Low carb kills the food noise but not the desire to eat for emotional reasons

[noraheggerty]

Just wondering if anyone else has this and if you have any tips to overcome it.

I'm totally on board intellectually with low carb and intermittent fasting, and when I do it I can feel it working. High/processed carbs make me bloated and lethargic, so even if I didn't want to lose weight (which I do) then I would still be best off without them.

On low carb I feel so much better, less hungry, no "food noise". I naturally don't feel hungry in the evenings, and feel better in the morning if I didn't eat dinner, so intermittent fasting is easy for me & I feel a lot better for that too. Although socially it's annying, so I eat dinner socially two or three times a week. All very good and sensible.

BUT after a few weeks of this, despite feeling great physically, I get this nagging desire to binge on carbs, and I'm sure it's for emotional reasons. I start to feel deprived & want to have the experience of eating cake or something like that because I feel like it's going to make me happy somehow.

I've thought maybe it's physical & have tried adding things like root veg, dark bread & porridge to my diet so as to get the nutrients I might be missing out on. Didn't make a difference.

I've read books on emotional eating and I know that the desire to binge is an indicator that something emotional needs my attention. Yet, when it hits me I can't for the life of me sit there and think "What am I feeling, how can I address it" etc. I just make a beeline for the nearest source of refined carbs, and this sets me off on the GI rollercoaster for a few days, till I get too bloated and lethargic to carry on & I go back to the low carb diet, feeling grateful for how much better it makes me feel, until it all goes round again.

I do enjoy the taste of cake etc if it's good quality. It would be nice to be able to eat it once in a while without going mad for it. I tried that too - having a treat every few days, thinking maybe it was the taste I was depriving myself of. But nope, still binged

Help...?

It could be for emotional reasons, but carbs are also moreish and it’s kind of normal to want more.
I make a low carb cake that I cut up and keep in the freezer, take a piece out every so often when I fancy it. You could try something like that?

You don't need a low carb diet to lose weight - I'm assuming from your post that is what you are aiming for. Carbs are not bad for you. It's probably healthier, although perhaps harder, to learn how to incorporate foods you enjoy without overindulging. Total normal to crave something you've cut out.

You're hungry OP. All this acting against and distrusting your body isn't going to help.

Tis an old cliché but everything in moderation, and treat yourself like a good pal.

If you have not already take a look at the Public Health Collaborations videos on YouTube, they have a couple of panel discussions on food addiction and it is really interesting.

Best of luck.

Could it be hormonal? I try to eat fairly LC (no bread, pasta, potatoes or rice etc, but will stick a carrot in a salad or some pulses in a soup kind of thing). Whenever I'm a week away from my period, which is increasingly irregular as I am perimenopausal, I crave carbs and sweet treats irrespectively of how well I'm feeling on my regular diet. I listen to my body and enjoy toast for breakfast etc. As soon as my period starts, the cravings go away.

Agree with PP regarding the hormonal question. I was the same as you but now well post menopause and it was like magic: the food rollercoaster I had been on for the previous 35 years just … went away.

I wonder whether a couple of PPs are posting from kindness without actual experience or understanding of food noise.

IME Low Carbing definitely reduces food noise. But if food noise is emotionally generated, rather than generated by insulin highs and lows, it needs to be addressed in a different way.

Are you eating wide range of different foods, textures, colours, flavours? The physical sensation of eating triggers your brain to recognise you are eating before the messages from your stomach tell you that you are full. So engage fully in the experience of eating. Slow down, appreciate it. Try to put any sense of guilt to one side and really focus on and engage with whatever you are eating at that moment. You can even describe it to yourself.

When you choose to step away from a food that is calling you, or from a random craving, recognise your hard work. Reframe that sense of deprivation. "I'm looking after myself", "I'm worth looking after", I'm going to enjoy that even more at supper ".

Distraction. Especially an emotionally satisfying distraction. Sometimes I literally just turn around and walk out of the kitchen, remove myself from temptation (while repeating one of my little mantras), but sometimes it's not quite enough and I need somewhere to go from the kitchen. I like knitting, and I usually do it in the evening, so to sit down in the middle of the day and take time out to do a couple of rows feels like a massive self-indulgence.

They sounds like food noise to me?

They are bad for me. They make me bloated with water weight and gas, and they sap my energy, both mental and physical. This is my experience. People keep telling me otherwise, but they are describing their own experience and not mine. We are not all the same

Thank you, I'll try some of these! Yes it definitely feels like two different kinds of food noise, the emotional one vs the carb-generated one. Insulin food noise is like a constant physical feeling of peckishness, the other is like a need for an experience of sweetness, hard to describe the difference but I think you get it!

That's a good idea. Does it contain Stevia or some other sweetener? I have not tried using those, maybe I should, so that I can have the sweet taste that I crave without hopping on the Insulin Roundabout

Thank you this is something I should look into. I recently was pregnant and had an early loss, so there's no point tracking it until my cycle comes back. When I was pregnant I ate plenty of carbs and whatever I felt like, btw, before anyone jumps on me about that! The result being I gained over a stone in 8 wks and felt bloody awful. I'm concerned about this if I do have a successful pregnancy, as I don't want to "diet" during pregnancy but don't want to feel like crap from eating food that doesn't agree with me. But that's another issue

Thank you, but the thing is I'm not going against my body. My body feels best if I eat low carb, both in terms of mental & physical energy (and I'm talking about a massive difference) and how I feel physically (less bloated, less acidy). If I have a just small amount of cake every so often, it doesn't affect me like that. So moderation would be great if I could manage it. The problem is I can't because I get these overwhelming cravings to binge on it and then once I start the carb rollercoaster kicks in and I can't stop.

I think some people can tolerate carbs more than others, and also some people have a deep emotional connection with food and some don't as much, so it's not one rule for everyone, sadly, as that would be easier!

I had a very lonely childhood & food had magical powers of comfort & escapism that I don't think it has for everyone, so the emotional pull of it is no joke. When I was a kid my dad got diagnosed with diabetes & had a heart bypass, and my mum developed an eating disorder in response to that as she became terrified of "bad food", so we went from being a home with jam tarts in the oven & roast chicken & Yorkshire's on a Sunday, to one where food is the enemy, kind of overnight.

I make mini cakes with butter, egg, ground almonds, vanilla, sweetener and baking powder. They fill the cake gap without making me bingey

I started low carbing more than ten years ago, it was meant to be temporary but every time I reintroduce carbs I feel bloated, unwell and can't control my eating- so I stay low carb. I eat some carbs in veg, berries, dairy, nuts and seeds but avoid sugar and white carbs totally.

@noraheggerty I am sorry for your loss.
I find these carb cravings as reliable an indicator of an imminent period as when I had a clockwork cycle.
I wish you all the very best on your conception journey.

I'm going to try this low carb cake thing. The recipes all look so complicated though!

Yours sounds easy, can you send me a link? Or is it something you made up? Thank you !

Like you I feel much better on a lowish carb diet. (I do eat more carbs than most on a low carb diet I think I'm on a moderate carbon diet!)

I also find I want things like donuts or cake if I am stressed or sad or angry. It's very much nothing to do with being hungry. It's like a self soothing thing.

There are recipes for keto puddings which are quite good.

A small amount of dark chocolate can also work.

Gonna get some keto cake mix from H&B today and try that. I'm sure the fully home made recipes are better but this seems an easy place to start. I'm keen to experience this miracle, of eating something sweet without it setting me off on a carb rampage! If it works I could carry sweet keto snacks around for when the craving hits... This could work :)

I hear you op - l have constant food noise and even if not hungry, l crave sweet stuff sometimes. As soon as l ignite that flame, l am back on the sugar train. It's hard.

I did make it up and just chuck stuff in- but I'll make it this week and work out quantities- in the meantime good luck with the mix!

Glad to hear from another fan of low carb to cut out all the drama and noise around food.

While distraction and keeping occupied to avoid boredom certainly works for me, I found Gillian Riley’s ‘non-diet’ approach to eating less really helped me to understand what was going on for me, to address head on the impulse to ‘kick over the traces’ and rebel against restrictions.

https://www.eatinglessonline.com/

it definitely does not include diet advice, though also turned out to be very low carb friendly. Having worked through her programme several times, I use the concept of ‘choosing to eat according to how I will feel after eating, immediately and for the next day 24hrs’ pretty much every day. It really provided the way out of food hell for me. All makes ch perfect sense, I just needed to have it spelt out for me.

Ooh thanks, I'd not heard of that, I'll have a look! Congrats on your escape from food hell!

I have the same powerful cravings that are completely unrelated to physical hunger, in fact the time I most crave something sweet is at the end of a meal when I'm already full!

I'm trying urge surfing, a technique whereby you 'ride the wave ' of a craving, observing it without giving in. Not easy but the other evening I was craving a magnum and managed to resist - I went for a walk instead - 15 minutes later the urge was gone. Now I've done it once I feel more confident about doing it again. Worth a try?

a need for an experience of sweetness

I totally get this!

TBF I do not find that using sweeteners helps. It just perpetuates the craving. It makes eating sweet foods 'justifiable'. Which is like lying to myself. And I need to be honest to myself, otherwise how can I believe that I'm telling the truth when I tell myself if I'm worth looking after?

If you're looking for an experience of sweetness, liquorice tea has a wonderfully sweet mouthfeel, especially when you are have become unused to sweet food. Red peppers also taste sweet, and the crunchiness enhances that sense of sweet. Strawberries dipped in cream are culturally-coded as sweet, luxury indulgence - even though they are not particularly sweet.

Oh yes, that's good.

The emotional craving triggers a very basic fear: that you will be hurt if you do not eat. How will you survive without love food? Intellectually you know that you will survive. You're alright. You're safe.