A partner exercise to uncover why you crave certain foods. Label a paper 1-20, have someone repeat a craving word like "chocolate" while you write your first association each time. Review the list to spot patterns: taste, emotion, memory. Then pick an action that meets the real need without food.
Chapters
Hi. I'd like to talk with you about a really simple technique that you can use to help to understand your food cravings just a little bit better. It's a technique that I call laddering, and I talk about it in my whole detox book. So I'm going to describe it to you. It should take only about four to five minutes to do it with a partner. And what you do is you figure out what is your biggest food craving. What is the food craving that you just can't seem to understand? You don't know why it happens as it does and why it has such a hold on you. Maybe it's potato chips, maybe it's coffee, maybe it's chocolate, maybe it's bread, pasta. You choose whatever it is and make sure it's a food that you almost kind of feel like you probably shouldn't be eating so much of this food, and you want to understand the deeper meanings of it. So what you first do is you take a pad of paper and you label the piece of paper that you have from 1 to 20. And what your partner is going to do is they're going to say the name of your craving over and over and over again very quickly. So it should go relatively fast. The actual activity itself should really only take about, I would say, about a minute to two minutes. So your partner might say the word. So let's just imagine that the word is chocolate, and that is your craving. So the word chocolate, every time you hear it, you're going to say the first thing that comes to your mind, and you're going to do it quickly without any type of filtering. So it might be an initial word like tasty, yummy, chocolatey, dark, rich, cocoa. Or it might be something completely unrelated, something like grandma, grandpa, holiday trip, car building. You know, whatever it is, there might be something that kind of pops up that would surprise you, and I would encourage you to say that anyway. So then what you do is once you have quickly said all of the words that come to mind when your partner says chocolate or whatever your food craving is for 20 times, you kind of stand back and look at these words to figure out, okay, how do these words make a story for me around chocolate? What is the deeper meaning here? So I did this for myself specifically with chocolate. But again, you can use any particular word you choose and any particular craving. And what I found in my relationship with chocolate is that I did have a number of words that connected to the taste, but then I also had words that connected me to feeling a sense of joy or freedom or happiness. When I ate chocolate, it's almost like it changed my mood. And I also have some connections with my family to chocolate. So having chocolate around the holidays and experiencing that with my grandparents. So for me, the next step that I would take my chocolate craving into is to figure out how I could actually get some sensation of freedom and joy and happiness and some connection to family and friends without necessarily having to eat chocolate. So that might be something as simple as calling a friend, getting out and taking a walk, something that gives me joy. Maybe it's going to see a movie or just taking a breather and just relaxing, something that I would enjoy doing rather than dipping myself into the indulgence of eating lots of chocolate in order to get that feeling. So again, this is called the laddering technique. It's a wonderful short technique that gives you some inside view into the deeper meaning and story of your food cravings.
