What Are Carb Cravings?
...and how important are they?

Quite awhile ago, I read a book called Welcome Silence by Carol North. it was written by a woman who had heard voices and other noises in her head from the time she was six years old. She tells how she tried to make sense of these voices, creating what we would call paranoid delusions about them - and indeed, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. However, at some point in her adult life, she received an experimental treatment - dialysis - which totally removed the voices in her head (the probability is that toxins in her body were causing the symptoms). The title of the book refers to the morning when she woke up...to silence in her head.

For me, getting rid of "carb cravings" is a little like this.

What do people mean when they talk about carb cravings?

Truly, I can only give my own understanding of this, from my own perspective and from talking to lots of other people about this. Essentially, carb cravings are 1) a strong urge to eat which is not associated with what we ordinarily think of as "hunger", and 2) usually triggered by either an excess of carbohydrates or the wrong type of carbohydrates. The craving itself may or may not be for carb-rich foods, but often it is, leading to a cycle of carbohydrate eating that is difficult to break. When people talk about "sugar addiction" or "carbohydrate addiction" they are probably talking about the same or a similar phenomenon.

What's clear is that they work differently for different people, and perhaps at different times in our lives. Five years ago, when I went on the Zone diet, I experienced for the first time, the liberation from carb cravings - before I actually knew what they were.

I'm checking

to see

what happens

when

I go

too far down on the page.

Amen