Why Am I Craving Food When I’m Not Hungry? | The Mindset Diet

You can crave food when you’re not hungry because cravings aren’t always triggered by physical hunger. The sight or smell of food, your environment, emotions, tiredness and familiar habits or routines can all trigger the desire for a particular food. Over time, these triggers can become part of patterns that happen on autopilot. When you learn to recognise what happens before your cravings, you can start to interrupt your patterns and create more choice around what happens next.

I'm Caroline Tyrwhitt, a food relationship coach and author of The Mindset Diet. I help people escape the dieting cycle by understanding the thinking behind their eating.

What your food cravings could be telling you and why more willpower may not be the answer

You see the chocolate or smell a cinnamon bun as you walk past the bakery. You’ve had a stressful conversation and suddenly want something to eat. You’re tired on the way home and find yourself picking up a takeaway rather than waiting until you get there. Or you settle down in front of the television and reach for a glass of wine or something to snack on.

Sometimes you’ve picked it up, eaten it or drunk it almost on autopilot. And you weren’t even hungry.

Other times, you’re very aware of the craving and try to fight it.I shouldn’t have it. I’m not allowed it. Come on, have some willpower.And instead of the craving disappearing, you find yourself thinking about the food even more.

Sound familiar?

What if willpower isn’t the problem?

A food craving is a strong desire for a particular food. Unlike hunger, which can usually be satisfied by a range of foods, a craving tends to be much more specific.

Chocolate is a particularly common example. In one seven-day study* of 129 women, chocolate accounted for 37% of the recorded food cravings. Interestingly, the same study found that women who were dieting to lose weight reported more cravings than women who weren’t dieting. Their cravings were also stronger and harder to resist, particularly when they involved foods they were restricting.

That doesn’t prove that dieting caused their cravings, but it does give us something interesting to become curious about. Because what happens when you tell yourself,“I can’t have that”? You think about it even more!

If I tell you not to think about chocolate.... What are you thinking about now?

Trying very hard not to think about something requires us to think about the very thing we’re trying to avoid. So perhaps the answer to feeling more in control around food isn’t always to control yourself harder.

Consider what happens before the craving

When we focus only on the food, the sequence can look very simple:I craved the cake, so I ate the cake. But that sequence makes it about you:I have no willpower. I can’t stick to anything. I’ve blown it now.

When you look closer, the craving may be just one part of a much bigger sequence. There can be events happening before it: a sight, a smell, a place, a time of day, a routine, an emotion, another person, something that has just happened, something you’re thinking, or even a combination of these.

These events are your triggers.

The same craving doesn’t necessarily have the same trigger every time. On Monday, you might crave chocolate because you see it sitting on the kitchen worktop. Wednesday, the chocolate craving might be associated with relaxing in front of the television. And Friday evening, you may find yourself craving the chocolate after a difficult conversation at work.

Same craving. Different triggers.

Simply trying to resist the chocolate isn't necessarily effective either short-term or long-term.

My coffee-and-cake craving

When I was studying myself as part of my NLP training, I noticed a particular habit I had at the end of the school day: I often wanted a coffee as a pick-me-up, so I’d go to the kettle to make it, but beside the kettle there would be cake. Now I wanted the cake too.

On the surface, it looked like a very simple sequence:

see cake → crave cake → eat cake.

But NLP taught me to become curious about our strategies— the sequence through which we do something — and to notice our inner dialogue through that sequence.

At the end of school I was telling myself,“I’m tired.”That led to thinking coffee was a solution. When I saw the cake, another thought appeared:“That’ll make me feel better.”

What had previously seemed like one craving was actually a pattern. And once I could see the pattern, I had places where I could interrupt it.

I had choice.

A trigger starts something. The pattern is what happens next.

Identifying a trigger is useful, but it isn’t necessarily the whole story.

Imagine you have a stressful conversation and then crave chocolate. You could decide “Stress triggered my chocolate craving.” Becoming curious about what happened inside that experience, what you felt, what you were telling yourself, gives you more clues.

Perhaps you thought, “I deserve something after that” or“I’ve had a horrible day” and then look for something to soothe the feeling.

You can begin to unravel your sequence. If you repeat a sequence often enough, parts of it may begin to be automatic. So instead of asking only,“How do I stop myself eating this?” start digging a bit deeper.

You may discover much more than you expected.

Try looking at one of your cravings differently

Think a craving you experienced recently. Now notice what happened immediately before it.

• Where are you?

• What has just happened?

• What are you feeling?

• What are you saying to yourself?

• And what do you tend to do next?

There’s nothing to judge here. You’re simply gathering information.

Because when something that has been happening automatically becomes visible, you may begin to see where choice becomes possible. And that’s very different from simply telling yourself to have more willpower.

Want to explore one of your cravings with me?

I’ve created a free 60-minute online workshop called From Cravings to Choice.

Discover what’s really triggering your food cravings — beyond hunger or a lack of willpower — so you can feel more in control around food.

Bring one craving you’re curious about and I’ll guide you through exploring the triggers, thoughts and patterns that may be happening around it.

SAVE MY FREE PLACE

Ready to go further?

Understanding your craving is the beginning. My online course Control Your Cravings takes you through the practical next stages:Understand → Break → Manage → Prevent.

You’ll explore your own cravings and patterns, learn ways to interrupt them, build a range of practical tools you can draw on when a craving appears, and look further upstream at some of the circumstances surrounding your cravings.

The aim isn’t perfection. It’s having more options, so you can make choices that leave you feeling more in control around food.

ENROL IN CONTROL YOUR CRAVINGS

Frequently asked questions

Are food cravings the same as hunger?

Not necessarily. Hunger can usually be satisfied by a range of foods, whereas a craving tends to be a strong desire for something specific. Sometimes you may be hungry when a craving appears, but at other times you might notice that the urge to eat has been triggered by something else — perhaps a sight, smell, situation, emotion or familiar routine. Becoming curious about what happened just before the craving can help you begin to recognise the difference.

Why do I keep craving the same foods?

A particular food can become part of a familiar pattern. Perhaps you always crave a particular food when you sit down to watch the TV, reach for caffeine or sugar when you’re tired or associate a particular food with comfort or reward. Rather than focusing only on the food, it can be useful to look at what tends to happen before the craving and what happens next. You may begin to spot a sequence that has become so familiar it feels automatic.

Can I learn to control my cravings without needing willpower?

That’s the approach I explore. Feeling more in control doesn’t have to mean controlling yourself harder. When you become more aware of your triggers and patterns, you can begin to recognise places where you have choice. My free From Cravings to Choice workshop explores that awareness; my Control Your Cravings course goes further into practical ways to interrupt, manage and prevent craving patterns.

Do I need to be on a diet to benefit from understanding my cravings?

No. You might be following a particular way of eating, considering making changes, or have no interest in dieting at all. If there are times when cravings seem to make the choice for you and you’d like to understand what’s happening, becoming curious about your own triggers and patterns can be a useful place to start.

Can I prevent food cravings?

You may not be able to prevent every craving, but you can become more aware of the things that tend to trigger yours. Once you recognise your own triggers and patterns, you can begin to make changes before a craving gets started rather than only dealing with it once it appears. In Control Your Cravings, we look at both sides: ways to manage and respond to a craving when it hits and ways to reduce how often your cravings are triggered in the first place.

* Massey, A. & Hill, A. J. (2012).Dieting and food craving. A descriptive, quasi-prospective study.Appetite, 58(3), 781–785.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2012.01.020