Solutions to Any and All Cravings

Solutions to Any and All Food Cravings

If you listen to the body closely, it will tell you what it needs. You just have to know how to interpret the signs the right way! Sometimes, a craving for salty things, for example, does not indicate that you are low on salt. This is also the case when craving for sweets.

Cravings 101

Cravings can be a great indicator that something is missing in the body. In fact, we can use these cravings to pinpoint problems we are having within the system, such as nutritional deficiencies of some kind, that could be wreaking havoc on our overall health and weight loss efforts.

Let’s look at what cravings for sugar, salt, chocolates, and other foods and compounds can tell us about what our bodies need more of.   
 

Sugar Cravings

If you’re craving sugar, then you’re not burning fat, you’re burning sugar! We don’t want that, right? We want to be in fat-burning mode as much as possible. This is a strong indicator that we need to fix something in the system.

Usually, if you’re craving sweets, you’re deficient in potassium. Now, potassium is one of those nutrients that is very hard to get enough of in our diet. That’s because we need a whopping 4 700 milligrams of potassium a day.

Most people think, well, I’ll eat a banana. But you’ll have to eat quite a lot of bananas to meet your RDA for potassium because a banana only has around 470 milligrams of potassium. So you’d have to eat 10 of them. And that would completely wreck your health and your diet.

Instead, look for low-calorie, potassium-rich dark greens and leafy vegetables. Beet greens, spinach, kale, garden cress, and Swiss chard have rich amounts of potassium in them, as do yams and bamboo shoots.  

You need 7 to 10 cups of these types of vegetables a day to supply all of your potassium.

Other Deficiencies That Could Be Present with Sugar Cravings

If your potassium requirement is being met (which is rare) and you’re still having sugar cravings, this could be a sign of complete adrenal burnout, and you need l-tryptophan to increase serotonin to reactivate the pleasure hormone in your body.

Foods rich in tryptophan are turkey, eggs, cheese, nuts and seeds, salmon, and tofu.

Cravings for Starchy Foods

If you’re craving starchy foods like potatoes, pasta, mac and cheese, and bread—all those wonderful pleasure foods that people are addicted to – that’s a B vitamin deficiency. So get some nutritional yeast, which has all the B vitamins in their natural form—which is far superior to synthetic vitamins.  

With this craving, you might need to increase L-tryptophan to increase serotonin and feelings of comfort, and you might want to increase dopamine.

Salt Cravings
 

If you’re craving salt, then we know one thing for sure-- the adrenals are losing salt.

In the body, salt has some very important functions for cardiovascular and lung health. In fact, it buffers the PH and it transports CO2 to aid in breathing. So if you’re missing this important mineral, the body will let you know about it via cravings.

You aren’t opposed to have to consume sea salt like crazy, as long as your potassium is in check.

Salt has gotten a bad reputation lately, but we do need salt. Often, if you’re deficient in salt, you’ll be tired and sluggish because salt is an electrolyte. Another way to tell if you’re not getting enough salt is that you might experience more muscle cramps in the calves and in the legs.

Cravings for Fatty Foods

If you crave deep-fried foods, like deep-fried catfish with tartar sauce, fried chicken, deep-friend things in general, these kind of cravings are typically cravings for fat.
 

Fat cravings are actually a sign of a liver, gallbladder, or bile issue. It is a sign that you’re not absorbing the fat-soluble vitamins. So again, you need to regulate your bile and the Gallbladder Formula can do that for you.

What if You’re Craving Chocolates?
 

Cravings for chocolate indicate an issue with pleasure hormones, specifically serotonin. These can be alleviated through more L-tryptophan. Magnesium is also used to build L-tryptophan so you can also take magnesium, too, to fix the chocolate cravings as well.

The Adrenal Formula at my store can also help with chocolate cravings. In fact, if you fix the adrenals, you’ll fix four cravings at once: salty, sweet, chocolate, and starch cravings.

Cravings for Sour/Lemon
 

Cravings for sour things, lemon drops, and sweet tarts, are a sign of a choline deficiency.

Choline is needed to make a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine, which is essential for our sleep/wake cycles and to support the parasympathetic nervous system. That’s the system that helps you sleep.

The best remedy for these cravings is through lemon water, lemons, or to take a choline supplement, which is actually a lemon-tasting vitamin, and if you’re low on choline, you will absolutely love sucking on these.  

Another thing you can do is to fortify the body with nutritional yeast to increase acetylcholine, and that will help improve the B vitamins, which will produce more acetylcholine.

Typically, craving sour things is a sign of fat on the liver as well, because choline can help to strip fat off of the liver.

Often, the body tells you what it needs via cravings, and this is why people with liver issues crave this nutrient.

Cravings for Ice
 

Cravings for ice indicate an iron deficiency. When you have cravings like this, you need to make sure that you are not:
 

1. anemic

2. pregnant

3. having a severe digestion problem
 

Usually, pregnant women crave ice or they’ll crave dirt, so you can often just get them a teaspoon of dirt from the backyard to ease these cravings. 

Caffeine Cravings
 

For caffeine addicts who want to come off of caffeine, you can take phenylpiracetam to come off of caffeine.  Caffeine is pretty hard to give up, however, and I recommend you reduce it, not come off of it completely.

Keep in mind that a lot of caffeine consumption can cause deficiencies of B1 and calcium, and you might show signs of those.

Cravings for Alcohol
 

If you know someone who is fighting alcoholism or addiction, you might want to recommend kombucha tea. It is a wonderful substitute because it actually has the same texture as beer. 

You can also give them Dopa Mucuna, which is an African bean called the 'velvet bean' that actually helps people come off of alcohol and drugs, because it simulates dopamine which is the pleasure/reward system of the brain.

Constantly Hungry
 

If you are constantly hungry, you probably need more bile in the stomach and more of the fat-soluble vitamins.

MSG Cravings

If you find yourself saying you’re addicted to the taste of Chinese food, that’s probably a sign of an MSG craving caused by eating MSG too often.

MSG is basically added to Chinese and Asian foods to cover up the fact that they are using poor quality ingredients. So they’re basically making bad food taste good, and that’s bad, of course.

You can get rid of MSG cravings by increasing the opposing mineral—potassium, to balance it out.

Another reason to avoid MSG- it increases Fat Storing Hormone by 300%, which is bad, bad, bad.

I’d love to hear from you! Please leave any comments or questions below. 

Understand your cravings and see more Diet Advice from Dr. Berg Video Blog.

Thank you,

Dr. Berg