Want to control cravings? Have some chocolate

By Rory Evans

updated 8:22 a.m. ET Oct. 3, 2008

Odysseus lashed himself to the mast of his ship, plugged his men's ears, and gave strict orders that no matter how much he begged, no one was to cut him free and let him run to the Sirens — seduced as he was by their mellifluous singing.

If only you could work out the same kind of setup: tying yourself to your Eames task chair, telling your office mate to tighten the straps, and not letting yourself get lured by the vending machine every afternoon. Homer might not have set the concept to verse, but you know this one by heart: One little craving can launch a thousand chips.

Maybe chips aren't your weakness. Maybe you're drawn to a big bowl of pasta, a scoop of ice cream, or a sloth of Gummi bears. Virtually everyone has, at some point, experienced a food craving — a desire for a very particular delicacy.

"A craving is different from a meal decision," says Marcia Levin Pelchat, a food psychologist at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. "It's something you will get dressed and leave your house in a snowstorm for." A craving isn't the same as hunger, either — although the latter definitely intensifies the former.

Women are especially prone to these longings: 18- to 35-year-olds are more likely to experience cravings than any other age or gender group, Pelchat says. Most of the foods they crave (60 percent) are sweets; 92 percent of self-described chocolate addicts are female. As notable as it is that these women are of childbearing age, Pelchat points out that "no one really has a handle yet on the mechanism" that can link cravings to the menstrual cycle or PMS. (There goes that excuse, huh?) But researchers do know that food cravings come from the same part of the brain as an addict's drug jones, according to a study Pelchat did with scientists at the University of Pennsylvania.

Considering how common cravings are, they're nothing to be ashamed of: As Stephen Gullo, a New York City psychotherapist and author of "The Thin Commandments" (Rodale), puts it, "A craving is just a feeling — not a demonic possession." It is also not necessarily something you have to conquer or quash. In fact, a recent study found that women who were told specifically not to talk about chocolate ate nearly one and a half times as much chocolate as women who were allowed to speak freely about it. "The results might have been identical if we had used French fries or chips," says lead researcher James Erskine of the psychology department at the University of Hertfordshire in England. "The important thing is, people were motivated to eat the food that they tried not to think about."

So go ahead and have a few chips or M&M's. Or better yet, consider where the craving is coming from, and if you can't curtail it completely, try feeding it a smarter alternative. "The human psyche hates 'no,'" Gullo says. "But it does like a substitute." And isn't that music to your ears?

Temptation triggers
A craving is not your body's version of a car's "check engine" light: It doesn't blink red all of a sudden as your body dips low on sodium or magnesium or vitamin A, as if it knows exactly what will refuel the deficiency. Pelchat ran a study in which people's caloric and nutritional needs were met by a liquid diet; although the participants weren't hungry, they still craved variety. (Their diet shake was vanilla-flavored, and they craved nonsweet foods, including red meat and pizza.) "Your body will want something different," she says.

Which explains the idée fixe that pommes frites can become for anyone who has embarked on a strict diet plan. But cravings don't have to put the kibosh on weight-loss efforts. In an ongoing study at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, 91 percent of the subjects reported having cravings after starting a restricted diet, and that number went up to 94 percent after six months. Yet people were still able to shed pounds. "Those who did best at weight loss didn't lose their cravings; they just got better at managing them," says Susan Roberts, director of the energy metabolism laboratory at the center. "Giving in less often seemed to be the most reliable strategy." 

Most cravings are for high-calorie foods, of course. ("Could we get someone to crave spinach?" Pelchat asks. "Maybe. If we forbade it.") It's often said that people compulsively eat carbohydrates, but "nobody craves pure sugar," Roberts points out. Cravings are "typically mixtures of fat and carbohydrates, and occasionally also protein. Everyone seems to have something different that they love, though chocolate and salty snacks are common."

In large part, cravings are governed by memory and reinforced by habit. A survey by the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University found that people craved foods that were related to happy memories. The snack has to match the memory in order to satisfy the urge, which can make the impulse feel stubbornly intractable. A craving, then, is perhaps best personified by the bratty teenage girl who wants the rhinestone-encrusted Razr cell phone in pink — not red (duh!) — and pouts until she gets it. And she probably has a tantrum at the same time every day. "So many food rituals are habitual," says Lauren Slayton, a nutritionist and founder of Foodtrainers in New York City. "Clients who have a frozen treat or cookie after dinner start to reach for it without thinking. I have them wait 15 to 30 minutes before indulging to assess whether they can pass on it. Once you take the automatic away, a lot of progress can be made."

It also helps to take away visual and sensory cues. A study in The Journal of Neuroscience found that some people's brains predispose them to intense cravings and make them susceptible to images of food. "Pictures easily induce cravings," says Marika Tiggemann, a professor of psychology at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, who has found that food imagery and scents intensify desire.

How you deal with the longing is more important than what prompted it. "There are many ways we can be triggered to crave a food — scent, memory, mood — but the key is to remember that there are easy substitutes for all types of cravings," Slayton says. And not just pathetic knockoffs: "No one needs me to tell them to eat lean turkey wrapped in lettuce," says Lisa Lillien, author of the new "Hungry Girl" (St. Martin's), an offshoot of her popular daily e-mail bulletin on tasty diet foods. "I love onion rings and pizza, so I want a satisfying swap." 

In the future, there may even be drugs that curtail the urges. Taranabant, an obesity treatment currently being tested, aims to suppress hunger by blocking the cannabinoid-1 receptor — the part of the brain that responds to cannabis — which plays a role in spurring appetite, says Steven Heymsfield, a researcher for Merck Labs. In other words: It could reduce pot-related munchies (as well as natural cravings). Harold and Kumar go to...Weight Watchers?

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