How to End Your Food Cravings

It’s a sur­vival mech­a­nism. Eating as many calo­ries as pos­si­ble, when­ever pos­si­ble, allowed our ances­tors to store excess calo­ries as fat and sur­vive lean times. That approach worked well for 2.4 mil­lion years, but today it’s mak­ing us sick and fat.

That’s because our brains haven’t evolved as fast as our food envi­ron­ment. The human brain evolved over 2.5 mil­lion years. And, with the excep­tion of the last 10,000 years, peo­ple only ate ani­mals they could hunt and wild plants they could gather. Imagine if you could only eat what you caught or picked! The vari­ety of foods hunter-gatherers ate paled in com­par­i­son to the 40,000 dif­fer­ent food items we can buy in the aver­age big-box gro­cery store today.

No cin­na­mon buns for them!

And whereas we have easy access to food 24/7, drive-thru meals were not an option for hunter-gatherers. Not to men­tion that hunt­ing and gath­er­ing was hard work. Early humans expended lots of calo­ries acquir­ing their food, so they needed to eat high-calorie foods to off­set the loss. The aver­age hunter-gatherer got up to 60 per­cent of his calo­ries from ani­mal foods, such as mus­cle meat, fat, and organ meat, and the other 40 per­cent from plants.

That bal­ance between pro­tein and car­bo­hy­drates in the diet is where the prob­lem lies, but it’s not what you think. Carbohydrates have got­ten a bad rap, but they are the sin­gle most impor­tant nutri­ent for long-term health and weight loss.

But I’m not talk­ing about bagels and donuts. I’m talk­ing about plant foods that more closely resem­ble what our ances­tors ate. Hunter-gatherers ate fruit, tubers, seeds, and nuts. These are whole foods. They are full of fiber, vit­a­mins, min­er­als and disease- and weight-busting col­or­ful phy­to­chem­i­cals. They also take time to digest. Therefore, they raise blood sugar slowly, which bal­ances metab­o­lism and offers a steady stream of energy. Whole foods have all the right infor­ma­tion and turn on all the right genes.

But the past 10,000 years saw the advent of both agri­cul­ture and indus­tri­al­iza­tion. And, in the blink of an eye (by evo­lu­tion­ary stan­dards), the human diet got turned upside down. Today, 60 per­cent of our calo­ries come from things that hunter-gatherers wouldn’t even rec­og­nize as food. The bulk of those items—cereal grains, sug­ary drinks, refined oils and dressings—are sim­ple car­bo­hy­drates (3). The prim­i­tive brain sees an end­less sup­ply of easy energy. Left unchecked, our bod­ies pay the price. The result is a two-fronted epi­demic of obe­sity and dia­betes in our country—what I call diabesity.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at HuffingtonPost.com.