So now you, like all of us, have a cupboard full of Halloween goodies!  Chips, candy, chocolate… yummy!  How are you going to resist the temptation to dive head-first into the junk drawer and eat every single, last piece of delicious goodness?

We all have cravings.  Sometimes it’s for salty things, sometimes sweets, sometimes it’s the meat craving!  But where do cravings come from?

One common reason is dehydration.  If the volume of fluid in your blood vessels drops, then a signal gets sent to your brain to increase your intake of sugar or salt.  When that gets absorbed into your bloodstream, it attracts fluid into the blood, through osmosis.  You remember that from high school biology, right?  Osmosis is the principle by which a solvent -- in this case water -- moves across a permeable barrier -- in this case the lining of the blood vessels -- to achieve the same concentration on both sides of the barrier.

So, one great tip for reducing cravings is to drink more water.  This also helps fill you up, which sends a different signal to the brain to say that you’re full, also helping to suppress cravings.

But what about when we eat to soothe ourselves after a hard day, or to reward ourselves for a job well done?  Sometimes we eat out of boredom, or frustration, or anger.  So the emotional component of eating can cause cravings too.

There isn’t such a simple tip as drinking water to help with this.  You have to identify your specific triggers for eating, and come up with strategies for dealing with those triggers.  You have to change WHY you eat, not just WHAT you eat.

  study published last month in the online edition of Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine looked at a group of over 1,500 employees in a company in Amsterdam.  What they found was that emotional eating caused weight gain, but “dietary restraint” -- that is: conscious dieting -- did not reduce weight gain.

Interestingly, they found that the one thing that helped with weight loss was strenuous exercise, and that exercise didn’t just reduce weight, but it also helped to reduce the effect of emotional eating on weight. 

However, it didn’t reduce all the weight gain associated with emotional eating. The researchers concluded that to really deal with weight gain, then, we have to utilize psychological approaches, rather than just standard approaches like dieting.  Willpower only lasts so long.

But there is a made-in-Canada approach to this issue of emotional eating.

Registered dietician Wendy Shah, and registered psychologist Dr. Colleen Cannon came up with a program called Craving Change TM.  They’ve licensed registered dieticians across the country to provide a series of seminars to help clients answer the questions that stand in the way of weight loss: why it’s hard to change; what needs changing; how to change; and, most importantly, how to keep these changes for the long term.

Craving Change teaches behavior modification techniques that have been shown to enhance weight loss, when combined with healthy eating, portion control and physical activity.

It’s the understanding of where emotional eating comes from that leads to permanent changes in eating patterns, and that leads to successful weight loss.