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Insatiable Cravings
Terri Crecco believes she's addicted to sugar. Even as a kid, she had trouble resisting sweets. As an adult, when things aren't going well, cookies and ice cream make her feel better. Once, she downed a whole pound of jellybeans walking back to her office after her lunch break. "I meant to eat just a few, but I couldn't stop until I finished the entire bag," she says. "My cravings can be awful, insatiable. You can't ignore them." As a result, the 55-year-old New York City mortgage broker has been waging a lifelong battle with her weight.Karsten Askeland, 56, a Niagara Falls police officer, got hooked on burgers, fries and other fast food when he was 14 and sidelined from sports after breaking his leg. Until then, Askeland had been a trim and athletic kid who played basketball and football, and was the fastest sprinter on the track team. Immobilized by his broken leg, he continued to eat as if he was still burning thousands of calories a week playing sports. Long after his leg healed and in the years beyond high school, he continued to indulge. "It would be nothing for me to eat my supper at home and then go out immediately to McDonald's and order a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, a fish sandwich, a large order of fries and a large Coke. Sometimes I would go to McDonald's two or three times a day!"
Before Askeland knew it, his weight had ballooned to 280 pounds. In 1975 he began a strict low-calorie diet and exercise plan to get down to 190 so he could join the police force. But on his break from the night shift, he would head for the local Chinese restaurant. In time, he regained all the weight and more, reaching a high of 474 pounds. Since then, life for Askeland has been a struggle to lose weight and subdue those hard-to-deny cravings for fast food.
Stress and Comfort Food
What makes people eat like this? On a more modest scale, why do we reach for chocolate or doughnuts or potato chips when we're stressed, tired or bored? "Under stress, we crave foods that we liked as children, a time in our psychological life when there was little stress," says John Foreyt, PhD, professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas. No surprise, then, that when we're under pressure, we don't reach for the steamed broccoli.
Even animals respond to stress by indulging in fattening foods. A study at the University of California, San Francisco, found that chronic stress prompted lab rats to indulge in high-calorie foods (in the rats' case, food containing lard and sucrose).
When cravings start to sabotage health or weight-loss efforts, however, they may become a source of stress, and that's a double whammy. Can you lose weight despite yearnings for chocolate or cheeseburgers? Experts say yes, though conquering cravings can take some savvy strategy -- as well as insight into the brain and body chemistry that underlies the yen for Rocky Road ice cream or guacamole and chips.
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