Ignoring an unhealthy craving is easy - but you need a few smart strategies

Claire Turnbull has six science-backed tips for keeping those tempting but unwholesome foods and drinks at bay.

Whether it's ice cream calling your name after dinner, salty chips and wine after work, or coffee and cookies during a stressful afternoon, food cravings sometimes feel like they have an inconquerable power of their own.

Despite your Monday morning committment to eating healthier this week, in the moment, it can be incredibly hard to resist a strong food craving, and all too easy to get stuck in the cycle of caving to those cravings every time.

So, what can you do to get the power back? Lots, it turns out!

If you're sick of your cravings muscling into the driver's seat and sabotaging your wellbeing goals, here are five things to try.

Be it late-night scrolling, a fun dinner party or a child clambering into your bed at 3am, a good night's sleep can be hard won. And a knock-on effect of poor sleep is that cravings for high-carb and sugary foods sky rocket the following day. For me, when my kids weren’t sleeping, it was endless slices of marmalade on toast or lemon curd straight out the jar. For my husband, coffee and pastries if he can lay his hands on them!

When we get poor quality sleep, it disrupts the hormones that regulate hunger – both increasing ghrelin (the hormone that makes you feel hungry) and lowering leptin (the hormone that helps you feel full). This double whammy is what ramps up food cravings and leads to poor food choices.

Sleep that's interrupted by a baby or another care-taking role can be the hardest issue to address. Where possible, ask for help and share the load. And fitting in naps during the day can make a real difference.

For most other things, it's about making sleep a higher priority because as well as helping you regulate your appetite, it helps your brain work better, supports your immunity and pretty much helps every system in your body do its job.

As an adult you need 7-9 hours sleep a night and kids need even more. If your kids are struggling with cravings, check on their sleep patterns too.

Too much caffeine and alcohol also compromise sleep quality and in turn can lead to food cravings as well, so be mindful of this too. Low alcohol options are a great choice to consider.

Feeling hungry is the signal that your body needs food. Having an appetite on the other hand is your body's desire to eat food. You don't have to be hungry to have an appetite.

Why does this distinction matter? Because your desire and cravings for food can be stimulated by the mere thought, a visual trigger, or smell of food. Essentially those things can tempt you to take action and eat, even when your body doesn't need fuel.

Our modern environment frequently triggers our desire to eat: TV ads, food-laden social media feeds, instantly recognisable fast-food signage looming ahead of us as we drive, or fragrant oven vents from bakeries releasing enticing aromas as we pass on the street. These things often lead us to eat when we don’t really need to, eat more than we need, or make choices that aren't aligned with our Monday morning wellbeing goals.

It's a tricky one to manage as our environment has been manipulated to encourage eating and drinking at all times of the day and night. The key is to simply be aware of these influences. Before diving in, ask yourself – am I really hungry? Or am I just being hooked in by outside cues?

Where possible, avoid triggers by driving a different way home to avoid fast food or petrol station doughnuts, or tune out from the lure of TV ads or social media feeds.

If every day, when you get home from work, you go straight to the kitchen and pour yourself a large glass of chilled white wine which you enjoy, accompanied by a small bowl of salty chips, while standing at the counter and making a start on dinner, it won’t take long for your brain to establish this as a habit. You'll find yourself led to repeat the behaviour every day at the same time – even on those days when your body tells you it's not hungry and would like a night off from drinking.

Your brain loves patterns and doesn't know the difference between a pattern that is helpful (brushing your teeth every morning) and a pattern that's unhelpful (daily chips and wine).

When your brain notices a pattern of behaviour, as soon as it senses the cue (which here would be walking in the door from work), it creates the sensation of a craving in your body – a rise in the hormone dopamine which acts to drive you towards the action it knows is the pattern.

When patterns are strong, cravings can be felt in the body like physical agitation which can only be relieved by completing the cycle with the behaviour. This is apparent with many addictions: smart phones, gambling, and, for some, it relates strongly to food.

Reprogramming your routines is how to break this cycle of habits and cravings. You need to plan for the moment of temptation and give yourself a different option. For example, the after-work drinker and nibbler might take a Sunday afternoon to plot a different approach in the coming week. This could look like laying out your exercise gear on your bed before work, emptying the kitchen of chips and wine, and stocking up on healthy alternatives such as chilled water with a squeeze of lime, crudités and hummus.

First stop in the door? The bedroom, rather than the kitchen. Automatic trigger (the sight of the fridge door): gone. After a brisk walk and a shower you'll probably find that embracing the healthier snacks as an end-of-day treat is as pleasurable (or almost) as the wine and chips ever were. Follow your new routine every workday for a week or two and you won't just be enjoying a lovely feeling of greater control, but the physical benefits of reduced alcohol/processed foods will start to kick in too. And a new, healthier habit is formed.

When life is busy and time is short, it can be easy to skip meals and ignore hunger signals during the day and then, come late afternoon/evening, feel an uncontrollable desire to eat everything you swore off on Monday morning.

If you aren't nourishing your body throughout the day, you can expect to find it difficult to manage your food choices and cravings later on.

While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to food timing and meal frequency – if you're up at 5.30am and not eating until mid-afternoon, other than a few coffees, you're not setting yourself up for success.

Sometimes we're advised that we need supplements to tame cravings, but supplements won't cut it if you don’t set up your food foundations.

A nourishing breakfast, whatever time of the day it suits you to eat it, is the place to start. You can find plenty of suggestions on my website, such as overnight oats as a portable option, or a chia oat breakfast pot, smoothies, or eggs if you have more time.

Making time for a bite for lunch or healthy snack during the day, perhaps some fruit and cheese or wholegrain crackers and a can of tuna, is better than going without all day and battling with the cravings later.

And the same, on a larger scale, goes for extreme diets. A sustainable diet should feel like a way of eating that you can enjoy and maintain your whole life. Any diet that involves sheer teeth-gritting discipline and self denial is likely to give your cravings a whole lot more energy and power.

Having got into a regular pattern with eating, you can support yourself a step further by improving the balance of your meals and snacks to help you feel fuller for longer after eating, manage your blood sugar levels more effectively, and keep those cravings at bay.

First up, aim to include protein in all of your meals and snacks. This doesn't just have to be meat, fish, or eggs, it can also be yoghurt, cheese, nuts, seeds and there are also some plant sources of protein like edamame beans and corn which have more protein you might think.

Fibre is another big winner here, and in New Zealand many of us fall short on this. On average we get around 20g of fibre a day and as women we need 28g and men need more like 38g, so this is definitely one to work on! Fibre helps you feel fuller for longer, feeds the healthy bugs that live inside your gut (your microbiome), and is a super helpful tool in your kit to help manage cravings. Aiming for at least five handfuls of veggies and 2 servings of fruit is a good place to start, and also include pulses and wholegrains.

Eating and drinking are common ways to manage difficult emotions like sadness, anger, frustration, or loneliness. If you were given chocolate as a child to "cheer you up" when you hurt yourself or something went wrong, that pattern may still be playing out in your adult life, leading you to crave tasty rewards when tough feelings come to the surface. Becoming more aware of how you feel and how you manage difficult emotions can be a real game changer.

So next time you find yourself battling with a food craving, rather than giving yourself a hard time – ask yourself, what could be driving this? When you get to the bottom of what's fueling your craving, you can process the emotion rather than anaesthetise it with a quick sugary (or salty or alcoholic) fix. And then you're in a position to make changes that last.

Claire Turnbull is a registered nutritionist with an honours degree in dietetics, a wellbeing educator and the author of End Your Fight With Food (Allen & Unwin).