Cravings seem to arise out of the blue and we are overcome with the need to eat the craved item, often sweet things for women. Well, the key thing to know is that like a screaming child, if you ignore them, they eventually stop, and if you keep ignoring them, they will stop for ever altogether.

So how to ignore cravings.

Well, one way is to identify what is triggering them. It is not hunger. It could be your routine. For example, if you have always had a snack at 3.00pm your cravings will arrive on the dot. If you always eat in the car on the way home, they will be there too. If you walk past a sweet shop and always buy chocolate or crisps with your paper, you will repeat the actions on and on. So these are environmental and habit-based triggers for cravings. Change your route, have no food in the car, stop snacking at 3.00pm. And if the trigger is boredom, develop a portable hobby so that you can distract yourself. And if I might bang on about this again, if you always munch away at chocs and crisps in front of the telly, just turning the telly on turns your belly on.

Changing behaviour in these relatively small ways is quite easy. You don't have to deal with everything all at once. One or two a week is quite enough. Then what?

When cravings come, ignore them. Distract yourself. This could be by going for a walk, phoning a friend, washing the car. Just tapping your finger onto your hand for a few minutes is also quite distracting.

Cravings disappear in only a few minutes. You can handle that!

Lots of people exclaim that they couldn't imagine life without chocolate. But we didn't eat it till the 17the Century.  It was first discovered by the Spanish Conquistador Cortez when he defeated the Aztec King Montezuma in 1519. Perhaps our love affair with chocolate is the real Montezuma's Revenge.

And many people experience powerful cravings for chocolate, which they feel are overwhelming. Why is this and what can we do about it? After all, if we are wanting to lose weight, eating chocolate at 150 calories an ounce won't help. 150 extra calories a day could end up meaning 10 pounds heavier at the end of the year.

There are a number of possible reasons for these cravings. Here are a few.

1. We allow ourselves for whatever reason to get overhungry. See my earlier blog. Eat regularly, little and often (every 4 hours during the working day).
2. We read lots of magazines and watch lots of telly, so we get a lot of advertising messages encouraging us to eat chocolate. Next time you are settled down to watch your favourite programmes, make a written note of the products being advertised and the time. It is not random. Research demonstrates that the foods advertised on the telly (not a lot of adverts for broccoli I notice) trigger cupboard raiding. If chocolate is in the house, whoops, it is in the mouth.
3. We have unresolved emotional problems. There are chemicals in chocolate which lift our mood. So some people might be using chocolate to self-medicate, instead of seeing a cognitive behavioural therapist.
4. Chocolate manufacturers know what our brains are hard-wired to like - the sweet sugar hit, the smooth creamy texture. And we think we shouldn't so we mentally ban it, then the cravings come. If we give in to the cravings, the cycle begins again. Read this great article from the BBC on recent research about chocolate cravings.
5. We have got in the habit of fulfilling our every desire. You're worth it. You deserve it. Why shouldn't you be allowed to treat yourself, you have worked hard. Why shouldn't we have it if we want it? This kind of thinking usually ends up costing us dear. We have got out of the habit of a bit of self-denial which builds our resilience to protect us when the hard times come.

Do you eat for emotional reasons? Of course you do—everybody does! Soon after birth we develop powerful emotional connections to feeding, eating, and food.

We celebrate happy occasions with food. We eat to express love, have fun, soothe a hurt, and reward ourselves for a job well done. These days, with food readily accessible and inexpensive, eating is an easy way to add pleasure to our lives. Emotional eating only becomes a problem when it’s used to cope with or avoid difficult and uncomfortable feelings.

If you feel your emotional connection to food is causing problems for you, these suggestions may help.

• Avoid labeling yourself.  Labels become self-fulfilling prophecies. Instead, label the behaviour. Behaviours can be explored and changed. For example. Eating when I feel stressed. Using food for comfort. Eating as a form of entertainment.
• Get back to the basics. To identify emotional triggers, ask “Am I hungry?” whenever you feel like eating. And then grade it out of 10. In fact, most of us no longer really know what hunger feels like. For me, my eyes feel tight, nothing to do with the belly at all! If there are no physical signs of hunger, it’s likely that the urge to eat was triggered by environmental or emotional cues. Much of our eating (and more besides) is triggered by external signals and our response is automatic. For example, driving on the way home, expecting your tea, starts you thinking about food. Seeing a picture of a dinner makes you think about food.
  
• Leave judgment at the door. Guilt and shame can trigger bingeing and then feeling bad.
  
• Be a caring friend for yourself. When you eat for emotional reasons, you are simply trying to feel better. What could you do instead?
• Cravings are time-limited. They soon pass. Distract yourself and you will be surprised to find that you have forgotten all about the craving. Treat them like an annoying child. The more you give in, the more they will whinge.
• Respond instead of react.  Eating is a choice. When you identify the triggers, you can then choose how you'll respond to your triggers instead of reacting automatically.
• Read the need. Your desire to eat when you aren't hungry is a clue that you have unmet needs and uncomfortable feelings. Recognising that they are gives you the chance to deal with them.
  
• Avoid labeling emotions as good or bad, or positive or negative. All emotions are information that you can use to better understand your interpretation of an experience and help you recognise your true needs.

In these days of relative plenty, hunger is not the main trigger to eat. Most of us don't really know what hunger feels like anymore. 

Vision - what we see - is one part of the complex pattern of factors influencing the amount of food we eat. So if we are looking through the kitchen cupboards and spot a bag of crisps, we are likely to eat them, even if we have just eaten a full meal. If there are no crisps to be seen, we manage to do without.

Many of us eat because we see something nice. We get hungry watching the food programmes on the telly, or reading a magazine, or wandering through the aisles in the supermarket. All these things make us think about food and eating. So our eyes are more likely to tempt us to eat than the signals coming from our body.

Yvonne Linné, Britta Barkeling, Stephan Rössner and Pål Rooth of Huddinge University Hospital in Stockholm show that eating with a blindfold decreased the intake of food, without making people feel less full. Eating blindfolded, therefore, may force us to rely more on internal signals.

Learning to recognise these internal, physiological cues of hunger and satisfaction will go a long way to controlling the amount that we eat. Just knowing that cravings and desires to eat come from external cues is really helpful. If you don't want to be always snacking, then don't have the snacks in the house. In the house is in the hand, in the hand is in the mouth.