Every year, I read and hear about “this year’s diet”. The name of the diet changes from year to year, but the intent is the same: You want to lose weight, or detoxify your system—And you are willing to sacrifice pleasure and flavor to reach your goals. Sure enough, last year, three weeks after you started “the diet”, you were back to your old ways—only then you felt guilty about it. Not to worry though. After a few bites of your favorite “guilty pleasure” comfort food, the feelings of failure and inadequacy just faded away. Oh well, there’s always next year.
What happened? Although you had good intentions, your body’s innate nutritional and emotional needs are being managed by your hormones and endocrine glands. You cannot quickly change the tastes and textures your body naturally craves. The secret of success in achieving your health goals AND mastering the process lies in knowing what your body is truly craving and satisfying it immediately.
Yes, you can have your cake and eat it without guilt—if you satisfy the real cravings you have soon enough. What is unique about the Craving Category approach is, it encourages you to listen to your body and put a time, taste and texture to everything you eat. That's the way the body works, that's the way the mind works. By taking charge of your cravings, your life will run better. It will eliminate frustration and you will be happier and more at peace with yourself.
How to find your Craving Categories
Step 1
On a two-column page or spreadsheet, make a list of your favorite foods of all time, and a list of foods you eat on any two or three days (it is not necessary that the days be consecutive). For example: Bacon, eggs, an apple, a chicken sandwich.
Step 2
Next to each food item, jot down a brief description of the taste and texture of that food (or how you think about that food). For example: An apple is crisp, semi‑sweet, juicy, easy to eat, and it's not messy.
Step 3
Take your list of tastes, textures and descriptions and write the list in one column of a second two-column page or the 3rd column of a spreadsheet. For example: 1-Crisp, 2-Semi‑sweet, 3-juicy, 4-easy to eat, not messy.
Step 4
In the second column of that second page, make a list of all the foods you can think of that fit in each category. Foods that are crisp: Apple, grapes, crackers, pears, watermelon, toast… Foods that are easy to eat--not messy: Potato chips, grapes, apples… Foods that are semi-sweet: Dark chocolate, cantaloupe, pear salad.
Step 5
With your craving categories, rearrange your list from most to least-healthy. Crisp: Apple, pear, grape, watermelon, toast, crackers… Easy-to-Eat—Not messy: Apple, grape, potato chips… Semi-sweet: Pear salad, cantaloupe, dark chocolate…
We've got one list of categories that we extrapolated from our original food list, and we may have 10, 15, 20, 30 or 50 categories of food that we select from throughout our lives that we can put all the food we eat into. We've got another list of all the foods we like. What we should have done by now is take the food we like and put category designations for each food. What about the next food? How would you categorize a hamburger?
By listing foods this way, you will be able to develop your shopping list and your everyday list of foods easily. Let's say you're going over to someone's house, and you want to help them prepare a great meal for you. Say, "These are the foods that I love… Can you make something kind of savory, sweet and chewy, but not greasy?". Shazzamm! Barbecue grilled chicken, marinated overnight in the family secret-recipe of sea salt, molasses, olive oil and Jerk seasoning, slow cooked to perfection! Now THAT’S what I’m TALKIN’ about!
You can post your list with a magnet on the side of your refrigerator, so when you go shopping, you can use it as a guideline for yourself seasonally, or you can have someone else make up the shopping list, because they know what your categories are. For my clients, Ed and Rosalie, she does the shopping, and, because she has a list of Ed's categories, she can just pull Ed's craving category list out and take it shopping with her to make sure that he has food at home in each of his categories. Because she makes the selection, she's going to also pick the healthiest foods for each of his categories.
Here's another way to consider your Craving Categories: Roxanne has two lists from which she selects her food. One of her headings is, "Reward Foods" and " Comfort Foods That Make Me Feel Good About Myself”. Her healthy shopping strategy is to always shop from the second list. On particularly stressful days, she will stop and pick up a small piece of her favorite gourmet chocolate, which is on her “Comfort Foods” list. She never keeps more than a small portion of comfort food at home.
Take a look at all your Craving Categories and, based on the information that you have been gleaning from your nutrition books, you can begin to rearrange the order of the foods on your lists. You can rearrange them according to how easy each food is to get. Put the easy ones at the top and the logistically cumbersome things to get at the bottom of the list. You can also categorize them from the most healthy to the least healthy.
The foods I eat during the week are different from what I eat on the weekends. During the week, I'm on the go and I need to eat foods that are easy to prepare. On the weekend, I eat more sit‑down meals because I have an hour or so to eat. When I go out for fine dining, I ask the server what’s on the menu that is kind of savory, sweet and chewy, but not greasy. Then I let them surprise me with their interpretation.
You can categorize foods in whatever way is significant to you. You can make up a list for every part of the country you're in. If you're in the South and you like gumbo or some other set of southern dishes, they fit in different categories for you, or maybe they fit in the same categories that you can only use while you're in another country. You can carry your list or have it in mind as you order your food, shop or when someone else will prepare food for you.
Use your Craving Categories list until you have a working command over the food selection process. Soon, you'll find that you can truly have your cake and eat it too. Bon Appétit! ˜˜˜--Aaron Parnell
