"I just want sugar" - how to deal with cravings
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm wearing my special Rugby Warfare Roman jersey. SPQR down here, Marcus Aurelius' favorite quote here, What stands in the way becomes the way, and then Rugby Warfare. So, today's episode is going to be inspired by the stoics based on a question I had of someone over the weekend.
Speaker 1:So, I'm going to chat with a member and she was saying, Listen, I don't want to be cooking. Even the feeling of doing the dishes now, I can't get my head to do it. Cooking means more dishes, more problems. I've got nothing in the house, just got sauces here and there. I'm craving sugary snacks.
Speaker 1:I just want to eat simple sugary foods, high fat, high sugar foods. And yeah, I don't know what to do. So I was like, on your way home tomorrow, perhaps get high protein ready meal, you know? And then the user or the member saying, I don't know about that. Like, I don't know what to do.
Speaker 1:Is that good or bad? I think it's bad, you know, that kind of mindset. And it's important that we really take a step back here and it makes me realize as well, I need to reinforce these messages because there's a discussion about processed foods are bad. We think of like ready meals as do you remember those Rustler burgers back in the day? They weren't even burgers, were they?
Speaker 1:They were like plastic, I don't know, they were just horrendous. The high protein ready meals are now available, such as, you know, My Protein ones, you got the gym kitchen ones, you got the prep ones, they're fairly decent. Yeah, okay, they have preservatives in them because they need to last on the shelves, but they're high protein, you know the calories, they've got decent amount of flavors and stuff. And if you are on the go and don't have time, they're a perfectly reasonable choice because they're high protein, you know the calories in them, they're in a pot, can prepare in the microwave and you're done. That is infinitely better than snacking on chocolates all night, right?
Speaker 1:Of course it is. There's layers and there's like, there's levels to this, right? Obviously, a home cooked meal, wholesome, amazing meal is better, but is it realistic every single day or every single week? It's not. And for some of you, it is.
Speaker 1:You love cooking, and that's an amazing, like, like a hack. You know, if you love cooking all the time and you love cooking from scratch, it's amazing. Honestly, it should be quite easy for you to stick to things. But it brings me back to this interesting study that was done on the British public, asking them recipes and meals they like to consume and stuff, and it basically came that every person on average has about six to seven different meals they rotate around. So breakfast, lunch, dinner, it's just got the same six ish, seven ish meals.
Speaker 1:And there was another study done as well on behavior. So they sent them meal prepped foods every day for like the duration of the trial. And after the trial ended, they said, you know, do you want to keep having these meal preps? And seventy percent of people said no. But when you look at this, right, these people have been given these foods, and even in this trial, by the way, all of them still didn't eat the foods they were sent, because for some reason, the human condition is we've got everything prepared in the fridge.
Speaker 1:We know we're going to hit our macros with it, but maybe, I don't know, two out of 10 times, we don't want to have us in the fridge, we want something else, and we want something else that's a craving and we go for that. That's fairly normal, right? That's where the flexibility element is so important. We think we can rigidly go towards our goals. We think if I just had the meals cooked for me, my goals would be reached.
Speaker 1:Yes, it would be easier, but don't fool yourself because when you grab those meals cooked, want someone else. You want someone else. It's not really that's a problem. The problem is is a craving. You get cravings.
Speaker 1:And what is a craving? If we were to remind ourselves the difference between cravings and hunger, because they're very different things. Hunger is a genuine kind of inner response to that you are hungry, you need some food coming in, right? You need some energy. Craving is completely psychological.
Speaker 1:Craving comes when you've just eaten loads of food. Craving comes like any given time. And cravings go away when your thoughts go elsewhere. So when you realize that cravings disappear when your mind is elsewhere, you realize that craving is a product of thought, is a product of you thinking about something. So if you read some of the classic marketing books about how to get people to buy your products and stuff, they talk about how they want people to create an image in their mind of the product, and that image then creates a thought of you with a product, and that image and thought then creates desire, which is the same thing as craving.
Speaker 1:So it comes from this linked thought process. So that's why one of the tactics for cravings is if you have a craving for something, is to like phone a friend, go for a walk, try and do something, take your mind off things, and often that solves the problem, right? Going for a fifteen minute walk and help, phoning your friend for a bit, just eating something like super low calories, what you're doing is good, some fruit maybe. You'd have to figure out for yourself what's going help there. So if we realize craving is the issue really, craving is not fixed with food, right?
Speaker 1:This is the important part. Craving is not resolved by eating the box of chocolates because if there was another box of chocolates, you would keep eating the box of chocolates. If there's another box of chocolates, you keep eating more and more and more. It doesn't satisfy you. The satisfaction isn't in you being full, right?
Speaker 1:It's this desire. It comes from boredom. It comes from thinking you've gotta be doing more things. It comes from your mind just thinking of things you want and desires and pleasure and chasing pleasure all the time and the pleasure lasts moments and then it goes again and you want pleasure again and again and again. And it's this kind of anxiety about it.
Speaker 1:Same with people who vape all the time. People are literally vaping. They wake up and vape. They walk around and vape, vape, vape. They can't go without three to ten seconds without vaping.
Speaker 1:Gives them a quick hit of pleasure and then it satisfies them for five seconds and they go back again. There's a brilliant, brilliant author and the book is called Failure of Nerve, and he speaks about problems in families, right, and he goes deep into the relationships with families and stuff. But he said a brilliant quote in the 1990s. He said, If we were to get rid of smoking today, it wouldn't be it would be gone and that problem is gone. Smoking would be replaced with something else because doesn't treat removing smoking doesn't fix the underlying anxiety of the population.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. He's bang on. Like, that is exactly what is happening. There's this underlying anxiety, underlying boredom, underlying worry always, that's causing us to be thinking about things, chasing pleasure, to fill this gap that we're trying to fill or to cover the gap. That's where the work needs to be done.
Speaker 1:And that's where stoicism is very, very handy. It's an operating system for things like this. And there's a few calls on stoicism I've shared before, but the classic one is it's not events that disturb us, it's our opinion. So, if you have a craving and you feel like you've got to go and eat something all the time, we don't really question it. We just think, Got a craving.
Speaker 1:I better satisfy her with a bag of chocolate even though the last thousand bags of chocolate satisfy the craving because I would've kept going. We know that's not going to fix it, but I might as well try again, maybe 1,001 time it'll fix it. No. So we have to treat this at the root, otherwise it's going to keep coming back without treating it at the root is a problem. And I met someone on the weekend as well who worked in weight management, more NHS stuff, and she was even saying the same thing.
Speaker 1:She was saying, Hey, we treat patients. Some people is beyond weight management. It is psychological. I was like, It is all psychological. This entire thing is psychological.
Speaker 1:Understanding you need be in the deficit. And protein. Yes, we got the roadmap. But the day to day is psychological. We put ourselves in our own prison and we make it hard for ourselves.
Speaker 1:And sometimes we're not willing to do the analysis on ourselves. And you've got to do this analysis without judgment for you to learn about yourself. You can't be judging yourself. If you think, Oh, why am I always craving chocolate? I'm an idiot.
Speaker 1:I hate myself. You're never going learn about the craving. What is it the craving? Is it when you're bored? Is it when you're sitting in front of the TV, you start thinking, Do you know what?
Speaker 1:I want chocolate now. Is it a habitual loop of when you sit in your favorite chair or after the long day of work, or is it when you have a message you don't like? Is it when you feel bored and you should be doing something formal? Like, what is it? Where is the trigger?
Speaker 1:And that'll work from there, and you can start resolving this and you can start journaling your thoughts down. Slow yourself down. Let it reveal itself and don't judge it and you will learn and journal it out. Drink water, have fruit, realize this is a moment, realize it's a thought and you can't beat it with more thoughts about it. You can't fight it.
Speaker 1:Let it blossom and reveal itself and let it die. It's really hard to do it, but this is what Buddhism is all about. Buddhism is all about this, as humans, we are chasing pleasure. How do we stop it? Do we fight it?
Speaker 1:Do we fight it? Fighting it makes it harder, sometimes fighting it always in the battle, bam, bam, bam, bam, doesn't really help. What about if we let it flower in the mind, let it reveal itself and not try and touch it, not try and disturb it, not try and judge it, just let it pop into the mind and it might go naturally. Try that, it's called bear attention in Buddhism. So yeah, and another word for it is choiceless awareness, stop choosing, just have an awareness of what's going on, but stop choosing what's right and wrong, da da da da da.
Speaker 1:And to be honest with you, like this topic is very difficult to help people with because it's so unique in the sense that like the triggers are different for everyone and some people can relate, some people can't relate, you know, like the only solution is that you break things down into chunks of time and it's like, right, if you feel like washing all the dishes is too much tonight, just put them in the sink with enough water on to soak them so the next day it's easier to wash it, right, in the morning. Whether it's like, there's a famous Jim Rohn quote about like, how do you wash a plate of how do you you'd get through a massive stack of plates to wash. He's like, you can only wash one at a time. It's impossible to get through the stack in one go. You just wash one and you stack it the next one.
Speaker 1:Not one. It's just one at a time, whatever in front of you. So that's all we can do is we can just do what's in front of us. And that's the real thing to focus on. If we can do what's in front of us one day at a time, break things down, guys, that is the secret.
Speaker 1:If it is a secret, that's the secret. It's not that exciting, to be honest with you, but it is something that really helps. And imagine now your day to day, you think, I can't be bothered to do the dishes. I can't be bothered to cook. Break it down and do one plate tonight.
Speaker 1:I know it sounds stupid, just do one plate. And do you know what, sometimes when you just start one plate, you end up doing 10. When you start a two minute walk, end up doing fifteen minute walk. When you start saying, I'm gonna go and distract myself with, it's ten, fifteen minutes down the line. I'm going sound journal for one minute.
Speaker 1:You start journaling for ten minutes. Sometimes you've got to trick yourself. James Clear talks about this in Atomic Harbets. But anyway, I want to end on that. I want you to think about it.
Speaker 1:I want you to be aware today of your thoughts without trying to change them. Just be aware. If it helps you to write them down and post them in the WhatsApp groups, that would be amazing. I want to hear what you guys are thinking about in these scenarios. Like, don't give me all your thoughts.
Speaker 1:Mean, I want all of that. And share what maybe is an insightful thing you find. Is it a feeling you get to trigger something consistently? Is it where you are? Is it like a certain habit you haven't figured out?
Speaker 1:Over the next few days, I think I'm going to post my content from my habits bootcamp I did. It's a four part habits bootcamp, like one to two hour videos. Maybe I'll run, if anyone wants me to do it again, guys, I do it on Zoom. We basically go through the steps ourselves. It's from BJ Fogg's Tiny Harbots, which is amazing, but I've broken it down into four kind of Zoom chats and we can go through it together.
Speaker 1:So by the end of it, we've really got into our habits or a good habit or a bad habit, and we've got a system for it. So if any of you are interested in doing Zoom for that weekly, I can maybe look at doing it for you guys if the interest is there, but share some podcast clips on it. And yeah, that's it really. Day one of the week, one day at a time, break your tasks down. The theme of today is awareness.
Speaker 1:And on that note of awareness, get up off your ass, get your steps in, and also track. Because if you don't track, you're not gonna know what you're measuring, and you won't be able to know where your tweaks are coming. So that's it, guys. Have a good day.
