When it comes to sugar or salt cravings, the typical questions I get asked tend to revolve around these two ideas:

How do I stop, manage, or reduce cravings for unhealthy foods?

What are healthy alternatives for sugar or salty food cravings?

While learning HOW to manage sugar cravings or salt cravings is helpful, I actually believe it’s maybe even more important to understand WHY we crave certain foods.

Why? Because talking about how to manage cravings or healthier options to curb them is the surface stuff. Knowing WHY you crave certain foods allows you to get to the root of what is really going on, find the solution, and as a result, clear up a lot of the surface issues with a lot less effort.

Think of it like a tree. Most people are spending the majority of their time trying to combat the cravings, get ideas on healthier options, or figure out how to use willpower to NOT eat sugar and salty foods when that’s all they can think about.

These people are hanging out in the branches and the leaves.

Today, we are going to dive deep and travel all the way down the trunk, into the soil, and get to the root.

If you prefer video over reading, watch my Facebook Live on this topic by clicking here.

So let’s get to it. The first reason we crave sugar and salty food is the most logical of the two.

1. Vitamin or Nutrient Cravings

Your body is an incredibly savvy miracle of a machine. If it needs certain vitamins or minerals, it’s going to do whatever it can to get those vitamins and minerals. Often, it knows exactly where to get them too.

For example, several years ago I experimented with going vegan for a week. At the end of the week, I laid down on my bed, closed my eyes, took a deep breath and asked my body, “What food do I crave right now?” And the thought of a big, juicy steak and eggs both hit me at the same time. My body told me what it wanted.

However, as logical as this sounds, it’s also the least common of the two reasons we experience food cravings because most people have long forgotten how to listen to their body.

Their body may be sending this craving signal, but they don’t even hear it. These cravings often fly under the radar.

In my Feel Amazing 6-Week Jumpstart, women learn how to awaken to and recognize these signals from their body, which ultimately is a huge part of the secret to the non-diet approach to weight loss and achieving and maintaining your dream body.

The second reason for sugar or salt cravings is more common, and… also, one that many people don’t like to openly talk about.

2. Emotional Cravings

This is often labeled as emotional eating.

These food cravings are triggered by a stressful day or situation, which leads to you turning to your favorite comfort foods to numb out, relax, distract, or soothe.

In these situations, we eat to fill a void inside. We reach for food to make us feel the way we want to feel, when really, what we are craving is not that food, it’s what that food represents…

Love.

Most people do not know that emotional eating is connected to our early years and specific memories and experiences where food was a key component to us receiving love.

In the very first instances, when we are born, we are held and fed. In these moments we felt safe, secure, comforted, and loved.

This continues into our childhood as well. I connect McDonald’s cheeseburgers, french fries, shakes, and those cherry pies with love because as a child, my grandparents would take me to McDonald’s and we would eat this together. I cherish those memories with them deeply.

For you, it may be peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and potato chips, or meat and potatoes, or macaroni and cheese, or fresh baked cookies. It just depends on what memories and experiences you had that connect food to love and comfort.

Emotional Eating is Not Bad

The most important thing to understand is that emotional eating is not a bad thing.

We all do it sometimes. No one ever really needs to eat cake, right? Sometimes we use food to celebrate. It’s tradition and part of our culture.

Sugary or salty foods are not the enemy.

The problem is when emotional eating or binge eating becomes a pattern and something we do often instead of dealing with our emotions.

The binge behavior is really just an indicator that something deeper is going on emotionally and we need to pay attention.

For most people, the root (remember my analogy of the tree) of emotional eating has to do with one of the following core limiting beliefs:

• I am not worthy of my desires.
• I am out of control (in some area) of my life.

When you discover and then heal these core wounds and shift these beliefs, you release yourself from the unhealthy behavioral pattern, and then food no longer needs to be that crutch that you use to fill the void.

You fill the void with what you actually crave... self-love.

This is a big topic, much bigger than I can adequately address here, so if you need further support with this, definitely check out my courses or reach out to me so we can chat one-on-one.

So, now that we have covered the reasons for sugar or salty food cravings, let’s talk about how I have been able to successfully incorporate them into my daily life while maintaining my ideal body.

How To Have Your Cake (or Chips) and Eat it Too

1. Salt is Not Bad For You!

As I mentioned above, it’s not the food that is bad or inherently unhealthy, it’s our behaviors related to the foods that are unhealthy.

I am not afraid of salt. I actually encourage my clients to incorporate Celtic sea salt or Himalayan sea salt regularly into their diet because both are incredible sources of minerals that the body needs to thrive.

I actually carry a small container of Celtic sea salt with me and add it to my food while I am out at restaurants having dinner. (My friends all make fun of me for this.)

I actually believe that using this mineral-rich sea salt helps my body to know what to do with sodium, in general. I’ve noticed that since I started doing this years ago, my body handles sodium so much better than it has in the past. I no longer blow up like a blow fish when I eat salty foods!

I also notice that it reduces cravings because I am giving my body what it is asking for — minerals. It helps to balance the systems.

2. Sweets in Moderation

I now honor my love of sweets, I don’t resist it. I incorporate sweets into my daily meals, using my 3 non-negotiables strategy, and no longer aim to cut out all sugar, because for me personally, the odds of me having sugar again are pretty high, so why go through all the pain of trying to go cold turkey for any length of time (just to be able to say that I did)?

Including sweets into my food lifestyle instead of cutting them out completely has helped me to eliminate binge eating. I can’t even remember the last time I was uncomfortably full.

Side note, I have successfully gotten rid of Candida and H Pylori using these methods as well.

This is what the ROCK Your Dream Body lifestyle is all about.

Bye-bye restriction, deprivation, and all-or-nothing thinking. Hello, freedom, optimal health, and sustainable dream body results!

Want more? Watch my free video series to get started.

Or, if you know you’re ready to dive into this work fully, enroll in my Feel Amazing 6-Week Jumpstart and begin your journey to body-freedom TODAY!