Yoga Medicine Founder, Tiffany Cruikshank explains how you can use the power of meditation and mindfulness to get to the root of what’s driving your sugar cravings. By understanding the root causes, you can overcome your sugar cravings without eating more sugar.
“When it comes to weight loss, sugar is one of the most difficult cravings to manage. It creates an endless cycle of wanting more. Besides tanking our blood sugar, driving up our cortisol, and trip wiring our metabolism, sugar drives us to constantly look for our next fix. Whether we’re on a diet or not, most don’t feel calm or content after we eat sugar. We just want more more more.”
“I believe that it’s healthy to give in to these cravings from time to time. But how do we find a balance?…Obviously, what we eat for the rest of the day is also very important, but our mental awareness of why we eat is also crucial to restructuring our metabolism (and often overlooked in diet plans and books)."
“Consider the emotional purpose of your cravings. If it’s sugar you’re craving, reflect on what sort of sweetness you need in your life right now. Are you craving sweetness or affection from your partner? Are you craving more energy? Self-love? Are you craving attention, appreciation, connection, approval, stillness, less stress, less pressure, a vacation, time with your family, love from your children, love from your parents?”
“When you’re hit with a craving, can you sit with it long enough to consider what’s under it, even for just one minute? Doing that - taking that one-minute pause - can honestly have the most profound effect on your health and your waistline. Can you broaden the gap between craving and filling your mouth?”“Become aware of these emotions, shine a light on them to see what’s actually happening underneath your cravings. Once you do that, you have created another option for yourself: Do I eat the brownie, or do I talk to my partner? Do I eat it, or do I sit and meditate, even for just a few minutes, to consider what’s happening and what my body actually needs? Can I find a way to answer that need from the body in a way that leaves me feeling more content?”
Try this 5-minute guided meditation:
1. Set your phone’s timer to five minutes.
2. Begin with a minute or two of just watching your breath and becoming an observer. Then, as you begin your meditation, notice what you need right now in this moment. Pay attention to what is necessary to be alive in this moment.
3. As you continue, notice how cravings come up in your meditation, things like wanting to move, or thinking about things on your to-do list. Notice whether you’re hungry and craving certain foods, or maybe craving something like sleep or love or movement. See if you can notice those cravings and the feelings around them. Do you feel anxious or excited, happy or guilty? Are there any emotions attached to cravings? Then, even more important, notice the sensations that these thoughts create in your body. Notice what you feel and where you feel it. Notice if it feels uncomfortable to sit with these feelings and not respond.
4. When the timer goes off, take a minute to finish by just watching your breath again
Learn more about how you can use the powers of meditation with Tiffany’s 21 day
guide: Meditate Your Weight: A 21-Day Retreat to Optimize Your Metabolism and Feel Great.
Excerpted from MEDITATE YOUR WEIGHT Copyright © 2016 by Tiffany Cruikshank. Published by Harmony Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.
Trying to beat those mid-day cravings? Try adding a scoop of Further Food Collagen into your morning routine to keep you filling fuller for longer and keep cravings at bay!
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