Sweet cravings are a common challenge that can often feel overwhelming, leaving many wondering how to regain control over their eating habits.
Understanding the underlying causes of these cravings is critical to managing them effectively. This blog post will help you identify why these cravings occur and offer practical strategies to help you take control.
To support you on this journey, the Eating Enlightenment Food Journal App can be an invaluable ally. It provides tools to track your cravings, manage emotional eating, and avoid binges, empowering you to make healthier choices with confidence and clarity.
Three Causes of Food Cravings For Sweets
- You are trying to restrict yourself to ‘good,’ non-sugary foods
- Are you not eating enough
- Are not eating regularly
If you isolate these reasons themselves, then they do not lead to crazy sugar cravings. However, if all three of these reasons are intertwined, you will lose control and binge eat the ‘bad’ foods you aren’t supposed to have.
Why? What happens is that when you 1) restrict 2) don’t eat enough and 3) don’t eat regularly – you experience something called Food Scarcity. This is when your body doesn’t believe it has enough food.
Therefore, your body tries to keep you alive by getting you to eat. Your body treats these restricted foods as rare and valuable, which triggers you to binge eat them.
Food Scarcity Caused By Not Eating Enough Drives You To Sweets
For example, you might binge on sweets on a particular day and make a promise to yourself, “I am done with donuts!”
But paradoxically, by restricting yourself from donuts, you make donuts valuable to your subconscious mind.
A few days after a stressful day at work where you haven’t eaten enough regularly, your body thinks it’s starving and wants the most valuable food to stay alive – donuts.
You are dieting or restricting* and then experiencing food scarcity towards sugary foods, not eating enough, which paradoxically makes you crave these foods even more!
*In case you’re wondering about the difference between ‘dieting’ and ‘restricting,’ I use ‘dieting’ to mean when you are on an official diet like Weight Watchers. I use restricting when you are using informal ways to eat fewer calories, like calorie counting or avoiding food groups.
Here is a quick video of how these three reasons intertwine and cause you to crave sweets uncontrollably.
This short one-minute video of a woman named Cat illustrates how sugar cravings result from restriction and not eating enough.
We’ll examine Cat’s story and then explore in more depth the three principles of food scarcity.
The cat was on a 1,1100-calorie diet five days a week. She would be disciplined, lose weight, and feel in control. She wouldn’t eat sugary candies or ice cream.
But then, somehow, something always happened over the weekend, and Cat would end up binge-eating sugary foods.
- a friend’s birthday party
- , a trip to the zoo
- , a family dinner
Things got so bad (as you can see in the video above) that Cat was at her friend’s house and had a binge. But unlike other events where she could hide her bloated stomach by lying down and watching TV, her friend was planning a girls’ night out!
When her friend went to take a shower, Cat lost control. She binged the whole cake. When her friend came out of the shower, she found Cat lying there, nearly unconscious, and of course, they called off girls’ night. While Cat’s friend handled this event exceptionally well, Cat was mortified.
Cat finally realized that this pattern of binge eating was hurting her. Somehow, she found my website online, and we started working together.
The key thing I helped Cat realize was that the restriction of her 1100-calorie diet and not eating enough were causing her to overeat.
It’s important to note that dieting and food scarcity are intimately related. Do you see the connection?
(hint: if you are wondering what it means when you crave sweets – this is why!)
Before working with me, Cat was very confused. She could pick up on the pattern that she consistently binged over the weekend, but she was mistakenly thinking her lack of willpower caused her binge eating. If I had asked Cat if she was dieting, she would have said, “No, I’m not on any diet. I’m not on:
- not on Weight Watchers
- neither on keto
- not on low-carb
I really had to help Cat see that she was dieting, even if she wasn’t on an official diet, and this dieting was causing her food scarcity, which in turn was causing her to lose control.
It looks something like this:
Dieting (either purposefully or unintentionally) >> Food Scarcity >> Binge Eating
After Cat understood this sequence and learned about the three points of food scarcity (restriction, not eating enough, and not eating regularly), she could take preventative action to avoid crazy sugar cravings.
But first, Cat could finally accept that she was dieting and experiencing food scarcity – even though she wasn’t on an official diet.
Nowadays, Cat is “allowing” herself to do things differently than she ever has in her life:
- eating some candy during the week while thinking, “I can have this if I want to.”
- eat more filling foods throughout the week and at each meal
- eating more food throughout the day
I emphasized “allowing” in the previous sentence because allowing yourself to eat more food and beat food scarcity is actually really tough! Often, we have a fear of weight gain, which prevents us from listening to our bodies and keeps us trapped in food scarcity.
How does this work?
You diet or count calories to eat less and reduce your food intake. Yet, by dieting or some form of calorie restriction, you paradoxically fool your body into thinking that food is scarce and that your body is starving to death.
But if you can understand food scarcity and how dieting/restricting causes it, then you can stop dieting/restricting.
For example, as you can see in the video above, Cat’s crazy sugar cravings have gone way down. She’s feeling a lot better, and her weight is gradually going down, too, at a natural, sustainable pace.
Are we all on the same page?
If not, please comment below. It’s okay to ask questions because “What does it mean when you crave sweets?” is complex. Craving sweets is a complex phenomenon with many moving parts.
Now that we have covered Cat’s story and illustrated how these principles intertwine to cause crazy cravings let’s understand how dieting and the first principle of food scarcity work together.
You are restricting yourself to ‘good’ foods (and then binge eating the ‘bad’ foods you aren’t supposed to have!)
Below is another way to look at how people can have a diet mentality without knowing it while not on an official diet.
Can you see how every day the thoughts on the left are? These thoughts about calories, restriction, and punishment are so commonplace these days that we can absorb these ways of thinking and diet without knowing it!
(Nowadays, there is increasing awareness of alternative ways of thinking about food so you don’t fall for the trap of food scarcity; for example, in the Health At Every Size mindset, you also consider foods that make you happy, which can include sugary foods.)
Of course, the problem with dieting – purposefully or not – is that you swing back and forth between dieting and binge eating like a pendulum! Or like an infinite loop …
(95% of people who diet end up gaining back all the weight, or even gaining more weight than what they started with!)
Let’s go back to Cat’s video. Again, Cat didn’t know she was dieting. She thought she was being healthy. She was not on any official diet. Cat felt that she was the problem! She thought it was her lack of:
- willpower
- control
- motivation
Why dieting and food scarcity automatically lead to uncontrollable food cravings
Exercise: Look at the following image and imagine yourself in both perspectives.
How do you think the left perspective views the cookie? How do you think, conversely, the proper perspective views the cookie?
The cookie on the left perspective represents unconscious dieting, where you are dieting, even if you don’t realize it and aren’t on an official diet. If you can use your imagination, then can you see how, from this perspective, the cookie is both:
- rare
AND - valuable
Your body (please note the word ‘body,’ as food scarcity triggers an automatic process in your body)…
Your body perceives the cookie as rare and valuable because there is a limit to one cookie, and you can only have one after dinner. In essence, your body perceives the food as rare and valuable because you have food rules around eating cookies. Said differently, you have a dieting mentality towards the cookie, and this is causing food scarcity.
Paradoxically – because you see the cookie as rare and valuable – you still go ahead and binge eat the cookie.
Your body has evolved automatic mechanisms to eat rare and valuable food, especially when you are hungry.
Hold that cookie thought. Let’s quickly talk about evolutionary biology. Evolutionary biology is useful because it helps you see how it’s not your fault.
Imagine thousands of years ago when famine and food shortages were the number one cause of death. In fact, our ancestors primarily died of starvation for millions of years.
Powerful mechanisms evolved to keep us alive. One of these mechanisms is … drumroll … BINGE EATING. That’s right. Binge eating is a mechanism evolution selects to help keep a species alive.
Imagine one of our hominid ancestors was starving and came across a dead deer. They are hungry and don’t have refrigerators or ways to keep the meat or access to other food. So they eat the entire animal without caring about what you ate! This allows you to survive by consuming a ton of calories in a short amount of time.
(Crocodiles, other reptiles, and many mammals commonly binge eat if you think about it this way, too!)
The key is to prevent yourself from becoming starving or hungry. If you enter a survival mode of starvation, your body will take over to help—in an evolutionary sense—keep you alive.
Take Action Now That You Know Why You Crave Sweets
This is why you crave sugary things. This is the answer to the question, ‘What does it mean when you crave sweets?’
You have restrictions, typically and specifically around sugary food. You are dieting or restricting either way; it doesn’t matter.
When you combine your self-imposed restrictions around sugary food, along with being starving, then you get the perfect combination – one that results in you losing control around sugar.
And these strategies we’ve outlined work! Take a look at the success stories featured on my website. Many of the videos on the ‘success stories’ page are instructional, and you’ll see Cat in there, too!
