More musings about cravings

After last week's cooking class, I headed to the local bookstore to find a decent book discussing the basics of nutrition. I didn't want at textbook and I didn't want to buy something that aligned too much with one focused diet. I ended up buying a book that I later figured out is the same person who taught Paula - the Wholesome Chef teacher! The book is called Integrative Nutrition and it is written by Joshua Rosenthal.So much of what I have been reading is the foundation of much of what Paula has been teaching us. I'm still reading it with an academic view (don't trust the assumptions without seeing the research yourself) but there is a great amount of informative information.

There is a whole section all about cravings. If you read my last post about cravings, you'll understand why this sentence was so powerful for me:

"We have been taught to believe our inability to stick with a diet is our fault, a flaw of our body and our will....To [stick with a diet] we must develop deep discipline over our natural instincts." (page 130.) And just a paragraph later "It's never the program's fault; it's always our fault. Or so we think. It never dawns on us that there's nothing wrong with us, that maybe the diet itself is flawed - that it actually sets us up to fail, and then unfairly lays the responsibility on our shoulders when we do." (p 130-131.)

"Cravings are the body's solution to underlying imbalances, and food becomes a kind of medicine to regulate our inner state." (p. 131)

Now, he goes on in some detail about what the different cravings may be signaling to you. Between the book, the discussion in the Wholesome Chef classes, and my musings, I think that my sugar cravings are a result of several things: a diet high on sugar, emotional eating (including boredom,) and habit.

While the cravings haven't disappeared since I've been making more healthy choices, they certainly have diminished in both the frequency and the intensity. I'm hoping that with my latest sweet class, I'll be able to really diminish the amount of refined sugar I eat.

One of the problems of trying to get away from sugar, your body just craves it more!! AAGGHHH... but the cookies I made are an awesome and filling way to healthily provide some food for those cravings!