Five tips to fight unhealthy food cravings

  • 12/09/2016
(Newshub.)
(Newshub.)

We all crave bad food at times, and in the midst of busy lives it's often just easier to get some drive-thru.

To help fight for healthy eating, wellbeing specialist and author Lauren Parsons has written Real Food, Less Fuss. She says it's more than just a cookbook, but a time-saving guide to help busy people eat real food.

She gave Paul Henry five tips on battling the bad food cravings

"Lots of real food that's rich in fibre, rather than processed food which is going to give us that sugar spike then that crash, so a variety of real whole food."

"It's all about our attitude. I do recommend having a morning and afternoon tea, for example, but to actually sit down and put it on a plate to eat it."

"One thing I recommend is having a salad entree before dinner every night, to slow down the meal and to make it easier to get dinner on the table as well."

"Triggers are times when you're bored, lonely, angry or anxious, stressed or tired." She says you need to set up "if and then strategies".

"So if I get bored, I'm going to spring-clean the house, if I'm stressed I'm going to go for a run."

"Psychologists have shown that cravings tend to heighten, and last for two to seven minutes, so if we can distract ourselves for just a short amount of time, that craving will actually start to subside."

"That's three little words you can have in the back of your mind - if the chocolate in your cupboard is calling out to you, you can just say 'eat fruit first' which means you take a piece of fruit, sit down, take a few minutes."

Newshub.