Craving Sweets

craving sweets but you're on a diet!

If you're craving sweets, it's nothing to be worried about. It's simply your body acting in a way it's evolved to do over the millennia. Your body knows what it needs to survive - calories - and it knows that sweet foods tend to pack in the calories.

So craving sweets is just a function of evolution. Your body needs to function. You, me, everyone else, evolved from a species of hunter-gatherers. That means our ancestors tended to eat fruits, vegetables, berries, grains and only occasionally, meats. And they ate a ton of them - enough to produce two pound stools. That means every time they "used the bathroom", so to speak, they left a two pound dump behind them.

So there was a ton of eating, and a ton of "clearing out" after eating, and not much in the way of calories in any of it. Grains and berries are nice, but you have to eat a lot of it to be sated. Meat is great, but for our ancestors - hunting with flint and or wooden weapons - meat wasn't always on the menu. Maybe you just didn't feel like hunting the wooly mammoth today, you know?

Virtually the only sweet available during our nascent stages as hominids was honey. And honey - unlike almost anything else available to our ancestors - is filled with calories. Our - their - bodies responded by craving sweets. Our bodies know that if we pack on calories now, we'll need less later. We'll have enough to survive a little longer if it becomes harder to find food and sustenance.

Of course, today food - and sweets in particular - aren't exactly hard to come by. Nearly everything we eat is loaded with sugar or corn syrup, and our bodies simply didn't evolve to process these types of sugars, which themselves are processed from sugarcane or corn. If you eat too much processed sugars, be aware that you are in fact poisoning yourself. Your body requires only 40 grams of sugar a day - sugars that it extracts naturally from fruits, vegetables, grains and other carbs - yet one sixteen ounce soda has fifty two grams of sugar.

A twinkie has even more. A slice of that delicious flourless chocolate cake that you just had to have after dinner has something near one hundred twenty grams of processed sugar.

Your body simply doesn't know what to do with all of that if you eat it regularly. A little will be burned off, and a lot will be turned into fat.

So be aware of the process if you're craving sweets, and be stronger than the primal urge to pack on calories. You don't need to be a slave to our history!