Food addiction: defeat it by eating

article-2647054-1E6ED46F00000578-272_634x286 Many people write to me asking me for some advice against nervous hunger. I have already talked about it in abundance ( here , here and here , but they are just a few examples), but one of the things to investigate in my opinion, and that can really be useful to those suffering from nervous hunger or hunger pangs , is that when the our body asks for food (even if for the wrong reasons: desire for something, desire to stop our anxiety, anger, our frustrations with food), we only need to do one thing that makes sense: give it food. Therefore eat without immediately implementing any compensatory or corrective behavior of a conscious type . By conscious compensatory or corrective behavior I mean:
– eat less at the next meal or skip the meal (if we binge at lunch or in the afternoon, skip dinner or reduce to a salad)
– go on a diet, “hoping” not to fall back
– feel bad, guilty, feeling desperate, losing your temper even more with the idea of having lost control
– exercising
– using purges
All of these things not only help neither to defeat nor to control food addiction, but from my experience and according to what I have read in many blogs and books by personal trainers, bodybuilders, nutritionists and researchers, it exasperates her. Any conscious corrective or compensatory behavior increases stress and above all increases the sense of guilt. This is the worst thing we can do to our body, especially if we want to have a healthy relationship with food and our weight. Do you remember when you hear that “if you do it without guilt you won’t get fat”? Well, in a way it is. In the short term, our body doesn’t recognize those extra calories we give it as something negative. We are the ones who pull our hair out, having arbitrarily considered our daily calorie intake as a line not to be crossed. This is an essential thing to understand in order to allow the body the way, calmly and at its own pace, to develop its compensatory and corrective behavior, unconscious for us:
– decrease the sense of hunger naturally.
– increase the NEAT , that is what I call our passive energy activity, that is the thermogenesis induced by activity not associated with physical exercise
For this to be possible, we must reduce the load of stress from food addiction

How? Indulging it without guilt. By ceasing to consider food in watertight categories (this no, this yes, this is good for me, this is bad for me). And thinking, every time we fail, that not only is it not the end of the world, but it doesn’t matter in the slightest. The less importance we give it, the more our body will naturally decrease the sense of hunger at subsequent meals with its natural behaviors. To do this it takes time, but we can help ourselves as follows:
– if we often have attacks of sugar hunger, we increase complex carbohydrates (bread, rice, pasta, potatoes, whole grains) in the main meals
– we do not use sweeteners of any kind. even if natural (such as stevia)
– if we often have attacks of hunger for sugars, we keep bananas, dates, dried figs at home. raw carrots on hand. The body is asking us for sugar and we are not giving it to it in a more nutritious form, since if we then go out and eat five cupcakes it is not the end of the world
– we do not try to eat less if we are still hungry after the binge.
At first we will feel like monsters (my God, what’s wrong with me? Why am I so hungry?), Then, within a few months the problem will start to lose its gravity and consistency. There were times in my life when I put duct tape on the refrigerator. Now I leave the food halfway, I am not constantly hungry for chocolate, etc. It all happened naturally, exactly as I explained it to you. All this is an exercise of great indulgence that we do towards ourselves, and that will help us a lot also at the hormonal level. Try to trust and no longer treat your hunger as a problem to be curbed.