ARTICLE OF THE DAY

As a low fat cooked food Vegan, I once ate tons of of grains, beans, vegetables and other vegetarian food at meals. I would often push away from the dinner table feeling stuffed, but rarely would I be satisfied for long. Within an hour I would be back at the pantry, looking for desert, although my stomach hadn't even finished digesting my last meal. The reason, I know now, is that I wasn't getting the simple sugars glucose and fructose found in fruit which tell the body that its needs have been met. If I wanted to achieve craving control, my desert, or better yet, part of my meal, would have had to of been fruit. These sugars fuel every cell in the body, including muscles and the brain, and are critical for energy and satisfaction.Today I feast on bananas, mangoes, dates, and other delicious fruit. I finish my meals with a full stomach, but also complete satiation from the sugars. I have complete craving control. The number one cause for cravings on a raw food diet, or on any type of diet, is failure to eat enough calories from carbohydrates. You ideally need fruit to feel satisfied. If you've not eating enough calories from fruit, you will stray eventually and eat unhealthy food. Got a craving? Eat fruit. Want cake? Eat more fruit. Nachos got you tempted? Stuff a banana in your mouth. Make sure your caloric intake meets your needs. ( See Nutridiary ).The times of greatest temptation are when you're hungry, so eat more fruit! Keep Your Fat Intake LowIf more than 10 percent of your diet comes from fat (the average raw foodist eats 60 percent of calories from fat(1)), you're going to have some problems achieving craving control. Most of the reasons to avoid fat are in the health department in the long run, but they will mentally affect your ability to function as well. First we need to look at what fat is. Besides being unhealthy for you in large quantities (atherosclerosis, for instance, is essentially caused by too much fat intake) , and carcinogenic in a heated state, fat is basically a numbing agent. Some food is called comfort food, but it's really more of a sedative. Fats make you emotionally numb because they require so much of the body's energy to digest that the mind is left running on whatever can be spared.When many people improve their diets, their meals are considerably less straining to digest and this frees their mind up for more creative pursuits. But with their numbing agent gone, people need to learn to deal with their emotions instead of burying them under a sea of fatty oblivion.Fat intake needs to be kept low to stop the emotional seesaw effect of dietary change from occurring. If your fat level drops a bit, and you start to get overwhelmed with emotions, you'll start having problems pretty quickly. This is no way to maintain craving controlMore than likely, you'll turn to those old, familiar, harmful foods to numb yourself. You're doing your diet and mind a disfavor by keeping the fat intake up. Keep it low, address your emotions and make peace with them, and move on. The Mental Side of Craving ControlEven if you've got all of the above dietary criteria down, you can still easily fall back on an unhealthy diet if you haven't tackled your mind. Even if the body is completely satisfied in both sugars and calories, an untended mind can sabotage your efforts.Like most people, I love food. I savor flavors. I relish biting into hunks of a juicy watermelon after a long run. I love the feeling of it in my mouth, and the sensation of the juice dripping down my face and hands as I sit in the sunlight- I love the stuff.The thing is that Watermelon loves me too, as odd as that sounds.I used to love Chinese food. I would go at least once a week to have broccoli in brown sauce and rice, which I felt was the height of cuisine. I loved the stuff. The problem was that it clearly didn't love me. I felt numbed from it, and my colitis always flared up soon after I consumed it. Deep down, I knew it was harming me, but I loved it just the same. But I'm a vegan, I told myself. At least I'm not eating meat.When I initially started experimenting with my raw diet, I would go a few months and feel great. My colitis would disappear, my running would improve, and my mind would be so much clearer.But inevitably I'd have a bad week, or a bad month, my stress level would climb, or I'd be incredibly hungry, and all my defenses would crumble. I'd go back for some Chinese.And oh, did I ever feel bad. The colitis was back with a vengeance, my mind was in a fog, my energy crashed, and all I wanted to do was sleep. It was very clear that the Chinese food didn't love me, whatever my feelings for it were.At about that time I ran across some words from Dr. Douglas Graham. I don't have the original text, but he more or less restated the message in an audio interview he did recently. This summed up my experience, and put things in perspective for me. He said:“It took me a long time to realize that, essentially, I’m in a relationship with food, and that what ended up happening was that I love all food. But all food didn’t love me back. And I much prefer to be in relationships with people who love me as much as I love them. Those are the most rewarding relationships. And so I gradually came to the realization that I was going to have to make some decisions about my food based on how much the food loved me. How did it make me feel? Did I want to wake up the next morning feeling like I’d been in a train wreck? Did I want to ache in my joints or be congested in my head? Or did I just want to feel fantastic all the time? So eventually I committed to an all raw diet.”That's it! I thought, and got to work on my mind. Soon after I switched to a raw diet permanently, and I haven't looked back since. After the body's needs are met, the final key to craving control is in the mind. Knock The Food Off Its Pedestal.As long as your look at SAD food as something that you're depriving yourself of, then you'll never fully escape your cravings. The temptation for cooked foods will be waiting for you when you've had a rough day or you've been traveling and you're starving or for any number of other reasons. So the key is to mentally squash your mental association of bad foods with good thoughts.This may take multiple attempts, but it can be done overtime with some work. Sit yourself down and start knocking the foods you are fondest of off their pedestals one by one. You do this by substituting thoughts of love, enjoyment and association with good memories with a thought that realistically portrays the offending food- indignation.The mental attitude to take is, "How dare you ruin my health, disrupt my progress, and keep me going in circles. You're slowly killing me."See these foods for what they are. You might love them, but they don't love you back, and they're hurting you.Work with this, and mentally take whatever personal angles you feel appropriate for your own situation.Never "give up," anything, because that's deprivation, which you can't maintain. Identify it as something that's not serving your greater good, and then get rid of it. Mentally trash the food, and then let go of it. ConclusionA good diet is necessary for craving control to work . A healthy lifestyle is also important. But once you have the right base, these methods will do wonders.This article is dedicated to Dave M., who specifically asked for it.