Areas › Your body › Food, caffeine and fuel
Some foods are formulated to be hard to stop eating. That is a design brief rather than a flaw in you, and it goes some way to explaining why one particular snack is the one you think about at eleven at night.
Knowing this moves the fight somewhere you can win it. Willpower at the moment of craving is a poor bet, and a decision made in the shop is a much better one. Keep it out of the house, or buy the small packet, or put it somewhere that takes effort to reach. Finding it hard is not weakness, it is the product working as intended.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Eat the good things We have provided for you and be grateful to God (Quran 2:172). Attention goes to what has been provided, which is a steadier place to eat from than what has been engineered.
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ كُلُواْ مِن طَيِّبَٰتِ مَا رَزَقۡنَٰكُمۡ وَٱشۡكُرُواْ لِلَّهِ إِن كُنتُمۡ إِيَّاهُ تَعۡبُدُونَ
You who believe, eat the good things We have provided for you and be grateful to God, if it is Him that you worship
Qur’an 2:172read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Cravings also have a physiological context that has nothing to do with character. Among 59 women, those under chronic stress showed a pattern connecting comfort eating, abdominal fat and a blunted stress hormone response, which offers an account of why stress steers people towards calorie dense food. The study was small and observational, so it describes a plausible mechanism rather than settling the matter.
Tomiyama AJ, Dallman MF, Epel ES. (2011). Comfort food is comforting to those most stressed: evidence of the chronic stress response network in high stress women.. Psychoneuroendocrinology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A craving that was engineered into a product will not be argued away, so the move that works is changing what is within reach.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Put a rubber band round your water bottle for each refill you want to get through today, and slide one off each time you finish it. Nothing to remember, nothing to buy, and you can see where you are at a glance.
Own brand products from large retailers were among the worst performers in these tests. A big name on the packet is not a quality check, however much it feels like one.
Skin prick and IgE blood tests find real allergies. The IgG food sensitivity panels sold direct to families have not been shown to measure sensitivity at all, and they tend to come back with a long list of foods to avoid.