You’ve made the choice to live for health one day at a time. But your old tastebuds are clamoring for those delightful foods that taste so good! All you can think of is that bag of candy sitting on the shelf or that bag of chips that seems to be calling your name. And they all spell “Sabotage” when it comes to meeting your health goals. How can you calm these cravings? You need a plan of attack. Here’s some that have helped many to calm cravings and win the battle with food urges.

REMOVE YOUR TRIGGERS. For some people, cravings are triggered by sight: if they see the food sitting out on the kitchen counter or on the corner of their desk, they’re more likely to snack. Put problem foods behind closed doors, says Marcia Pelchat, food cravings expert at the Monell Chemical Senses Center—or better yet, keep them out of the house altogether. If you know you have to go out to get your ice cream fix, you’re more likely to enjoy it as a small, occasional treat than if there’s a half gallon of mint chocolate chip in your freezer.

DON’T STARVE YOURSELF. If you avoid eating during the day in an effort to lose weight, you’re bound to have powerful hormones that will make you more likely to binge by dinnertime. “You’re more apt to be able to avoid eating high-fat, high-sugar foods if you have filled yourself up on healthier foods during [meals],” says Caroline Apovian, M.D., director of the Nutrition and Weight Management Center at Boston Medical Center.

DISTRACT YOURSELF. A successful distraction can be as simple as tapping your forehead or your ear, or imagining a blank wall. Researchers from Mt. Sinai St. Luke’s Hospital in New York City found that doing any one of these activities for just 30 seconds helped to diminish food cravings. And even if you eventually come back and eat the food you were craving, the mere act of delaying the inevitable can help weaken the craving in the future, says Pelchat.

STARVE THE MICROBES. If our gut bacteria are partly to blame for our Twinkie and Frito obsessions, then giving in will only expand the population of microbes that depend on those foods, making the cravings worse, explains Dr. Athena Aktipis, assistant psychology professor at Arizona State University.  “If we want to stop craving foods that are so bad for us, perhaps the most important thing to do is to cut back on those foods,” she says. That means cutting back not just on the particular food that you crave, but on high-fat, high-sugar foods in general.

EAT BREAKFAST. Researchers from the University of Missouri found that people who ate a morning meal had dramatically fewer cravings for both sweet and salty foods during the day, with breakfasts high in protein being the most effective. For great plant-based sources of breakfast protein, load up on nut butters, scrambled tofu, quinoa and other whole grains, or even beans (yes, they’re good for breakfast!).

-excerpt from Vibrant Life magazine, 8/18/2015