#010: Why you crave certain foods & what to do about it

If you’re anything like me, knowing why urges and food-cravings arise AND that it’s possible to reduce their intensity sounds great and hopeful and positive—especially if you’re not actually experiencing an urge right now. Everything seems totally manageable in theory, right?

But when you’ve had urges to eat or cravings for those Bliss-point foods for a long time, navigating an urge in theory and actually doing it in real life can be very different experiences.

That’s why I want to finish up this episode with four tangible, practical ways to support yourself as you practice allowing urges using the strategies we covered in episodes 8 and 9.

And these are techniques I’ve seen work in real life—they’ve helped people who are struggling with bingeing and overeating, including when they’ve been trying to find a way out for years or even decades.

Welcome to the YoYo Freedom Podcast.

This is the place to learn actionable, step-by-step tools and strategies to help you stop bingeing or overeating and start feeling relaxed and confident around food, 

so that you can show up for your life on your terms.

I’m Gemma Keys and I know first hand what it’s like to feel out-of-control around food and trapped in the pain of binge eating and body-shame.

There is a way out. 

Keep listening to discover your path to food freedom.

Hello and welcome!

In the last two episodes, we’ve talked about full on urges to eat and how to get through them. You heard in detail about how to use two really effective tools in episodes 8 and 9.

That was like an emergency rescue plan.

But now we’re gonna move on to why allowing yourself to fully experience urges is worth it and how it can change the long-term landscape of your eating

In this episode, you’ll learn WHY you desire the foods you overeat or binge on so much, and why you never seem to reach that point of having had “enough.”

As a side note—have you ever noticed how the wanting is often so much more intense than the enjoyment you get when you’re actually eating the food? There’s a reason for that too.

And you’ll hear how you can ramp down those urges or cravings using simple, practical strategies that have already been successful for real-life people.

So that you’re no longer taken over by overpowering urges to eat a bag of freshly baked pastries or cookies from the store that’s pumping out all those tantalizingly irresistible smells …, 

… or a double burger and fries meal on a quick stop off at the drive through on the way home from work … which, of course, it’s never quite enough … so that fast food meal ends up becoming a snack before dinner.

Let’s start with a whistle stop tour of where the urges come from and why they’re there.

The human brain is wired to seek out what feels good.

For example, food, warmth, shelter, community, and sex.

All of those things make sense, right? Because when they’re not readily available, we’re in trouble. 

In other words, our evolutionary survival was dependent on a determined focus to go out and get those things.

A strong desire to feel warm and dry and well fed and accepted as part of a group—followed by a blast of, “aaah, that’s nice” when we got them.

So far so good. But, ironically, a problem arises when those things we seek out become just too nice—they feel too good.

Our brains haven’t evolved nearly as quickly as the world around us has changed.

And, let’s face it, we’re surrounded by a lot of stuff that’s designed to make us feel really good!

A sweet treat has morphed from a bowl of freshly picked berries, to a multi-layered Candymania ice-cream sundae.

A meal from, say, a fire-roasted antelope is now more likely to be a Fully Loaded Stuffed Crust Meat Feast pizza.

Food scientists have even identified a Bliss Point, which is the name for the perfect combination of ingredients—especially sugar, salt and fat—in a food that makes it the most enjoyable to eat and the most difficult to resist. 

So the rush you get from eating ultra-processed food like ice-cream or pizza really can mess with your head!

It’s a brilliant money-making ruse to get people to buy more of your product if that’s your business, right? But for those of us on the other side of it—those of us who find the food more and more difficult to resist or stop eating—well, it seems a pretty manipulative strategy to me.

Now for a slightly closer look at what’s actually happening in the brain.

The main chemical in your brain that causes you to seek out food—or other pleasurable substances or situations—is a neurotransmitter called dopamine.

Going back to our ancestors again for a moment, imagine searching for food and coming across a bush laden with delicious berries.

After those berries had been found and sampled, and then eaten and enjoyed, the brain released a little rush of dopamine that caused a desire for more berries—in other words, that little shot of dopamine meant the berries were recognised as being delicious and set up a cycle in which they’d be sought out again in the future.

And that’s great when it comes to recognising what helps us humans survive and thrive.

The problem comes when the pleasure reward is exceptionally fast and intense. Think of those ice-cream sundaes and stuffed crust pizzas. The rush from ultra-processed food, particularly sugar and refined flour, causes a way larger dump of dopamine to be released in the brain.

It starts off feeling AMAZING. And the release of dopamine starts a cycle of desire that causes you to want more.

I’m guessing you’re pretty familiar with that feeling of wanting more—I know it very, very well, that’s for sure!

The spanner in the works is that the brain wasn’t designed to experience such a rush of pleasure, It has a careful system of balance between pleasure and pain—a bit like a see-saw or those old fashioned weighing scales where you had to ensure each side held an equal balancing weight.

So when that intense rush of pleasure comes, it’s as if the brain is set off-kilter. It needs to do something to rebalance—to reduce the pleasure to a more standard or manageable level.

And that something is called downregulation. It means adjustments happen inside the brain to make sure it can’t get such a high of pleasure from the same substance again.

So, the next time the pizza or ice-cream are eaten, as well as less dopamine being released in the brain, there are also fewer receptors to recognise and register that dopamine. 

The brain has made ingenious adjustments to ramp down the pleasure response to those very same foods.

But we still remember how good it felt to eat the sundae, and now we’re programmed to want more and to actively seek out the ice-cream. What do we do? When we get it, we eat more of the ice-cream an attempt to recreate the same feeling of pleasure we got the first time. What started as a small scoop of deliciousness becomes polishing off a pint tub. Or a couple of slices of pizza become a fully loaded super sizer. 

And each time we eat more to try and recapture that moment of bliss, the brain downregulates further—it makes another readjustment to reduce the pleasure in order to maintain a more stable neurochemical balance. 

Yet the desire—the anticipation of the pleasure we’re going to get from the food—well that stays

Before we know it, eating the ice-cream or the pizza doesn’t really feel good at all. BUT, and this is the kicker, we feel miserable if we don’t eat it.

And that’s where the craving starts—the feeling of desperation and intense desire or craving for certain foods to just feel normal—almost always accompanied with a sense of unease and a sort of generalised dissatisfaction with life.

Do you recognise that cycle? I certainly do!

If that all makes for slightly discouraging listening, I get it.

And there’s also good news! The brain can readjust to reset that pleasure-pain balance.

So there is a way to reduce the intensity of cravings and urges to eat.

It can take a little time, but it happens! And this is how.

It ties back to the strategies we covered in episodes 8 and 9 about how to make it through urges to eat—-how to feel an urge in your body, become familiar with the sensations that come with it and how long they last, and any other characteristics of the urge.

The aim is to build the ability to experience an urge to eat without feeling scared or apprehensive, and to create a pause before reaching for food. 

Because, it turns out that, if you can let an urge to eat be with you and not respond to it, the chemical landscape in your brain gradually shifts.

The more you can get close to an urge, feel it in your body or get to know it using the tools we covered in the last two episodes, the more your brain will become re-sensitised to lower amounts of dopamine release. 

In other words, the intensity of wanting the food will go down and you’ll be able to experience pleasure—in all it’s forms—more easily. 

With practice, you’ll be able to feel an urge without eating the food at all and, eventually, the cravings will ease away altogether.

As a quick side note, if what you’re hearing about dopamine is sparking your interest and you want to find out more, I’ll link to a brilliant book called Dopamine Nation in the show notes. 

If you’re anything like me, knowing why urges and food-cravings arise AND that it’s possible to reduce their intensity sounds great and hopeful and positive—especially if you’re not actually experiencing an urge right now. Everything seems totally manageable in theory, right?

But when you’ve had urges to eat or cravings for those Bliss-point foods for a long time, navigating an urge in theory and actually doing it in real life can be very different experiences.

That’s why I want to finish up this episode with four tangible, practical ways to support yourself as you practice allowing urges using the strategies we covered in episodes 8 and 9.

And these are techniques I’ve seen work in real life—they’ve helped people who are struggling with bingeing and overeating, including when they’ve been trying to find a way out for years or even decades.

The first is to create snippets of time for things you enjoy.

I know life can be super busy, and you might think pleasure or fun is something that has to wait—wait until the weekend or pay-day or when you feel better about yourself.

However, it’s worth noting that an enjoyable and stimulating environment has been found to be protective against many different forms of addiction.

I’ve noticed two things.

One—finding something to enjoy doesn’t have to take a huge amount of time

And Two—just knowing something fun or pleasurable is coming up helps—the anticipation in itself, can put a smile on your face and increase your resilience.

That’s why one of my regular posts on Instagram and Facebook is called “Food for the Soul” — I love to share the small yet significant moments in my week that have created genuine pleasure and are absolutely nothing to do with food. 

If you’d like to check them out, you can find YoYo Freedom on both instagram and facebook, and I’ll add links to the show notes for this episode at yoyofreedom.com/10.

And if you’re not sure where to start—if food has been the main source of pleasure for you for some time—well, I get that. Creating a moment of pleasure, a reward, or a way to feel better can be a key role that overeating or bingeing plays. 

So if you’re looking for tips on how to begin, check out the YoYo Blog, How to Maximise Pleasure in and Beyond Food. You’ll find a link to that short read in the show notes for this episode at yoyofreedom.com/10

The second tool that will support you through urges is to track what urges feel like for you.

It really is the case that the more you get to understand how an urge shows up and exactly what it feels like for you in terms of physical sensations, emotional pull, associated thoughts and characterizations, the easier it will become to move through each urge.

You’ll also begin to notice how urges change over time and get easier.

Episode 8 introduced the idea of the 100 Urges tracker which offers a really simple format to track urges.

Again, you can go to the show notes at yoyofreedom.com/10 for links to that episode and also to download the 100 Urges tracker.

The third tool is to plan in advance for specific times when urges are most likely.

As you track your urges, you’ll begin to recognise patterns in the times or situations they’re most likely to arise.

Once you have that insight, you can begin to plan ways to support yourself during those times.

For example, you might plan a snack to be available in advance. You might plan a rest—perhaps with your eyes shut—for 10 minutes when you know you’re likely to feel depleted. You might plan for how to introduce a moment of pleasure that will give you a boost—-or to go for a walk, chat with a friend, or stroke your cat, or write a poem.

Think of it as an experiment—finding what will support you most at times when you might otherwise turn to food.

And the final tool is to offer yourself a simple reminder.

A reminder that the urge won’t be with you forever, and that every second you can stay present with it and feel it in your body counts as a step forward.

That the urge could well be coming up because there’s something you want or need that’s beyond the food, and the more you become familiar with urges—tune into them and listen to the messages they hold—the closer you’ll get to being able to meet any deeper needs or desires that they might be pointing to.

I still experience the occasional urge to eat foods that I know will not end up feeling good. And I can’t tell you the freedom that’s come with understanding that urge is simply an arrow pointing toward something else that needs my attention, something else in my life that’s slightly off balance and I’ve probably been ignoring.

To wrap up, you’ve heard about why and how the brain operates pathways of desire and reward that cause us to seek out food—-and you’ve also heard about how those pathways can become hijacked, especially be the highly processed foods that are available all around us.

That wanting—-those urges or cravings for foods like cookies, ice-cream, crisps, bread or fries—-can get pretty intense.

But there is a way to ramp down that intensity and greatly reduce the power urges have over you. And now you’ve got a selection of tools to choose from that will help you do just that.

That’s it for today’s episode. Thank you for listening.

I hope you’ve found this episode helpful. Subscribe to The YoYo Freedom Podcast for more insight, tools and support as you pull back from bingeing, overeating or yoyo-dieting and step into your most authentic, vibrant life.

And, if you liked what you heard, it would be wonderful if you’d take a moment to rate this podcast on whichever platform you listen on.

Thank you so much! And Bye-bye for now.