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Writer's pictureTahlia Sage
Jan 29 min read

What Do Your Cravings Say About You

One of the most common roadblocks during a weight loss program for clients is not that they aren’t eating a healthy diet, but rather what they eat on top of the healthy food. These extras are often between-meal snacks, post-workout treats, afternoon pick-me-ups, sweet rewards after dinner, or that light popcorn during movie night. It might even be the habitual glass (or glasses) of wine with dinner.

This creates two significant problems.


Problem 1: A Sense of Defeat

These habits can create a sense of defeat: Healthy eating doesn’t work, and my weight just won’t budge. Say that you just started to cook more from home and eat more fruits and vegetables, but after a month of increased grocery bill and hours spent in the kitchen, your heart sank- the scale did not budge.  This frustration often leads to abandoning the healthy eating habits you have just formed. The feelings of guilt and failure compound, making it harder to stay committed to your healthy diet. This can leave you completely demotivated, making it feel like healthy eating just isn’t worth it. But the issue isn’t your effort in eating healthy; it’s the hidden calories and choices that sabotage your progress.

Problem 2: The Slow Metabolism Fallacy

Cravings often lead to snacking. The issue isn’t snacking itself but the type of snacks. Ultra-processed snacks are packed with inflammatory ingredients and excessive calories in small portions. These snacks make you feel like you’re snacking smart with portion control, but that 'small' snack actually packs the calories of a full meal—minus the nutrition—and still leaves plenty of room for another full meal later! Even if you don’t overeat at meals, stopping when you’re about 80-90% full, those empty calories from small snacks can still sabotage your progress. It’s easy to feel frustrated, blaming a slow metabolism and thinking that no matter how careful you are with portions, your diet is still failing you.


So, Is Snacking Bad for Weight Loss?

In a small-scale study comparing weight loss results from intermittent fasting versus eating six small meals a day—with both groups reducing their calorie intake by 500 calories—both approaches led to weight loss. However, the intermittent fasting group lost more weight compared to the six-meal-a-day group. 

While six small meals a day was once believed to help maintain consistent blood sugar levels, the reality in day-to-day practice is more complex. For this approach to work, the meals must have carefully restricted portions and balanced protein, fat, carbs and fiber. In many cases, eating six small meals keeps blood sugar consistently high, causing insulin to be overproduced. This can make it significantly harder to achieve weight loss goals. Similarly, consuming three regular meals with three small high-calorie snacks is almost guaranteed to sabotage healthy eating efforts.


Lean Into Your Cravings, Don’t Deprive

When you choose to work with me, I focus on gathering personalized data to understand how your blood sugar responds to specific foods. It’s also important that we work together to address the underlying reasons for your cravings and provide personalized support and guidance in this area.

Understanding why you have cravings is key to getting to the root cause, rather than approaching the issue from a place of restriction and deprivation. Deprivation is a surefire way to magnify cravings. When you say no to something, your mind will only want it more.

You won’t need the willpower of steel to resist cravings once we address the underlying needs your body is signaling through these cravings. So, let’s lean into your cravings and learn how to develop a healthy relationship with food—enjoying what you love without guilt!


Reason 1 Craving Can Mean Emotional Overwhelm & Depletion





Stress Eating is a natural, built-in mechanism for the body to relieve stress. You might have conditioned yourself to use snacking as a stress release valve. Studies have shown that sugar has a short-term anxiolytic (anxiety-reducing) effect. Here’s how it works: when you eat a snack, it gets turned into sugar in your body. The spike in blood sugar temporarily dulls the brain's signal to the adrenal glands, which detect stress. This creates a temporary escape from stress.

Another layer to this is that the sugar spike can actually make you feel sleepy due to high blood sugar levels. I recall a client from my early days of practice who was trapped in the cycle of relying on carb-heavy meals to fall asleep. She suffered from anxiety and had a stressful job. She tried eating protein and vegetables for dinner to lose weight but couldn’t sustain it because she couldn’t fall asleep unless she had a large plate of pasta, garlic bread, and some cookies or mini donuts for dessert to feel "fuzzy" enough to sleep. In this case, she was using high blood sugar as a self-medication tool for stress and anxiety.

Unfortunately, "food as medicine" doesn’t apply here. Using sugar to medicate stress doesn’t pay off in the long run. First, sugar is addictive. The more you consume it, the more your body becomes less sensitive to its effects, meaning you need more sugar to achieve the same stress-relieving result. Second, when the body becomes insulin resistant from consuming too much sugar, blood sugar dysregulation will reduce the quality of sleep due to heightened inflammation. In some cases, it may even cause you to wake up and not be able to fall back asleep. This interrupted sleep pattern is called the "dawn phenomenon."

Boredom & DreadLet me ask you this: when you have cravings, are you actually hungry? A quick test to distinguish between real hunger and boredom is to ask yourself: If there were grilled salmon and steamed broccoli in front of you, how appealing would that sound? If you wave it off and say, "Nah, I really want ______," (you can fill in the blank), have you noticed that you're not actually craving a solid meal, but rather your mouth feels "lonely"?

Living in chronic high stress can depletes dopamine, making the brain more likely to become bored and unmotivated. The fatigue from living under chronic stress can be further intensified by ‘anticipatory dread’, as you look at the growing mountain of to-dos and looming deadlines. This creates a sense of losing control and makes it hard to see any hope at the end of the tunnel. It leaves you feeling like you lack the energy and confidence to tackle everything on your plate.  When you snack, the spike in blood sugar triggers a reward response in your brain. Over time, snacking becomes a quick and reliable way to get a sense of hope and encouragement when you feel unmotivated. However, relying on snacking like this actually dulls motivation and reduces the brain's ability to focus and learn. You’ll also experience very real withdrawal symptoms of anxiety and depression when trying to clean up your diet.

ComfortPeople often crave sweets when serotonin levels are low. This is because, when you eat sugar, not only does stress go down, but the brain releases serotonin and dopamine, which are linked to feelings of comfort and encouragement. However, as you rely more on sugar for comfort, your body becomes less responsive to it, and it releases less serotonin and dopamine.

Another reason is that serotonin is made from tryptophan, an amino acid. Since the digestive system can only process so much protein in a day, and tryptophan has other functions in the body, it cannot all be converted into serotonin. There is a limit to how much serotonin your body can produce daily. If you stimulate serotonin too much through sugar, you end up "overdrafting" it—leaving you without enough building blocks to produce more, which means you’re left feeling empty and unsatisfied.





Reason 2 Craving Can Mean Sleep Deprivation



This is what happens when your body is sleep-deprived:When you don’t get enough sleep, ghrelin—the "hunger monster" hormone—goes into overdrive. Even one night of poor sleep can increase the power of this hunger hormone by 10%. Lack of sleep also decreases your willpower and skews your food preferences towards junk foods: salty, fatty, and sugary options. Your body senses low energy and seeks a "quick fix" to replenish your batteries.

You can see how this plays out in new parents; it's easy to pack on a few pounds when you’re constantly waking up throughout the night to care for a little one.

Over time, sleep deprivation can negatively affect your metabolism, increase fat storage, and suppress feelings of fullness. And yes, if your metabolism is poor, your body becomes more inflamed, which further disrupts your sleep pattern. When blood glucose is dysregulated, your sleep quality decreases because high inflammation prevents your body from getting enough oxygen. As a result, your nervous system stays alert, trying to compensate for the lack of oxygen.

Fluctuating blood sugar levels can often create something called the "dawn phenomenon," where you wake up around 4–5 AM due to a sudden rise in blood sugar.

Sleep deprivation doesn’t simply mean you're not getting enough hours. If you’ve been struggling with unhealthy cravings, it may be worthwhile to ask yourself:

  • How do you feel when you wake up in the morning?

  • Are you desperate for that cup of coffee to start your day?

  • Do you wake up during the night?

  • Do you often have vivid dreams that leave you feeling tired?

  • If you live with someone, ask them whether if you toss and turn or snore?



Reason 3 Craving Can Reflect Lack of Protein, Fiber Healthy Fat





A common reason clients confess they give in to cravings is because they feel a little hungry and know it will be hours until the next meal, so they grab something small to "keep their energy up.

This could be due to one of two reasons:

First, your stomach might actually be empty and growling. Both fiber and fat slow down the time it takes for the stomach to empty. So, if a meal contains too many refined carbs like pasta, bread, rice, and sauces in relation to fiber and fat, things just slip through too quickly.

Second, the meal may not have provided enough satiety, and you didn't feel full to begin with. This is the same reason people often reach for dessert. I call it the "I’ve got room for more" phenomenon. Protein scores the highest on the satiety index, meaning it keeps you fuller for longer. I observed a trend of clients hitting only 30-60% of their daily protein target. Fiber also contributes to this because it fills the stomach without adding excess calories. Fiber is calorie-free. A high-protein, high-fiber diet is the best way to curb hunger for hours.

However, many clients confuse satiety with eating too much or excess calories because they've bought into the idea of "portion control." I believe that getting a satisfying portion of protein and enjoying your vegetables works better than a restrictive "portion control" mindset. The satiety you get from protein, fiber, and healthy fats eliminates the need for dessert. Clients are often shocked at first because they don't have to starve and feel like they’re eating more than before. But they quickly realize how fast the weight comes off when they cut out empty calories from small portions. Feeling full and eating more may just be the key to making healthy eating sustainable.

The trifecta for blood sugar balance is protein, fiber, and healthy fats. If your meal lacks any of these factors, you'll be left wanting more.



Reason 4 Craving Can Actually Mean Your Blood Sugar Is High!!





One of the shocking discoveries I made is that cravings can be an early warning sign of metabolic dysfunction. This may sound counterintuitive, but especially for my diabetic and prediabetic clients, I ask them to measure their blood sugar levels when their afternoon hunger hits. Oftentimes, even hours after lunch, their blood sugar levels are still riding high.

One of the mechanisms behind this is insulin resistance. When simple carbs rush into your bloodstream, they turn into sugar, causing a spike in blood sugar. If you have insulin resistance, the excess sugar in your bloodstream cannot be effectively pulled into your cells to become energy, so you continue to feel hungry, triggering the hunger signals to eat more.

 


If you have read to this point so far, congratulations! By investing your time into exploring how to develop a healthy relationship with your weight loss journey, you’re also nurturing a sustainable, healthy relationship with yourself. When you listen to your body, understand what’s going on, and discover what it truly needs, weight loss becomes not just a possibility, but a natural outcome. The best part? It doesn’t require a deprivation mindset or desperate calorie counting. What you’re doing is building your health and confidence, focusing on eating, not dieting.

I’d love to hear which points resonate with you—let me know in the comments below. If you’re ready to discover how to achieve sustainable weight loss, I’d be honored to guide you. Please book a complimentary discovery session with me through the link below:




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