a case of, my God, I'm starving. I need to eat everything in the fridge. It's just like, yeah, I'm ready to eat now and I can eat. So.

When you are metabolically inflexible, when you are body stuck in sugar burning mode, there's going to be some clear signs. Essentially, you're going to feel hungry every hour or two hours. You are going to essentially think about food all day long. If you go without a meal, you're going to feel lethargic, cranky, hangry. You're not going to be able to focus. You might also get headaches and it's going to make long-term weight loss very, very challenging. You might lose weight in the short term, but the weight's always going to come back up.

So this is the number one thing that you need to address and we help our clients with if you want to lose weight and keep it off. So how do we do that? There are a few main ways in which you can, and we help our clients become more metabolically flexible and transition from being a sugar burner to a fat burner, a fat burning machine. The number one thing is to eat larger meals less frequently. So part of the issue is people are eating little mini meals

frequently and Sometimes they're doing this because they want to lose weight. So they're like, I need to lose weight So therefore I'm going to eat less at meal times But what that means is you're hungry all day long. You're obsessing about food all day long It might not be during the day, but it might be in the evening things go to shit. So Eat larger meals less frequently. So I'm talking two or three square meals per day Like big satisfying meals. Next thing to do is to fill up on protein and fiber which keep you fuller for longer

Max Lowery (09:57.694)
And, know, everyone knows to do this, but what I've realized is that most people don't actually do it. Like they think they're doing it, but they're not doing it. And when we kind of show our clients how much protein they need to eat to make fat loss effortless, they're like, okay, this is nowhere near what I was eating before. And when they actually do it, they're like, I'm just not hungry. Like I literally, I'm not hungry all day long and I feel full, I'm satisfied. So protein and fiber is incredibly powerful.

You don't want to drop the snacking. And I heard a great phrase the other day, which is a BLT. I think it's from like Weight Watchers or something. But stop the bites, licks and tastes. Which we could be talking about something else there, but no biting, no licking, no tasting, because it all adds up. And I think people have kind of got used to, a bite of that, a taste of that. It all adds up. And honestly, we've gone into this in lot of detail and I'll remind you.

On average, you're going to be consuming four to 600 calories just in bike bites, licks and tastes, just snacking throughout the day. So eliminate the snacking. And then the last thing that you can do is be as active as you can, you know, get lots of steps in, walk more, and that will help you process the sugar, deplete your glycogen stores, transition into fat burning. and it just will improve your life in so many different ways. Have I missed anything there, Shane?

Not that can think of. Those are the exact same principles we give our clients. So there you go. Fill your boots. Nothing fancy. No, it really isn't anything fancy. What works is the basics done consistently, but unfortunately most people don't really understand what the basics are. And there are a few things which stop people from being consistent with them, which we're going to go into. So that is the first step, right? You want to transition from being a sugar burner to a fat burner. And that is going to mean your

less hungry, you're not obsessing about food all day. You're just in control with your eating and your relationship with food. And that is the most empowering thing for a lot of our clients. All right. The second thing is we then need to address the psychological and emotional reasons why you might turn to food in certain situations. Most people don't address this. Everyone knows that they turn to food. Like if you turn to food and times of stress and negative emotion, you know that you do it, but people are

Max Lowery (12:23.824)
heading towards just the usual meal plan workout to fix their problem. If you don't address this, you'll get results when you've got motivation and willpower, but the weight will always come back on. As soon as something happens in your life, whether it's stressful situation at work, whether one of your children is playing up, you're going to turn to your usual coping strategies, which is with food. Okay. I think it's also really important to understand that sometimes people don't label themselves as emotional eaters.

but they're aware that they turn to food in times of stress or when they're bored or as a reward. So are you rewarding yourself with food because you've had a stressful day? This still all counts. Yeah, I wanted to jump in and say that, because you were saying, you know, if you're an emotional eater, you know, actually, as you kind of alluded to, not everyone does. They think they wouldn't label themselves as an emotional eater. And yet they would come to us and say, I feel like I need to have something in the evening to unwind. Like if don't have a dessert or a snack, then

I don't feel like I've relaxed at the end of the day. Yeah, for sure. I like, I regularly hear the term banded around on social media or with potential clients. If like, I'm, I'm addicted to food. I can't have sugar. can't have sugar. And I don't really believe that. I think the first issue is what we've already discussed is that they're stuck in sugar burning mode. So they'd need a constant stream of food. And then the second thing is that. Sugar or food is serving a very specific purpose. So.

The question we always ask our clients is what is the food doing for you? So I want you to ask anyone that's listening to this or watching this now, I want you to ask yourself now, if you struggle with emotional eating, what is the food doing for you? Is it a painkiller? Is it numbing your, how you feel? Are you avoiding negative emotions? Are you procrastinating from stress? Is it an escape from your

busy, hectic life? Is it a punishment? Are you using food to punish yourself for the situation that you're in? And it's really important you understand what the food is doing for you. Because when you understand that, then you can potentially start to incorporate strategies which will, or other ways in which you can process that emotion and that feeling and get the need fulfilled with something else. So,

Max Lowery (14:51.418)
If you reward yourself with food at the end of a stressful day, ultimately what you're looking for. So the one is to, to have food and the need is to feel less stressed. Okay. So what else could you do to feel less stressed? You could do some breathing techniques, do some journaling, go for a walk, have a conversation with a friend, stretching meditation.

There's a million and one things that will help you feel less stressed, which will help you fulfill the need that you have. Ultimately. Yeah. It's Christian right here. That replacement has to happen. If you just try and remove the food, then you're just trying to white-knuckle your way through it. That need is still there and inevitably you'll end up turning to the food again at some stage. A hundred percent. That's exactly what I was about to say. I think the issue is most people apply.

willpower, motivation to this, right? I'm just not going to eat when I feel stressed. I'm not going to eat when I feel lonely. I'm not going to eat when I feel sad. But ultimately the need is still there. And so you must learn to fulfill the need in a way that doesn't involve food or alcohol in a way that doesn't make your life worse. So this is a process. This doesn't happen just because you've listened to this podcast. It doesn't even happen when you've signed up for our coaching program. It takes time.

We are, this is like the crux of what we're helping our clients with on a day to day basis, week by week basis, month by month basis. It gets better gradually over time with practice consistency and constantly reminding yourself of why you need to change your coping strategies. And the thing is, you know, we've had clients who've worked with us for, you know, a year and under certain circumstances, certain situations when it's like layers and layers of stress, like

grief in the family, lost your job, you're injured, they will often still return back to that very, very familiar coping strategy. So that's not to say that what we do doesn't work. It's just, this is hard. it's hard even when you have support and accountability. So if you're trying to do this by yourself without sounding sarcastic, good luck. It's, really, really hard and very, challenging. well, the extra challenge here is that it becomes like a self-perpetuation.

Max Lowery (17:12.514)
perpetuating situation where you are turned into food because you feel negative emotions, you have negative thoughts. And then whenever you if you expect to be perfect with this, like replacing these coping mechanisms, you inevitably end up engaging in more negative self talk and guilt and shaming and berating yourself, which further amplifies the feelings that make you want to eat in the first place. It becomes this vicious cycle if you're not able to step out of that and

employee or deploy a little bit more compassion. And that can be really hard to do when you're just going on your own. A hundred percent. And that's where exactly all our clients, when they first start working with us, are stuck. They're stuck in that vicious cycle, which is essentially a negative feedback loop. And things are just getting gradually worse and more ingrained. And it takes something completely different. It helps. It takes proper support and accountability to snap out of that and get you into the virtuous cycle, the positive feedback loop where

Gradually over time, everything's just improving instead of getting worse. So this is a really big topic. Let's just kind of summarize what we've spoken about. But essentially, when it comes to emotional eating, you want to understand what your triggers are. You want to understand what leads you into eating. You want to know exactly what the food is doing for you. And you want to understand exactly what need is being met. You then want to have a list of things that you can turn to.

to help you fulfill that need. And this is gonna be personal for everyone. So as a bit of homework, I want you off this episode or even right now, give it a pause and write down what are the things you know help you feel more calm and help you process the emotions. For me personally is my breath. Like your breath is the most immediate way that you can change your physiology and psychology. You can do it whatever you're doing. You could be in the middle of a meeting.

about to start panicking and feeling stressed and you can just change your breathing and it will change your state. I would say that is like, should be the go-to for most people. Then there are other things like walking for me, getting out, like just spending time outside full stop immediately makes me feel better. And obviously exercise and all the other kind of hobbies that I have or my kind of stress relieving activities. How about you Shane, what yours? Yeah, very similar.

Max Lowery (19:33.15)
The breath is the first thing I go to in any circumstance. If I've been like rushing around and I have a client call, I'll do some breath work before. So I calm down. I do on an airplane. get a little bit claustrophobic if I'm on the window seat. So I'll use my breath. honestly, a few different things, but breath, the breath is the first thing I go to. And I think unless you've tried it out, you hear that and you think the experience of being like in a really high stress state is so visceral and it's so uncomfortable. You're like, yeah, like I just breathe differently and that's going to help. Yeah, it really does.

so yeah, maybe we share some techniques at some point, specifics. If you want to go into understand more about what I'm about to share, you should listen to the episode with Ed, the mindfulness coach, but I essentially had a bit of a kind of a, we'll call it a breakdown. I'm not sure, really sure what it was whilst we were renovating a house. had a death in the family and I basically was on this heightened stressful states, whereas essentially having panic attacks and

What was happening as I was making the panic attacks worse with catastrophizing and my breathing and all this kind of stuff and with practice with therapy with mindfulness coaching with the help of Ed I Was able to kind of stop the panic attacks in its tracks using my breath and using Awareness ultimately so the breath is So powerful. I mean even just a basic one. All right, so basic one is box breathing so

It's four seconds, inhale, four seconds, hold, four seconds, exhale, four seconds, hold. Okay. That's like the basic one. And what's the other one? There's another one where it's, is it four, four, seven, eight. So four second, inhale, seven second, hold, and then an eighth second exhale. Generally the longer the exhale compared to the inhaled more relaxed or sorry, you will feel more relaxed if your exhale is longer than your inhale. Yeah, exactly. So

Shorter, sharper inhales activate the sympathetic nervous system to the flight of flight response and longer, slower exhales. So longer exhales, then inhales will activate the parasympathetic, which is kind of slow, slow down. So anything, anything where your exhales are longer than your in-house is going to help you feel less stressed. And the key here really is to catch yourself feeling stressed. Like how do you feel within your physiology? How do you feel within your body?

Max Lowery (21:54.366)
when you are stressed and when you're about to turn to food. For me personally, I feel a tightness in my chest. I feel butterflies in my stomach. I feel my breathing goes a bit out of whack. I feel my shoulders tense up and I've got really good at now recognizing that and feeling that within my body. And I know as soon as I feel that I can just override that with my breath. And that's happening like multiple times throughout the day. Cause I do have a habit of winding myself up.

and being a bit manic and not, find it very difficult to relax. So it's, it's been really powerful for me to do that. So, so far we've told you if you want to stop craving food, you need to shift from a sugar burner to a fat burner. You also need to understand why you turn to food in times of stress and negative emotion and what is the food doing for you? Because when you don't need the food for that, to feel a certain way anymore, you won't crave the food.

Right? So that's two ways to stop craving food. The third way is to stop dieting. Honestly, dieting makes all this worse. Dieting can, you know, if you go through periods of restriction, guess what? You're going to crave food even more. You're going to obsess about food even more. You're going to train your body to not essentially trust itself and trust you to give it what it needs, which means it's going to be on high alert and crave food. it's going to make everything that we've described worse. It's going to make you

more dependent on sugars, it's going to potentially cause worse emotional eating. And as Shane described earlier, that vicious cycle, which just creates more and more stress, which means you need more and more food to feel less stressed. And ultimately, the more you diet, the more you lose weight, put it back on, the more that you fail, you just develop a core belief that you cannot succeed at weight loss.

And unfortunately that is probably the biggest block that people have when they potentially are thinking about signing up with us and working with us. It's not because they don't believe what we have is going to work is like useful. It's the fact they don't think it's going to work for them. Even though we've got all this testimonials, we've got in-depth conversations with countless women in exactly the same situation. When someone has this core belief.

Max Lowery (24:15.897)
that I cannot succeed. Essentially, it's a case of they're different from me. I've tried everything. It's my genetics. My family's obese. You come to these conclusions and once you believe that about yourself, it can be very, very difficult to get out of and it ultimately impacts. It becomes self-fulfilling. You never really try anymore. Whenever you do try, you don't try properly and it's a horrible place to be because you want to lose weight and you're

kind of obsessing about it and not liking to see what you're in the mirror, but equally not doing anything about it because you don't believe it's possible. Yeah, it's a difficult situation. mean, people, don't think people are quite aware just how much your beliefs influence your behavior, even if it's not a conscious thing, like you will act in a way that validates your worldview, your beliefs. And if you fundamentally believe it's not possible, then you will act in that way. I think it's important to really hammer home at this stage. We're talking about two main things, which

is psychological pain or discomfort and physiological pain or discomfort. like fatigue, just low energy in general, and then all these uncomfortable feelings, thoughts, emotions. And food is a really effective way to solve both of those pains if you're metabolically inflexible and you have no coping mechanisms in place for the psychological stuff. until you address these two things, like it does feel like an uphill battle.

And the odds are stacked against you. So it's understandable you have that belief. But it's because you haven't addressed the fundamental causes that in reality, this is why I don't like the conversation around discipline. If we take person A and person B, person A is someone who is metabolically flexible, has decent coping mechanisms in place, sleeps well, all that lovely stuff. Person B is the opposite, metabolically inflexible, reliant on food for both constant energy and emotional regulation.

It just feels so much harder for person B to lose weight until those things are addressed. And just telling people to be more disciplined isn't really an honest or a helpful take because it does feel significantly harder in that situation.

Max Lowery (26:21.739)
Anyone who tells you that the only reason you're not losing weight is because you don't have enough discipline has no idea what they're fucking talking about. We've called them a number T where I'm Run a mile. You know, anyone on social media who says you just need more willpower, more motivation to lose weight. They ultimately don't have the understanding or the knowledge on how to address the nuance, the nuances that are involved with weight loss. So

run a mile, unfollow them, do not sign up for anything that they are offering, because it's just, it's not true. And the example that Shane there has really highlighted that. This is not a willpower or discipline thing. This is about setting yourself up for success by making sure your physiology and psychology are working for you rather than against you. Cool. So hopefully this has been a useful episode.

We have actually created a metabolism and root cause assessment. what we, and the idea of this assessment is you fill this in and you'll know if you're metabolically flexible or not. And you'll know exactly which of the root causes you're struggling with. And that is really, really powerful. That can be the first step in you actually taking proper action and efficient and intelligent action on why you're struggling with, you know, with or without our help.

So just click the link below if you would like to take part and fill in the assessment and find out if you are methodically inflexible and what are your real root causes and why you're struggling. Thanks again for joining, Shane. We'll see you same time next week. Cheers, Max.