Although your cravings will gradually diminish with time as you live within your new healthy nutritional environment, they will not vanish right from the start. Also, you will need a few weeks to truly get all the aspects of the environment described in the previous three posts to just “click” and start working together in perfect harmony. We therefore need some additional strategies to make sure that we maintain our ideal healthy environment until the point where it becomes completely automatic.
The primary strategy that I use for this is something I call “hunger-busters”. These are things which are healthy, filling and at least reasonably tasty. The purpose of always having a number of hunger-busters in your ideal nutritional environment is to bust any of those cravings we get when we are not really hungry. Thus, instead of ordering a pizza, you simply wolf down a green salad, down a few glasses of water or enjoy a bowl of whole wheat cereal. When you have taken a few minutes to fill your body with such low-calorie, high-nutrient, high-volume foods, you will find that your cravings simply fade away.
The most effective hunger-buster I know of is a green drink. A correctly blended green drink is one of the healthiest things you can ever dream of putting into your body. Ask Google for get some recipes. Also, if you are scared of stuff like spinach, take heart from the fact that this fear is only due to our cultural conditioning and can easily be overcome. Personally, spinach scared the hell out of me only one and a half years ago, but now I consume a big bag of the stuff every two weeks in the form of regular green drinks.
Another handy rule of thumb for maintaining your healthy nutritional environment is the “two out of three” guideline. The food we eat can have three handy properties: it can be healthy, tasty and free. The two out of three guideline simply says that you should strive to only eat foods that qualify for at least two out of these three points. In practice this implies that you will only buy foods that are both healthy and tasty (something which becomes laughably easy once you have learnt a few quick, healthy and tasty recipes as discussed in the previous post). It also implies that you can graciously accept a tasty (but perhaps less healthy) treat offered to you by a friend or a host without feeling guilty about it.