If you’ve been trying to improve your diet but can’t shake the call of sugary treats, you’re not alone. Americans eat way too much sugar.
But experts say there are some concrete steps you can take to keep your sweet tooth at bay. Here’s how to start.
Balance your blood sugar
When you eat a meal or snack with sugar or carbohydrates, your body breaks it down into glucose, the type of sugar that acts as the body’s primary fuel source. If that snack is mostly carbohydrate or sugar without fiber or protein, the amount of glucose in our blood will spike quickly. “Then we’re on this roller coaster all day long, trying to manage our blood sugar dips,” says Alison Acerra, a registered dietician nutritionist in New York. Those dips can nudge us to reach for another sweet or carb-laden snack as a quick fix. “What we’re looking for is really stable blood sugars over the course of the day.”
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Enter protein and fiber, both of which slow down the speed at which carbohydrates turn to sugar in the blood, helping to stabilize blood sugar. Making sure you pair carbohydrates with protein and fiber “prevents those crashes that cause the cravings in the first place,” says Acerra.
Another mistake people make—especially very active people—is just not eating enough overall. Undereating can cause fatigue that also drives a craving for rapidly digestible carbohydrates, such as sweets, she explains.
Limit triggers
One of the most difficult aspects of addressing sugar cravings is that they’re typically driven by unconscious signals, explains Dana Small, a professor studying the brain, diet, and metabolism at McGill University in Canada. When your gut senses glucose, it sends reward signals to your brain. One of the downsides of this mechanism is that it is “associated with habit learning, and habits and compulsive behaviors are very hard to break.”
We then become conditioned to expect those reward signals when we sense certain cues in our environment.
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“The food industry plays into this,” says Small. “They want a loud pop when you take the lid off. The packaging is beautiful. You have all of these cues that have been conditioned to these strong signals that promote you to consume that item again.”
Nonetheless, she says there are strategies you can use to combat this conditioning. First, do your best to reduce these types of cues in your environment. Try not to stock your kitchen or workspace with appealing snacks, for example.
Another deconditioning strategy is to take one sip of a sugary soda or bite of a snack, then throw it away. “The more times you do this, you condition a new behavior, and you also make your ability to throw it away stronger,” she says.
Improve your sleep
Maybe it feels like you’re doing everything you can to manage your blood sugar and reduce potential triggers, but you’re still craving sugar. If so, you might consider trying to improve your sleep. “If we can improve your sleep, it does improve your eating behavior and your food preferences, and that’s something we don’t really think about,” says Ayan Merchant, a sleep and performance psychologist in Gujarat, India. She adds that when we don’t sleep well, we start to crave sweets more.
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She and a team of researchers recently published a small study finding that when adults who had trouble sleeping underwent cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), they reported fewer cravings for both sweet and savory foods, and they had better control of those cravings.
Can sugar substitutes help?
Artificial sweeteners, chemicals that deliver the sweetness of sugar without the calories, might be tempting. However, Small says they’re best avoided. “Artificial sweeteners are not inert,” she says. Different sweeteners work through separate mechanisms, and scientists don’t fully understand all of them yet, but there’s good enough consensus in the scientific community that they can have negative consequences, she says. And these sweeteners may show up in places you don’t expect, such as protein powders. It’s especially important to make sure you’re reading the labels on your food to ensure you’re not just replacing sugar with another potentially problematic sweetener, she says.
Most importantly, Acerra notes, when we’re having intense sugar cravings, “usually the body is telling us something. It’s really important to understand the root of why it’s happening, and then from there, be able to come up with the strategies and how we can relieve them.”