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Have you ever felt a sugar craving at 3 am in the night and immediately rushed to your refrigerator to eat a giant scoop of ice cream? Or do you feel like eating a huge, creamy, chocolatey slice of cake after finishing a heavy meal, even when you are full? If these regular sugar cravings are increasingly becoming a major cause of concern for your health, fitness and diet, then you need to evaluate, understand and work towards eradicating that cause. After all, if it is a recurring thing, this sugar craving might end up messing with your physical health.
Sometimes, we give into the sugar craving that our body is feeling, while other times, we restrain ourselves. While the latter is futile in the long run as not listening to your body is ultimately detrimental to your health and you will anyway binge on either sweets or something else later in the day, doing the former repeatedly means compromising on your diet. Instead of waiting for this intense craving for sugar and then thinking how to get rid of it, let us actually delve deeper into the causes of it and try to understand why exactly your body must be craving sugar.
1. Conditioning and habits – Sugar cravings have been associated with both physiological and psychological reasons. And one of the main psychological reasoning behind why you are suddenly craving too much sugar is because you are habituated to it. You might subconsciously look at sugar as rewarding and your mind and body have been trained to crave something that feels like a treat. If we talk in context of India, sweets are associated with festivals and celebration and hence you might feel the need to eat something sweet every time you want to celebrate. Scientifically speaking, sugary sweet foods might trigger the release of the feel-good neurochemical dopamine in your brain. More dopamine could mean more sugar cravings.
2. Eating a lot of carbohydrates and too little nutrients – Do you feel the need to eat sweets increase multi-fold after having pizza or a bowl of pasta or a lot of mashed potatoes? Well, that is because a big meal of carbs is basically a lot of sugar intake and automatically, makes your body crave more of it. It is also not a filling meal as all the energy from it gets absorbed by the body super soon, leaving your body asking for more sugar soon.
Refrain from having too much diet soda | Unsplash
– If you have the habit of relying upon artificial zero-calorie sweeteners, that is another major reason your body now craves more sugar. Artificial sweeteners are mostly sweeter than sugar and get you hooked on easily to the extremely sweet flavour. If you want to cut down on your sugar intake, complete dependence on artificial sweeteners can be detrimental.
4. Lifestyle – Are you feeling more stressed lately? Has your sleep cycle gone for a toss? And amidst all of this, do you have this tremendous urge to binge on all your favourite desserts? Well, it would be news to you that all of these are related. A stressful lifestyle hampers your sleep, which in turn pushes you to eat more sweets to keep the body energized. This energy is required to compensate for the lack of rest the body is getting.
So, if you suddenly notice that your craving for those ice creams, cakes, gulab jamuns and jalebis have rapidly increased, take a pause and think about the probable cause. Eat a balanced diet with carbs, proteins, fat and minerals, steer clear of having too many artificial sweeteners and have a clean lifestyle. These simple tips will help you a lot.
