5 Common Food Cravings and How to Beat Them
Lola Berry is the author of The Happy Cookbook: 130 Whole Food Recipes for Health, Wellness, and a Little Extra Sparkle. She joins the Clever Cookstr to talk about her food philosophy, healthy ways to quench food cravings, and how you can make beauty supplies from ingredients in your kitchen!
Kara Rota
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5 Common Food Cravings and How to Beat Them
Lola Berry stopped by the Clever Cookstr studio to tell us about her go-to staples, her personal food philosophy, and lots more. Here’s an excerpt from The Happy Cookbook: 130 Whole Food Recipes for Health, Wellness, and a Little Extra Sparkle.
We all get them, so what do they mean? Food cravings may well be your body’s way of telling you that you’re deficient in something. First up, I haven’t met one woman who doesn’t get food cravings at a certain time of the month, so when I know that’s happening I always take magnesium in powder form just before bed – this helps with the cravings as well as other PMT symptoms such as fatigue and moodiness. If you don’t want to take supplements that’s totally fine; natural sources of magnesium include dark leafy greens, raw chocolate (cacao to be specific), raw nuts and seeds, and whole grains.
I also notice that for the first few days of eating really clean, all I can think about are the things I can’t eat – especially sweet things. A recent study found that the amino acid glutamine can help with food cravings. Glutamine is found in high amounts in any complete protein, such as red meat, eggs, cottage cheese, fish or chicken. So I always up the protein when I’m trying to get over food cravings.
Here’s a handy list of some common cravings, their likely causes and how to beat ’em:
Chocolate: If you’re craving chocolate then up your magnesium intake with dark leafy greens, broccoli, raw nuts and seeds, and whole grains (I use quinoa, millet, buckwheat and amaranth).
Sweets: Hankering for lollies, chocolate or even just dates? It could mean you need a little more chromium (found in broccoli, white cheese and chicken), carbon (fresh fruit), phosphorus (chicken, beef, fatty deep-sea fish, eggs, nuts and seeds, whole grains), sulphur (cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, garlic) or tryptophan (banana, turkey, white cheese, potatoes and spinach).
Carbohydrates: When clients tell me they crave toast or pasta, it can sometimes be a sign of nitrogen deficiency. You’ll find nitrogen in all your complete proteins (meat, fish, chicken, eggs, nuts and seeds).
Fatty foods: Craving these can be a sign you need more calcium (found in dark leafy greens, chia seeds, white cheese, yogurt and almonds).
Salty stuff: Another common one, this can indicate a need for chloride (fish and goat’s milk products) and/or silicon (raw nuts and seeds)
Excerpted from The Happy Cookbook by Lola Berry. Copyright © 2016 by Lola Berry. Reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of Macmillan.
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