Why are food cravings so hard to predict and resist?

Food cravings are hard to predict and resist if you don't know how the mechanisms in your body work. Fitness trainer Chris Powell explains how your blood sugar and hormones impact cravings, and how you can resist and override them.

Transcript

00:00

The brain actually runs off about five grams of glucose every hour. And when that five turns into four and three, then it really starts pushing out those hunger and craving

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hormones. [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:15

Food cravings, they're hard to predict and resist if you simply don't know how your body works. Once you really start to understand

00:22

the biological mechanisms in our body, then we can really begin to control those cravings. And the reason being is that, you know, cravings are natural.

00:30

If you've got a brain, you're gonna get cravings. And our brain runs off of sugar. Once you understand that, this is like the starting point

00:38

for how everything else works. When the brain gets low on sugar-- so when the blood sugar in your body starts to get low--

00:44

your brain will naturally send out these hormonal messengers. One's gonna be predominantly on hunger, which is ghrelin,

00:51

and the other one, which is gonna be predominantly on cravings, which is called neuropeptide y. Now ghrelin tells you that you're hungry.

00:57

Neuropeptide y says, you want sugar and you want starch, because sugar and starch are broken down in the body really quickly and turned into sugar.

01:05

You don't crave a stick of butter. You don't crave lean protein like a chicken breast. No, your brain knows exactly where that really fast sugar

01:12

is, because it's hungry. And it's desperate. And it needs that sugar fast, because the brain actually runs off about five grams of glucose every hour.

01:20

And when that five turns into four and three, then it really starts pushing out those hunger and craving hormones. The blood sugar gets lower and lower and lower.

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Sure enough, those signals get stronger and stronger and stronger. Before you know it, they're not whispering in your ear. They're grabbing you by the shirt

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and they're shaking you, saying, you need sugar fast. And so that's why we give in to those cravings. When we understand the mechanisms there,

01:41

then we can really begin to manipulate and override those hunger hormones so that we don't experience them at all.

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And if you can control your hormones, you can totally control your body. [AUDIO LOGO]