So many of us struggle with cravings. They can prevent us from losing weight, feeling satisfied, and can trigger mental and physical anxiety.
In short: cravings suck.
In my article Goddesses Don’t Count Calories to Lose Weight & Feel Satisfied, They Use This “Taboo” Trick, I dish about the slick ‘n delish nutrition trick Goddesses use instead of counting calories to lose weight and feel satisfied: they eat for satiety!
Here, I’m going to share with you a cravings-busting sneak-peak mini-experience of my training program, TOTAL CRAVINGS CLEANSE: Your Ultimate Mind-Body Reboot: 2 simple but powerful steps you’ll integrate into your daily routine over 5 delicious days.
These 2 simple steps guide you to FEEL how easy it is to ditch cravings and calorie-counting, in a sustainable way that FEELS GOOD, nurtures the mind-body, and helps you shed pounds and keep them off–with zero deprivation.
But first, I want you to notice my emphasis on how you FEEL.
Can’t Fight This Feeling: Cravings and Weight Loss
For weight loss and weight maintenance to work, they must be sustainable. How you feel–physically, emotionally psychologically, mentally–is important.
How you feel directly, and usually exclusively, dictates whether or not you’ll keep losing weight and keep that weight off for the long-term.
If you’re walking around tortured by cravings, no amount of willpower is going to keep you from eventually regaining weight, binging, or feeling miserable for very long.
Diet vs. Lifestyle
In comparison to a lifestyle, the very nature of a diet is that it’s a short-term deal, a dietary fling that leaves you all by your lonesome and hungry for more. Diets require willpower to stick with because they are not, by their very nature, sustainable or satisfying.
The Goddess Lifestyle isn’t a diet. It’s a sustainble, satisfying, scientifically-validated way of life that supports optimal health on every level, including not just weight loss, but disease prevention, and emotional and psychological wellbeing–in other words, the mind-body.
I teach you how to live The Goddess Lifestyle in my training program, TOTAL CRAVINGS CLEANSE: Your Ultimate Mind-Body Reboot.
What a Low-fat Diet + Calorie-counting Does to the Mind-Body
Calorie-counting (a product of which is the low-fat diet) sends our bodies into a fight-or-flight activated-sympathetic-nervous-system starvation state. We get hungry–often. (Read this paragraph again!)
When we find ourselves having to eat every 3-4 hours, chances are we’re not eating enough fat and protein. Generally the case is that we’re not eating enough fat. Keep in mind:
- Fat makes us feel stable and satisfied longest, and the most intensely
- It’s more common for people to skimp on fat, not protein. Although many of us are opening up to the idea that fat can be healthy and doesn’t make us fat, our culturally-programmed low-fat mindset runs deep, generally favors only plant fats (which can be unhealthy in excess, as I explain here and here), causing many of us to keep fat intake lower than it needs to be, rely largely on lean protein, or excessively focus on plant fats.
How Ditching Calorie-Counting + Eating for Satiety Empowers You to Ditch Cravings +Balance the Mind-Body
When we eat skillfully, according to The Goddess Lifestyle, we can master things, like cravings and low blood sugar, that we thought were permanent biological sentences. Even emotional eating can be massively curbed when we introduce higher amounts of fat into our nutritional practices.
The Goddess Lifestyle is truly holistic, serving the mind-body relationship. I teach you to eat skillfully (and deliciously!) in my training program, TOTAL CRAVINGS CLEANSE: Your Ultimate Mind-Body Reboot.
The Mind-Body Benefits of The Goddess Lifestyle
I’ve been a dedicated yoga practitioner for the past ten years. “Yoga” simply means to “yoke” or unify the body with the mind.
Naturally, I’ve infused The Goddess Lifestyle with an emphasis on cultivating the mind-body connection. As a result, a huge component of The Goddess Lifestyle is eating to nurture the mind-body–what I think of as The Yoga of Eating.
In TOTAL CRAVINGS CLEANSE: Your Ultimate Mind-Body Reboot, we ditch cravings, lose and maintain weight the smart, strategic, satisfying way: by eating for satiety. Fat and protein provide satiety. Fat provides the longest-lasting, most intense satiety of the two.
The benefits of eating for satiety over counting calories are physical, emotional, and psychological. They include:
- blood sugar and insulin stabilization
- sustained feelings of satisfaction and calm for brain and body (yes, this means mouth and belly, too)
- optimal enjoyment of food flavors (the brain is wired to enjoy protein, and especially fat)
- balancing of an overactive sympathetic nervous system response (“fight-or-flight”)
- desirable activation of the parasympathetic nervous system response (“relaxation” and “rest-and-digest”)
- the end of cravings.
These benefits biologically empower Goddesses to go for hours on end between meals, and ensures we optimally enjoy our food, our bodies, and our lives.
Your FREE Mini Total Cravings Cleanse Experiment — SUCCESS IN JUST 5 DAYS!
Let me re-emphasize: Goddesses don’t focus on number-crunching, nor dietary-fat-monitoring. I cover all this–and lots more–in TOTAL CRAVINGS CLEANSE: Your Ultimate Mind-Body Reboot.
But as a valuable experiment in mindfulness, I want you to observe your fat-intake by trying the following 2 Steps below.
Step 1
For the next 2 days, don’t change anything, just observe your fat-intake for each meal/snack. At the end of each day, review and answer the following questions:
- Which foods make up the majority of my meals/snacks?
- How long can I go between meals? Between snacks and meals?
- Am I relying largely on skinless chicken breasts (read: super-lowfat)?
- Am I relying largely on fish for not just protein, but fat (fish is generally higher in protein than fat; also, fat in fish is mostly unsaturated, which is unstable when heated/cooked–read more here)?
- Am I throwing out my egg yolks, or eating mostly/only egg whites?
- Am I limiting whole eggs to only one or two per day? Do I feel hesitant/anxious about eating more?
- Do I generally snack on fruit–and only fruit?
- Do I generally snack on veggies–and only veggies?
- Am I eating butter-alternative “spreads?”
- Am I eating/drinking reduced fat/skim/nonfat dairy? (Yes, even trendy low- or nonfat Greek yogurt.)
- Am I drinking cartoned (read: watered-down) nut/grain/seed/coconut milks?
- Am I eating coconut oil or butter, but only using , say, less than a teaspoon in my food?
- Do I mainly eat plant-sourced fats (oils, nuts, seeds, nut/seed butters)? (Learn why you must eat more grass-fed animal fats.)
Step 2
Over the following 3 days
- Eat more of the satiating Goddess Lifestyle foods listed via this link, alongside colorful veggies (load up on veggies; minimize grains, legumes and beans).
- Include 1 tablespoon of coconut oil or butter with each meal, starting with and focusing first on breakfast (butter from grass-fed pastured cows is your ideal butter-option). Cook with it, dress food with it, etc. Be sure to transfer oil/butter used for cooking from your cookware to your plate–leave no fat behind! You may not feel like you want as much oil/butter for later meals, and that’s fine–listen to your body–but kick start your day this way.
Over the course of each day, pay attention to
- hunger levels
- time between meals/snacks (how many hours?)
- how many meals you find yourself hungry for (does this number stay the same or decrease?)
- energy levels
- sense of groundedness.
Basically:
- For the first 2 days, you observe your normal eating habits.
- Then for 3 days after that, you integrate more Goddess Lifestyle foods into each meal, including 1 tablespoon coconut oil or pasture butter. Observe your physical and psychological responses.
I’m going to bet my money on your noticing some pleasant effects. These effects, in turn, have a cumulative momentum-encouraging effect, making The Goddess Lifestyle a sustainable holistic lifestyle, not a short-lived diet.
Learn more about TOTAL CRAVINGS CLEANSE: Your Ultimate Mind-Body Reboot here.
Reminder
I’m sharing these 2 life-changing Mini Total Cravings Cleanse tips with you because I know how frustrating and overwhelming cravings can be, and I’m committed to helping you become a radiant, satisfied Goddess. It doesn’t cost you a cent, but if you find these steps helpful, share it with three friends as payment.
I Want to Hear About YOU!
Now, let me know you’re committed to your Delicious 5-Day Goddess Lifestyle Experiment, by pasting the following phrase into the comments below: Hey Erika, I’m kicking off my delicious mini Total Cravings Cleanse experiment! I’m excited to feel amazing, ditch cravings, and calorie-counting! Even better: post a comment each of the 5 days of your experiment!
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