Two thoughts on cravings

(SVGuss) #1

I know it’s controversial, and each person is different, but maybe somebody will find this helpful.

  1. I find that I have sugar cravings when my daily duration of not-eating is over 18 hours in a row. My craving ALWAYS come after the meal (in the evening, in my case). I had a nice tasty big meal, and in a couple of hours it begins…
    I wonder if anyone ever has evening sugar cravings while fasting the whole day. The very idea sounds strange to me. If I don’t eat at all during the day, I never have any cravings. So it seems a craving must be somehow related to the food eaten and how it is eaten, not necessarily a lack of something in the body.
    When I distributed meals more evenly through the day, I had cravings, but not as often, and not that severe. What seems to work best for me is to have breakfast at 12-14, and go as late into the night with food as it feels, eat whenever it feels. Normally, my latest meal is the biggest, but far from gigantic.

  2. If I have a craving, I simply give myself a blank check to eat as much tasty keto food as I want - make sure you don’t have those checks daily :). Doesn’t matter how many calories I already have had. I don’t have mercy for my fridge keto stock on such an occasion. I turn on a good movie and enjoy myself, that’s all. It is still better than eating a cookie (especially as I have an early stage of diabetes so keeping low sugar is vital).
    There’s no magic potion against a craving, and instead of trying those tricks some recommend, I just eat chicken legs.
    Overeating is not a problem, because the next day the body normally somehow self-regulates the amount of food.

(Carl Keller) #2

I feel fortunate that my sugar cravings basically went away. For most of the last nine months, I’ve had zero desire to eat anything sugary. But from my observations here at the forum, I know that some people struggle with sugar cravings so its grip on each of us definitely varies.

One other observation from here and from articles I’ve read is that artificial sweeteners can play tricks on our brains. An incomplete sensation of sweetness can cause insulin to rise without affecting blood glucose and this can lead to a desire to complete that sensation. Again, not everyone is affected the same way but the fact is that AS and especially diet drinks can do things to us that we don’t even realize.

(Full Metal KETO AF) #3

Hi Guss, I see you joined the forum fairly recently. How long have you been eating keto? I wonder if after dinner dessert was a regular habit for you before keto. This may just be mental habit, your brain waiting for the sugar rush in the evening that you were used to getting. Watching TV and snacking go together like two clamshells for lots of people. You always hear people saying stuff like “I can’t go to to the movies without getting popcorn!”
The habits become intertwined. I know you can handle this and eventually it will subside, I used to be a late night snacker too but I don’t think about it anymore. As @CarlKeller said, be careful about the artificial sweeteners if you continue to have the problem try cutting them to see if it helps. They interfere with weight loss even though they are sugar free because they still cause an insulin spike and stimulate hunger. Good luck :cowboy_hat_face:

#4

I think cravings in the first few weeks of keto is normal. After that, you might want to try individually eliminating possible triggers (artificial sweeteners, baked keto treats, etc.) to see what might be causing the cravings.

(SVGuss) #5

Thank you people for your response. I am on keto since March and I was doing OK, can’t say that those craving were a big problem, but mid-May I decided to do OMAD and it’s then when they became worse.
I think I’ll go back to what is normal and comfortable to me - to start eating in the noon (basically, I never wanted breakfast in my life) and finish before sleep :slight_smile:
I don’t use table sugar for 8 years, artificial sweeteners for a year or maybe three, I don’t even know.
As for “after dinner dessert” - you know, the way I’ve been eating all my life is such that you can hardly distingush which is dinner, which is dessert, which goes when… in other words, it was very irregular.
I do not even want to look into sweets subsitutions, I eat very simple and the food that I love. Again, I believe that the trigger for the cravings was simply eating after not eating for too long. OMAD is clearly not for me, it probably works on the body like a calorie restriction.
Maybe I just have to master KETO more :slight_smile:

#6

Maybe it’s the size of the meal being larger on OMAD?
Do you have a glucose and/or ketone meter to test and see if you’re getting large fluctuations after a meal?

(SVGuss) #7

Well, I had the same amount of calories as usual (around 1800) that I ate within an hour or so. Since it’s lots of fat, it wasn’t really big. 350 grams of pork, butter, cheese, lard, a couple of eggs, veggies.
No significant blood glucose fluctuations either.