Almost everybody who changes their diet expects the wanting to stop.
It does not.
At least not immediately, and that surprise ends more attempts than any practical difficulty does.
Somebody eats well for three weeks, finds themselves standing in front of the fridge at eleven at night thinking about cheese, and takes it as evidence that they are not the sort of person who can do this.
We would say it is not evidence of anything, except that the food was working exactly as designed.
Why cheese in particular
Milk is not a neutral food.
It is a substance that nature built to turn a small calf into a very large cow in about a year.
Cow’s milk contains casomorphins, which are peptides that act on opioid receptors when the milk is digested.
Cheese is milk with most of the water taken out of it.
So you get the same compounds, concentrated, with a great deal of fat and a large amount of added salt.
Fat, salt and concentrated protein arriving together is a combination that does not occur anywhere in the natural world.
Wanting it very much is not a moral failing on your part. It is the expected result.
The three things nature made hard to find
Almost all processed food is built out of the same three things, and they are the same three things that were hardest to find for most of human history.
Sugar, in concentrated form.
Fat, separated from whatever it grew in.
Salt, which almost nothing in nature offers you freely.
An animal that went out of its way for those three survived better than one that did not, so we are all descended from the ones that went out of their way.
We do not think the problem is that the drive exists. The problem is that it was built for a world where finding those things took real effort, and now they are eleven metres away and cost very little.
What actually helps
In our experience, understanding the mechanism helps more than people expect it to.
A craving you experience as personal weakness is demoralising.
A craving you recognise as an engineered response is merely inconvenient.
The second one is much easier to sit through!
Beyond that, the practical answers we use are dull and they work.
Do not arrive at the evening hungry, because most of what people call a craving at nine o’clock is ordinary hunger wearing a costume. Make sure you eat enough at dinner, from the foods that carry weight.
Keep the thing you crave out of the house rather than in the house being resisted, because willpower spent on the cupboard is willpower unavailable for anything else.
The part nobody mentions
The wanting does fade, and it fades further than most people expect it to.
We do not particularly want animal foods now, and that is not discipline. After a few years of eating this way, they simply stopped being appealing.
That took considerably longer than a fortnight and we would be lying if we said otherwise.
In the meantime, the useful position is not to fight the craving but to stop arranging your life so that it has to be fought so often.
The hardest version of this is not the fridge at eleven at night, though. It is other people, and that is what we want to talk about next.
