Veronica from Purple Rain Nutrition breaks down four reasons we crave food: nutrient deficiencies like potassium, learned associations between foods, habits formed by repeated exposure, and food addiction that triggers the same reward pathways as drugs. She notes that sweets cravings rarely signal missing nutrients.
Hi, it's Veronica from Purple Rain Nutrition, where we use mindfulness and spirituality to overcome eating disorders. So today we're going to talk about why do we get cravings, and I'm going to give you 4 reasons why. The first one is we're lacking a certain nutrient. It seems pretty straightforward. I mean, if I'm craving, let's say, banana, maybe I'm lacking potassium. However, if I'm craving a chocolate or Or a cookie. If I look for its healthy equivalent in composition, then the craving should go away. Hmm, not likely to happen. So let's look at another reason. Another reason is conditioning. This means that we pair two things together. Let's say I'm making a sandwich and I'm used to having peanut butter and jelly, and I just have peanut butter in the sandwich. I'll start craving the jelly, and this comes because I've paired the two together. Another reason why we have cravings is because we're a habit. It's, it's a habit for us to eat that certain food. Let's say I was raised and born in Venezuela, and arepa is a very common gluten-free, corn-based sort of bread. But I wouldn't be craving an arepa if I had never grown up with an arepa, if I hadn't eaten it so many times in my life and actually enjoyed it. and this is a habit. So if you're craving something, it's also because you've repeated this habit over time and actually enjoyed it. So it's pleasurable. And this actually leads us to the next and last reason why we would have cravings, and this is food addiction. That's right, you can actually get addicted to food, and there are a lot of explanations why. One of them would be the neurochemical part of it. There are actually areas in your brain that get activated just like when you do drugs. It creates a pleasure reward system to light up, and this makes it a lot more likelier for you to repeat this same behavior in the future. There are a lot of reasons for food addiction, and I'll make sure to make another video about that one. But for now, what you need to know is that food addiction, or being addicted to eating certain foods, is something that can definitely be broken. It has a lot of reasons why it happens. So if you have any comments or you have any questions or you want more tips, just give me an email or look us up on Facebook, Instagram, or website at www.purplerainnutrition.com and let us know. And stay tuned for food addictions.
