If you’ve been attempting to enhance your diet yet can’t resist the allure of sugary treats, you’re not alone. Americans…
However, experts state that there are specific steps you can take to keep your sweet tooth in check. Here’s how to begin.
Balance your blood sugar
When you consume a meal or snack containing sugar or carbohydrates, your body breaks it down into glucose, the type of sugar that serves as the body’s primary fuel source. If that snack consists mainly of carbohydrates or sugar without fiber or protein, the amount of glucose in our blood will surge rapidly. “Then we’re on this roller coaster throughout the day, striving to manage our blood sugar drops,” says Alison Acerra, a registered dietitian nutritionist in New York. Those drops can prompt us to reach for another sweet or carb-laden snack as a quick fix. “What we’re aiming for is truly stable blood sugars over the course of the day.”
Introduce protein and fiber, both of which slow down the rate at which carbohydrates convert to sugar in the blood, assisting in stabilizing blood sugar. Ensuring you pair carbohydrates with protein and fiber “prevents those crashes that trigger the cravings in the first place,” says Acerra.
Another error people make—especially very active individuals—is simply not eating enough overall. Undereating can cause fatigue that also drives a craving for rapidly digestible carbohydrates, such as sweets, she explains.
Limit triggers
One of the most challenging aspects of dealing with sugar cravings is that they’re typically driven by unconscious signals, explains a professor studying the brain, diet, and metabolism at McGill University in Canada. When your gut detects glucose, it sends reward signals to your brain. One of the drawbacks of this mechanism is that it is “associated with habit learning, and habits and compulsive behaviors are very difficult to break.”
We then become conditioned to anticipate those reward signals when we sense certain cues in our environment.
“The food industry capitalizes on this,” says Small. “They want a loud pop when you remove the lid. The packaging is attractive. You have all of these cues that have been conditioned to these strong signals that encourage you to consume that item again.”
Nevertheless, she says there are strategies you can employ to combat this conditioning. First, do your best to reduce these types of cues in your environment. For example, try not to stock your kitchen or workspace with appealing snacks.
Another deconditioning strategy is to take one sip of a sugary soda or bite of a snack, then discard it. “The more frequently you do this, you condition a new behavior, and you also strengthen your ability to throw it away,” she says.
Improve your sleep
Perhaps it seems like you’re doing everything possible to manage your blood sugar and reduce potential triggers, but you’re still craving sugar. If so, you might consider attempting to improve your sleep. “If we can enhance your sleep, it does improve your eating behavior and your food preferences, and that’s something we don’t typically consider,” says Ayan Merchant, a sleep and performance psychologist in Gujarat, India. She adds that when we don’t sleep well, we start to crave sweets more.
She and a team of researchers recently published a finding that when adults who had difficulty sleeping underwent cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), they reported fewer cravings for both sweet and savory foods, and they had better control over those cravings.
Can sugar substitutes help?
Artificial sweeteners, chemicals that provide the sweetness of sugar without the calories, might be enticing. However, Small says they’re best avoided. “Artificial sweeteners are not inert,” she says. Different sweeteners operate through distinct mechanisms, and scientists don’t fully comprehend all of them yet, but there is a consensus in the scientific community that they can have negative consequences, she says. And these sweeteners may appear in places you don’t expect, such as… It’s particularly important to ensure you’re reading the labels on your food to make sure you’re not merely replacing sugar with another potentially problematic sweetener, she says.
Most importantly, Acerra notes that when we’re experiencing intense sugar cravings, “usually the body is communicating something to us. It’s really crucial to understand the root cause of why it’s occurring, and then from there, be able to formulate the strategies and how we can alleviate them.”
