Seven Days to Beating Your Carbohydrate Cravings

Overcoming addictions to cake, cookies, ice cream,candy bars, bread, mashed potatoes, and other easily digested carbohydrates requires that you just say "no" to carbs. At some point, you simply have to stop eating carbs, so you can stop eating carbs. However, there are ways to do this that allow you to break habits gradually even though you "turn off" the stimulation to the addiction centers of your brain immediately.

Here are some diet hacks that allow you to eat familiar, carbohydrate foods without stimulating the brain centers involved in addiction.

• Cold food is digested more slowly than hot food. Hot instant mashed potatoes get turned into glucose almost immediately in your digestive tract. In some studies, they have a glycemic index of over 100, that is, they are broken down into glucose and enter the bloodstream even more quickly than pure glucose itself. (The reason for this is the way glucose is emptied out of the stomach.) Cold boiled potatoes in potato salad, in contrast, can have a glycemic index as low as 
• Mixtures of foods take longer to digest than single foods. A bento lunch box in Japan may have as many as 60 tiny servings of different vegetables and meats. The stomach breaks down all of them before eventually sending the mass of digested food into the small intestine. This takes time. This doesn't mean you should start going to all you can eat buffets and eating a plate of every kind of food, but it can help simply to get more variety in your diet.
• Fat and protein have a glycemic index of 0. Actually, about 30 percent of the amino acids in excess protein can be transformed into glucose very slowly, over 24 to 48 hours, but this process takes place in the liver, not in the digestive tract. Adding fat to your foods, eating your chips with dip, for example, and eating protein foods instead of carbohydrate food, reduces your carb cravings.
• Bitter foods accelerate digestion, while sour foods slow it down. Bitter foods stimulate a reflex action that causes your stomach to digest food more quickly. The reason we have this reflex probably is that most poisons in nature are bitter, so releasing more stomach acid  breaks them down faster and more completely. Sour foods, on the other hand, usually break down in ways that increase the release of bicarbonates into the small intestine. Acidic foods, ironically, are alkalizing, and slow down the release of glucose into the bloodstream. That's why vinegar is often used to aid weight loss.

See Also: Working Out Your Ideal Carb Intake

The bottom line to all of these recommendations is, if you can't give up your favorite carb foods yet, you can start eating them in a different way, and in different combinations. Doing this for as little as seven days can break the cycle of addiction and stimulation that keeps you carb-addicted, making it much easier for your to limit your total food consumption so you can lose weight with calorie restriction and weight loss.