Three minutes of Tetris is enough to weaken a craving. Thirty-one students carried an iPod for a week and logged every craving as it struck, rating its strength out of 100. Half of them then played Tetris for three minutes, and their cravings fell by about 14 points, whether the target was food, a drink, a cigarette or coffee.
A sugar craving feels like an order from your body. The word agrees: "crave" comes from the Old English crafian, to demand. It behaves more like a picture in your head, and a picture can be crowded out. Ahead: the blood sugar dip that sends you back to the kitchen, why nobody binges on sugar cubes, why the small daily treat keeps a craving alive, and how three months on less sugar changed the taste of the same pudding.
1. Watch the dip, two hours later
The spike gets the blame. The dip does the damage. When 1,070 people ate the same breakfasts while wearing glucose monitors, the ones whose blood sugar dropped furthest two to three hours later felt 9% hungrier, ate their next meal about half an hour sooner, and took in around 312 calories more over the day.
Identical breakfasts produced big dips in some people and small ones in others. Your dip is your own.
The dip reaches the brain. Twelve overweight men drank two milkshakes, equal in calories and taste, one made with fast carbs and one with slow. Four hours after the fast one, their blood sugar was lower, they were hungrier, and the brain's reward centre was more active.
Note the time you eat something sweet or starchy, and the time the next craving arrives. Two to three hours is the pattern to look for. A lets you see the dip for yourself.
2. Know what you're craving
Nobody binges on sugar cubes. When people bid real money for snacks, they paid more for foods that combined fat and carbohydrate than for equally liked, equally caloric foods with only one of the two, and the brain's reward areas responded more strongly. The foods people report losing control over are chocolate, ice cream, French fries and pizza, all of them processed, and nearly all fat and refined carbohydrate together.
Whether sugar counts as an addiction is less settled than the headlines suggest. Reviewers who went looking for sugar addiction in humans found little evidence. In animals, the addiction-like bingeing shows up when sweet food comes and goes: banned, then allowed, then banned again.
One thing does look like tolerance. Among 151 teenagers, the ones who ate ice cream most often showed the weakest response in the brain's reward areas to a milkshake. More of the same food bought less pleasure.
Name the food, out loud, the next time you "need sugar". It will rarely be sugar on its own.
3. A craving is learned
The usual story says a craving reports a missing nutrient. The evidence points to learning. Nearly half of American women say they crave chocolate around their period. Among 275 women of different backgrounds, the figure was 17% for those born outside the US, 33% for those with US-born parents, and 41% for the daughters of immigrants. The body is the same in all three groups. The habit is local.
Sight refreshes the lesson. Across 45 reports on 3,292 people, seeing food and craving it predicted eating and weight gain, and pictures and videos of food worked as well as the real thing, and better than its smell.
A liking for sweetness itself is inborn. Across 74 tests in 7,049 newborns, a little sugar water eased the pain of a heel prick. What you learn is which food to want.
Ask where you learned this craving: which room, which company, which mood. Charles Duhigg's shows how a cue, a routine and a reward lock together, with his own afternoon cookie as the test case.
4. Expect it in the evening
"Dessert" comes from the French desservir, to clear the table. It was always the thing that came after you'd had enough.
And there is always room for it. Fullness is specific to the taste you've been eating: the pleasure of the main course fades while a new flavour still appeals. People given four different courses ate 44% more than people given the same food four times.
The evening pull is built in. Twelve adults lived in a lab for 13 days on a schedule that pulled their body clock apart from their meals and their sleep. Hunger, and appetite for sweet, salty and starchy food, hit bottom in the body's morning and peaked in its evening, whatever they had eaten and whenever they had slept.
Decide the evening's food earlier in the day, while the clock is on your side.
5. Sleep before you fight it
After a night without sleep, people wanted high-calorie food more, and the more tired they felt, the stronger the pull. On the scan, the parts of the brain that weigh up a choice had gone quiet, and the part that reacts had grown louder.
The hormones move too. After two nights of short sleep, twelve young men had 28% more ghrelin, the hormone that says "eat", 18% less leptin, the one that says "enough", and 33 to 45% more appetite for calorie-dense, high-carb food.
Sleeping longer works in reverse. Forty-two short sleepers were either coached to stay in bed longer or left alone. Within four weeks the coached group was eating about 10 grams less sugar a day, without being asked to.
After a short night, expect the pull, and keep the sweet food out of reach for the day.
6. Walk off the stress
Stress sends some people straight to the sweet shelf. When 59 women went through a stressful session in a lab, those whose stress hormone, cortisol, rose the most ate more afterwards, and chose more sweet food.
A walk answers it. Seventy-eight regular chocolate eaters went two days without it, then sat down to a computer task with a bowl of chocolates beside them. Those who had taken a brisk fifteen-minute walk first ate about half as much as those who had rested.
When the craving arrives, walk for fifteen minutes before you decide.
7. Eat protein at your first meal
Twenty young women who usually skipped breakfast ate a 350-calorie breakfast for six days. Their cravings for sweet and savoury food through the morning fell, and a marker of dopamine, the brain's wanting chemical, rose. The higher the protein in the breakfast, the higher the marker.
The kind of breakfast mattered by evening. In the same test, only the high-protein breakfast, eggs and beef, cut the snacking on high-fat food that night and lowered the hunger hormone through the day. The cereal breakfast did neither. This is about what goes into your first meal, whenever in the day you eat it.
Build your first meal of the day around eggs, meat or fish. A takes the effort out of the eggs.
8. Cut the carbs, and the craving follows
You stop wanting what you stop eating. When 270 obese adults followed a low-carb or a low-fat diet for two years, the low-carb group had the larger drop in cravings for carbohydrates and starches, and in their liking for high-sugar foods. They were also less bothered by hunger.
Your taste shifts too. People who cut their sugar by 40% for three months came to rate the same pudding about 40% sweeter than a comparison group did. Sweet things started to taste sweeter, so less was enough.
If you take medication that lowers blood sugar, cutting carbs can push it too low. Make the change together with whoever manages your medication.
Pick a level you can keep, whether low-carb, keto or carnivore, and give your taste three months to catch up.
9. Eat it less often
Lord Darlington, in Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, could "resist everything except temptation". The trick is to meet it less often.
How often matters more than how much. In 367 people followed for two years, cravings for a food rose and fell with how often they ate it. The amount made no difference.
That's bad news for the small daily treat, and good news for everything else. Across eight groups of people who ate less for twelve weeks or more, cravings went down, and cravings for sweets went down the most.
It may get worse before it gets better. Being denied a particular food is tied to craving it more, and the falls in cravings were found at checks made twelve weeks in or later. In the pudding test the change in taste showed up in the second month. Going without food altogether is different: fasting quietens cravings along with hunger.
Eating it less often can look like the on-off pattern that set the animals bingeing. The difference is hunger. Those rats went without any food for half of every day. So eat properly on the days in between.
Move the sweet thing from every day to one day a week, and see what happens to the craving on the other six.
10. Find the hidden sugar
"Sugar" goes back to the Sanskrit śárkarā, grit. In Europe it was a luxury until plantations made it cheap, and by the 18th century every level of British society was eating it.
Of 85,451 packaged foods sold in the US, 74% had a caloric sweetener added. It goes by many names. The commonest on the label were corn syrup, sorghum, cane sugar, high-fructose corn syrup and fruit juice concentrate. Every one of them counts toward how often.
Read the ingredients on five savoury things in your cupboard.
What about sweeteners?
The theory is that sweet taste keeps the sweet tooth alive, with or without sugar. The evidence is thin. Across 21 sets of findings the results pulled in different directions, and in the controlled tests, more sweet taste tended to lower the liking for sweetness for a while, with little effect later. Treat it as unproven either way.
What your gut has to do with it
Is it your gut bacteria? In mice, yes. Mice left with less of one common gut bacterium, and of the vitamin B5 it makes, developed a taste for sugar. The vitamin works by raising GLP-1, the gut hormone the weight-loss injections copy. In people, nobody has shown it yet.
The weight-loss injections show how much of a craving is signalling. In 30 obese adults, twelve weeks on semaglutide (sold as Ozempic and Wegovy) brought fewer food cravings, better control of eating, and 24% less food eaten at open meals than a dummy injection. A copy of one gut hormone turned the wanting down. Willpower had no part in it.
When it's more than a craving
Four patterns deserve a check. Constant thirst, peeing more than usual, tiredness and losing weight without trying are the commonest signs of type 2 diabetes, so get your blood sugar tested.
Eating a lot in a short time without being able to stop, fast, alone or in secret, with guilt or shame afterwards, is binge eating disorder. It's a recognised condition with treatment. Ask for help.
A sudden craving for one food can also be the first stage of a migraine, hours or even a day or two before the pain. If you get migraines, the chocolate may be the warning, and it often takes the blame.
One craving should be obeyed. If you take insulin or another diabetes medicine, and a sudden hunger comes with shaking, sweating or dizziness, that's low blood sugar. Treat it with something sugary straight away.
Crowd it out
Sugar cravings come from a dip in your blood sugar, a food built to be wanted, a short night and a long habit. None of them is a defect in you.
Tetris was written in the mid-1980s by Alexey Pajitnov, a Soviet software engineer, in his spare time. Curing cravings was no part of the plan. Three minutes of it took the edge off one all the same. Give your next one three minutes of something that fills your head, and see what's left of it.
Tired an hour after something sweet? How to Fix Blood Sugar Spikes Naturally — the carbs to cut first, and the ten-minute walk that flattens the rest.
Is the sweet thing usually in a glass? The Hidden Cost of Your Daily Sugary Drink — what a daily soda or juice does to your liver, your teeth and your cells.
Know someone who raids the biscuit tin after dinner? Send them this, and go for a walk together.
Disclaimer: This article is general information. For advice about your own health, talk to a qualified health professional.
Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, All For Life earns from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. We only link to products we would recommend without the commission.
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