My simple mind trick for beating food cravings

Food is getting tastier, cravings are getting stronger—this is how you stay in charge.

Mike Roussell, PhD

Feb 24, 2025

Bottom Line UP Front (BLUF)

Managing food cravings is a skill—not a battle. Approach it with a practice-learn-adjust mindset, not a win-lose mentality.
Logic is your best weapon against cravings. Reframe emotional justifications and reconnect with your goals.
The Shift separates the successful from the stuck—stop asking “Can I get away with this?” and start asking “Will this move me forward?”
Food cravings thrive on attention. Change your focus, change the craving.
The best time to enjoy your favorite foods is when you plan for them—not when a craving demands them.

Before We Get Started

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This week focuses on how to beat food cravings. There are 3 specific tactics and strategies that I outline below to help you help you better control cravings - and not have food cravings control you!

Appetite control is the holy grail of health. If you can manage your appetite, then controlling your weight becomes much easier (all the news and weight loss success around Ozempic highlights this fact).

Let’s dig in.

How to beat food cravings

The drive to eat is a strong one. It will only get stronger as our senses become fine-tuned targets. Food science, manufacturing, and food advertising are getting better and better at making food look, smell, and taste delicious (almost independent of shelflife). All of this is done with one goal in mind - increase your drive to eat.

The drive to eat is hard to manage. Why you feel hungry or why you are craving food feels the same if your body has eaten enough calories or if it needs more to fuel your efforts.

This is the crux of managing your appetite. The always outstanding question of “why am I feeling hungry?"

While difficult to decipher, understanding appetite, urges, and food cravings is not impossible.

It requires a handful of skills, mental tactics (some of which I’ll share with you below), and practice.

Practice. Practice. Practice.

Managing your appetite and food cravings isn’t a win-lose game. It is a practice-learn-adjust game.

If you look at it in terms of wins and loses, you’re going to lose a lot. Progress will be hard. But if you approach each food craving or hungry situation with a little curiosity and a practice-learn-adjust mindset - you’ll be unstoppable. You’ll enjoy food and will make more progress towards your health, performance, or weight loss goals.

Appetite control is the holy grail of health

If you can manage your appetite, then controlling your weight becomes much easier.

If you can control your weight then sustained health becomes much easier.

Let’s dig into how.

You’re Set up To Lose This Game (But That Doesn’t Mean You Have To)

So much of our daily nutrition is the daily battles. In 2011 German behavioral scientist Georg Förster spearheaded a study to explore how much of our day was spent fighting internal daily battles. His findings (still very early in the cell phone era - the study used pagers) were astounding…

The most conservative estimate from our data indicates that people feel some desire about half the time they are awake. Almost half of those desires (47%) were described as conflicting at least somewhat with the person’s other goals, values, or motivations.

So, most of the time that you are awake, you are wanting something and half of that time the thing that you are wanting runs counter to your goals (case in point…the ham & cheese croissant from the Village Bakery that I woke up thinking about this morning).

When we feel an urge that runs counter to our goals, the first step is resistance. When it comes to nutritional urges, one of the most effective tools for deploying resistance is logic.

Logic is the antidote to emotion. It is the key to stopping your mind from successfully persuading you to eat/cheat/wander off your dietary path/plan.

But I Deserve It…

You know this scenario.

A cookie catches your eye and your mind starts to run through all the reasons why you should eat it…

You deserve it.
You’re stressed and the cookie will make you feel happier.
One cookie will keep you motivated and you’ll make better progress.
You’ve made such good progress with your diet, one cookie won’t matter.
Diets can’t be all about restriction, you need moderation, this will help you be more moderate.

You get the idea. You’ve heard all of these (and more!).

Now, mount your resistance…Logic.

Remember your goals.
What happens if you eat it?
Remember your motivations.
What will happen if you don’t eat it?
How will your motivation be impacted?
Will these 142 calories help move you closer to your goals?
Will it actually make you happier if it isn’t moving you closer to your goal?
Think about how much stronger you are making your willpower muscle if you don’t eat it.

What could you do instead that will make you happier AND move you closer to your goal?

Logic helps break the emotional mind spiral that goes along with cravings. Logic is a superpower. Use it often.

Embrace the Shift

A colleague of mine, Alwyn Cosgrove, co-owner of Results Fitness in Santa Clarita has shepherded more clients through successful fat loss transformations than you can count. Alwyn has long talked about what I called The Shift. The Shift is a mindset transformation that occurs within all individuals that are successful at losing weight and keeping it off. I would add that I also see it with athletes working to unlock their performance (it is one of the differences that I’ve observed first hand between players who have All-Star seasons in the NBA vs. not being voted to the All-Start team).

The Shift has to do with how you think about foods that you are eating (or are tempted to eat).

When seeing a piece of pizza, you can ask yourself

“Will it make a difference if I eat a slice of pizza or not?”

You could also ask yourself

“Will this piece of pizza take me closer to my goal? If not, I’m not interested.”

The Shift embodies a mental transition from “can I get away with this?” to “will this move me closer to achieving my goal.”

Baltimore Ravens running back Derek Henry made headlines after a post game interview on Christmas Day, when he refused to eat the winners cake. What many people don’t realize is that Derek Henry is deeply committed to his nutrition plan. Deeply committed. It is probably one of the driving forces behind his continued success in the NFL. Derek Henry was on a mission this season and the cake wasn’t part of the plan. The joy he was looking for wasn’t in the cake, it was in being the best he could be in order to bring home a Super Bowl.

On the surface this might seem like an approach to nutrition that sucks the joy out of eating. But I encourage you to look a little deeper. This is more about fueling a commitment. Honoring the why behind one’s desire to change. Dialing in your nutrition takes effort over weeks, months, and years is challenging.

These one off moments can add fuel to your motivation and drive.

Can you plan to enjoy pizza or whatever food/meal you’d like to occasionally enjoy - totally. Should you? 100%.

Eating the foods that you want to enjoy on your terms is going to be more enjoyable and fulfilling than if you eat them in a moment of craving.

Leverage the Power of Focus

One of the aspects of dealing with food cravings and urges that should be talked about more is focus. Food cravings are all about focus. Change your focus, and the craving dissipates. This is often coached as “distract yourself.”

Distracting yourself gives off a reactionary feeling that doesn’t scream empowerment. Instead, I like to coach clients to change their focus. Move your focus off of yourself and onto something else.

This could be going:

…for a walk (an almost undefeated craving breaker).

…engaging in a conversation with someone else.

…working on a project.

…reading a book.

…practicing mindfulness meditation.

Whenever possible, leave the physical space where you are experiencing the food craving (e.g. don’t continue to hang out in the kitchen).

Deliberately change, move your focus to something else. Engross yourself in this new focal point. When you are done with this new activity, your craving will be gone or weakened to the point where it is nothing more than a slight nagging sensation.

Practice, Practice, Practice

The skill of managing food cravings is going to become more and more valuable to you as time goes on. Food is becoming increasingly tasty and available. Food marketing and advertising is a ubiquitous part of life. You aren’t going to be able to eliminate food cravings and you aren’t going to have comprehensive drill sergeant-like control over your hunger.

That’s fine.

As I said in the beginning, approach hunger and cravings with a little curiosity instead of shame (the all too frequent default view of cravings for both men and women). Take the mindset of practice-learn-adjust and the stress of food cravings will be a thing of the past.

-Dr. Mike

Dad Bod Rebuilt

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