In late August, 2009, I gave the following directive to our team: "I want a way to eliminate hunger craving using natural, off the shelf supplements or whatever other safe methods may be required. I don't care if you lose weight so don't bother trying. The objective is to identify and eliminate food cravings, which then may lead to a natural weight loss program." At the time of this writing, it's mid October, and what we've found seems quite remarkable to us. Using nothing but inexpensive natural appetite suppressants, it's possible to completely eliminate both physiological and psycho-physiological cravings completely in almost everyone involved.

We're not a team of scientists following a rigorous testing method, and so I won't be reporting statistics. I am, however, willing to interject my personal experience, and perhaps some general comments relating to the members of the group as a descriptive method of our exploration. The one most probably of interest is that I 'accidentally' lost 20 pounds during the evaluation. (No sacrifice is too great in the name of science) I had no particular desire to lose weight and it was by no means the goal, though in retrospect, inevitable.

We're a small group of diverse talent dedicated to finding holistic, integrated solutions to human problems, both epic and incidental. Because we have no big business affiliation and don't depend upon government grants, we remain free of motivations that may restrict our ability to intuitively perceive solutions that others with a conditioned objective may miss. If you want to know more about IRI, check the 'About' page.

The reason my initial directive included the statement that weight reduction is not the goal is because the proposal was based on the idea that psychological struggle is the primary cause of dieting failure and rebound, and short of using strong CNS medications, there is no way of dealing effectively with this psychic state, and so the directive is that this resistance must not arise to begin with. If we are to be successful, the cravings must be dealt with in the absence of the psychological struggle. A thorough understanding of this is absolutely critical to success and I highly recommend reading this more detailed discussion on the 'Psychological struggle' page.

Many experts are now advising that you give in to your cravings in a responsible way rather than resisting them. One study found that "Women who tried to quit thinking about eating chocolate ended up eating 50% more than those who expressed their desire for the candy." In other words, those trying to mentally control their cravings ate 50% more than those who didn't try to control it. What I want to emphasize here is the futility of trying to control cravings by resisting. Resistance creates more struggle, leading to more resistance. It simply doesn't work.

A French study by INSERM reported "Though food craving episodes were not related to weight status, they were strongly related to weight concern." The craving is triggered by the resistance of psychological involvement. This is by far the strongest factor in craving, and one that we bring on ourselves. In the same study; "In our study, food craving was related to a desire and not a need, for a majority of subjects." While it's true that cravings are not always psychological in nature, there are many myths about cravings that imply the body is primarily responsible. It's human nature to seek out and confirm such alternative explanations, so lets challenge some of these myths.

Body Wisdom

Craving chocolate means you need to relax.

Craving potato chips means you're dehydrated.

Craving cookies means you're feeling drained.

While it's true that Phenylethylamine and magnesium in chocolate may promote relaxation, and the salt in potato chips may aid in water retention and cookies may energize you by spiking your blood sugar, we're actually putting the cart before the horse. We eat those things because they taste good, then we look for what effects it may have on the body and presume that the body is asking for it. This serves to justify feeding the craving, but it's about 90% nonsense. If broccoli had the ability to produce relaxation we would still be eating chocolate. While it's true the body gives us signals as to it's needs, the bodies off most civilized humans have their wires crossed to such a degree that there's very little relationship between cravings and bodily needs.

Several hours after a meal, many people experience cravings, but the body is not lacking for anything. You can survive for weeks without food, and your body is intelligent enough to get what it needs in all but the most atrocious of diets. More likely when you're saying "I'm starved. what's for dinner", you're actually on a blood sugar roller coaster because your body is so confused it doesn't know how to level it out. So be careful when 'listening to your body' because for most of us, the body is as confused as the mind.

Carbohydrate Craving

A USDA study found ”that cravings are for calories, not carbohydrate, as is widely assumed. What is commonly called carbohydrate addiction should probably be relabeled as calorie addiction,“ What they did see is that the common factor in all cravings is 'calorie density', food which may contain fat but are more importantly high calorie foods. Foods that are high in calories are the ones that taste good, and for a very good reason. Human biology developed in such a way that our taste buds respond best to foods that are rich in calories and fat. We are naturally drawn to foods that will supply our energy needs most efficiently.

Nutrient Deprivation Studies

While there are many studies demonstrating dire consequences to not having enough of a particular nutrient in the body, such deficiencies are rare in a culture in which food is abundant and food consumption is most often excessive. (66% of the US population is overweight or obese, according to the CDC) The body miraculously finds a way to get nearly everything it needs from a relatively healthful diet, though it may get quite a bit that it does not need. Such studies yield valuable information about how such nutrients are used in the body, but they do not imply that the average body is in need of some particular nutritional supplement other than to possibly correct some bodily system that has lost it's ability to function properly, in which case it is not in a position to properly convey that need to you in the form of a craving. Trust your body to tell you well something isn't quite right, but trust your intuition and common sense more. In the same way that a confused mind may not be able to tell us what the problem is, a body with it's metabolic wires crossed may also be giving you false information.

A multi-vitamin/mineral supplement is recommended in this program as a safety measure because no dietary recommendations are being made, and it's assumed that food intake will be curtailed, and perhaps dramatically so. A supplement should always be taken if you are severely restricting nutritional consumption.

Survival Mode

Traditional wisdom says that if you reduce caloric intake a little, the body will burn it's fat reserves, while if you restrict it dramatically, the body will reduce basal metabolic rate and start breaking down muscle to supply it's energy deficit. It seems this notion is so readily accepted that it's not even discussed. It also conjures up an image of a body tapping on a calculator keyboard, checking to see if you have exceeded it's caloric deficit threshold and then checking it's long term planning chart to see if it might be better off saving up it's fat reserves, which of course is there for this very purpose, and instead slowing the body down.

What we need to understand is that while the body is a remarkable instrument, it does not have a separate thinking mechanism. The thinking mechanism is on top of your shoulders, so if the body seems to be planning, calculating, prognosticating, the place to look is in your own mind. The body is always functioning in the present, fully prepared to deal with whatever the situation is now, but the brain is the planning mechanism.

What this myth suggests is that, while the mind is intending to burn fat reserves as a means of improving healthy functioning, the body has no idea what you are doing and is going into existential crisis, wondering if you are ever going to feed it again. It also suggests that the most appropriate  response to an apparent crisis is not to maintain optimum functioning so that you might actually be able to find or hunt food, but rather to slow the metabolism and start eating away at your muscles. If this were the way the body was 'designed' to function, nearly all bodies would function the same way, and yet they don't. Many can continue to lose body fat far beyond the so called 10% wall, while others will experience a loss of energy after the first day of not being fed.

What is actually happening is psychological craving. Unconsciously, perhaps, the mind wants to be done with the diet, and is secretly looking for ways to sabotage it. Feeling very weak and unable to perform daily tasks is a very good excuse for ending a diet. Besides, it's not really working anymore because you're not losing anymore body fat. Survival mode is the result of psychological craving.

As such, the best way to prevent survival mode is to eliminate the craving. Nobody in our group, or with other folks that we have been working with, ever went into survival mode because the whole point is to first eliminate the cravings.

Rebound

Rebound is a phenomena which occurs after the diet has ended. In most cases, the lost weight returns, and often even more is acquired. Again, the traditional thinking goes something like this: During the diet, the body struggled mightily with a low caloric intake, but it has learned it's lesson, and now that you're eating well again, it's going so save up as much fat as possible in case it happens again.

Again, it's not the body having a conniption fit, it's the mind. The body doesn't respond by projecting fearful scenarios into the future and working out a plan to keep it from happening again, especially while ignoring the intentions of mind all the while. This is mind projecting it's own dysfunction onto a body that is simply doing the best it can to respond to your intentions and it's own needs. The difficulty is that the mind may be in conflict, and so this is reflected in the body.

It's obvious that, if one gained excess weight with a given dietary routine, that routine cannot be returned to once the diet is over, or the weight will return. Also, if a significant amount of weight is lost, the body requires significantly fewer calories to maintain that weight, so not only do you need to reduce your caloric intake to a level that your body used to require, you need to reduce it further to match your new reduced weight.

There's another psychological factor involved when dieting has become a struggle; After sacrificing for weeks or months, you likely feel as though you deserve a reward. If that reward period goes on for more than a day, you're already on the road to creating worse eating habits that you started with.

If the sacrifice never happens to begin with, all you need to do is understand the physics of your metabolism, and find the new caloric intake that will maintain your reduced weight. You may need to accept that, in a very real sense, the diet is never 'over'. You cannot go back to doing what you did and expect different results. Yo-yo dieting can become a lifelong game, or you can just refuse to play.

While the physiological hunger response is the most obvious, it's by no means the only craving, and in fact is relatively minor, at least in the context of the living standards of most Americans.

1. Physiological hunger

As anyone who has gone on an extended fast knows, the physical hunger response grows weak after a few days, and in fact we found that, in isolating this response from other triggers, it's actually quite weak in the first few days as well. It's not really the body that goes into starvation mode so quickly, but rather the mind justifying it's psychological cravings, and perhaps other cravings triggered by nutritional imbalances. The body does, after a time without a relatively continuous food intake, begin lowering metabolism and processing fat reserves, but it's not nearly as starvation traumatized as we may come to believe based on our responses after not being fed for a few hours, and so the basic hunger response was dealt with quite easily using a currently very popular appetite suppressant called Hoodia. (The final formula of supplements and dosages that we found to be effective is shown on the 'Anti-Crave Formula' page. You'll also find the links at the top of this page)

2. Blood sugar imbalance

It was initially believed that only those with a diabetic condition or who showed overt signs of Hypoglycemia were subjects of blood sugar imbalance. We were surprised to learn that nearly everyone is affected to some degree. We found one doctor who believes half of his patients are hypoglycemic, whether being officially diagnosed or treated as such or not, and most people seem to have some kind of craving associated with a certain time of day, which are clearly blood sugar related. Night cravings are very common, often shortly before bedtime, sometimes in the middle of the night, and we also believe that the strong hunger that often proceeds regular meals or drives you to the vending machines at 3pm is not a basic hunger response but rather a blood sugar dip.

Given this new evidence, we decided to see what it would take to balance blood sugar in the 'normal' individual. (Those diagnosed as diabetic, pre-diabetic/hypoglycemic are obviously a special case and are not referred to here specifically) We tested several supplements and found that it takes anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to balance the blood sugar roller coaster, often shifting the times, frequency and severity of the cravings as it smoothed out. Generally, the cravings lessened for everyone during this process, but expect that it will take some time. We found that L-Glutamine worked remarkably well. (See anti-crave formula for details of what we used.) We exceeded the recommended dosage by quite a bit in order to accomplish this, but studies have been done to determine L-Glutamine toxicity and failed to identify a toxic level. Many practitioners prescribe this nutrient in the range of 4,000 to 5,000mg/day, and we've been operating in the 2,000 to 3,000mg range. L-Glutamine is an amino acid that can supress insulin to stop the decline of sugar levels when needed. It can also stimulate Glycogen to increase sugar levels, and can, itself, be converted to a sugar through a process called glucogenisis. It's very plentiful and relatively inexpensive.

It is suspected that those who eat the 'right' foods and consume several small meals a day likely are not subject to significant blood sugar variations, but unfortunately we seem to have no such individuals in our group. In any event, once the physiological hunger response is dealt with, any regularly timed blood sugar variations can be easily detected.

3. Stress related craving

Since eating is pleasurable, stress can often derail an otherwise successful diet, and so it must be dealt with separately. Most of us are familiar with the many ways of reducing stress, but since we were moving in the direction of natural supplements, we explored various homeopathic, herbal and psychoactive supplements. We found Theanine to be quite effective in bringing lasting relaxation. It also seemed to take effect relatively quickly, which may become important in the event of sudden emotional upsets.

In the absence of emotional stress, the 'pleasure syndrome' of eating is no stronger for most than any other enjoyable activity, and need not take precedence over other enjoyable activities that can substitute. In addition, since we assume nutritional intake will be perhaps severely restricted, we also recommend a nutritional multivitamin supplement. This may become increasingly important  in the case of fasting.

Mind and body are in no way separate, and so it can take some effort to determine what is a physiological craving and what is psychological, and in the physical realm the basic hunger response must be separated from blood sugar variations. Perhaps you can view these recommendations as a 'toolkit' to be used to explore the nature of your own cravings by resolving them one at a time, much the way we did in our explorations. The tools may give you a way of dealing far more effectively with your own unique mind/body, which can positively affect not only your dieting goals, but your quality of sleep as well as your mood and sense of well being throughout the day. For all of us, it has also brought to our attention the quality of our diets as well as shaking up our ideas about the quantity of food needed in order to function at peak performance. To put it bluntly, we all eat more than we need to and removing the bulk of our attention on food can only improve our lives in a multitude of ways.

Once again, it is critical that the struggle relationship with food be severed, and it's my hope that you can sever it permanently. Respond to your cravings in your usual intelligent way without carelessly indulging or applying a rigorous discipline, and allow nature's gifts to help you.

All the best.

Dean R.

Integral Research Institute