I have been reading this book Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and the book is helping me understand so many things we do in our daily life and why we do it.
Why is it that I am unable to stick to my diet? Why is it that I feel hungry all the time? Why is it that the day I start dieting I get these horrible cravings making me quit the next day or binge eat after four days?
It’s all about how our brain reacts to cravings and how cravings are hard to resist, because of how our brain is. I can’t really put the concept down here, it’s too complicated and long to be put down in a blog post. Moreover, you must read the book to understand it fully but the basic thing is – these cravings are insanely hard to resist unless you replace it with another cravings.
Cravings NEVER go away.
You may think you’re going to eat healthy for 28 days and get into the habit of eating healthy but all it would take for you to get back to zero is giving into one craving.
And the problem is they’re always there. You can’t get rid of them.
If you’re addicted to say, junk food, you’re going to have to fight the cravings to have junk food for forever.
The book discusses concept while talking about smokers and alcoholics. While the people around them act thick and ask them to just quit because they think they can, the book tells them why they cannot – physiologically and psychologically.
The same is with the food we eat. If you get addicted to a certain kind of food and if it’s something unhealthy like junk food, you’re going to have a life long battle to kill the cravings for this kind of food and eat healthy.
And how do you fight? You replace it with other cravings. If you’re eating a certain kind of food unhealthy amount of times, you need something you love more than this food. You’ll need to replace your cravings for the old unhealthy food with this new food.
The problem? When does healthy food taste as yummy as junk food does? That’s where I am stuck with the book. I get its point, derived from several researches, that I need to replace my cravings for unhealthy food with cravings for healthy food but how do I find healthy food that I will really crave?
That’s the entry #2 in my food diary discussing my struggles with getting healthy and shunning junk food.
Read the entry #1 – being a fast food junkie here!
