Wishing you could control certain food cravings is a common fantasy, and feeling guilty after not being able to do so is a common consequence. The guilt comes from the assumption that you should be in complete control and are to blame if you’re not.
However, recent research suggests that food cravings might not be entirely about us. After studying eating behavior and the microbes in the human gut, some researchers have argued that certain organisms in our bodies are partial to certain nutrients and, as a result, influence our eating behavior through our cravings. For example, particular microbes grow best on carbs while others seem to prefer fiber. Scientists even suspect that such microbes can influence our eating by affecting our mood through the secretion of hormones. The research in this area is not conclusive, but it certainly is interesting.
Perhaps, in addition to psychological reasons, there might be physiological reasons why people don’t need to be so hard on themselves if they don’t have absolute control over their cravings. This is not to say, however, that we are powerless when it comes to cravings or that we don’t bear any responsibility for our eating and health.
The body is a complicated machine, with no one system having total control over the others. The better we take care of the machine by keeping everything in balance, the more harmoniously the systems function together. That’s why knowing that certain microbes might influence our cravings is interesting but not reason to fear or give up.
In the course of therapy for eating and weight problems, for example, people improve their health and eating, and recover from eating disorders by approaching the problem from different angles at the same time. Cravings can diminish over time by doing a number of things: becoming less perfectionistic, reducing anxiety and stress levels, improving self-esteem, becoming more active, getting better nutrition, getting better sleep, working on long-standing resentments and emotional pain, becoming less rigid about life, getting rid of toxic relationships, drinking more water, working on drug habits, being more compassionate with oneself.
