Emotional Food Cravings & Weight Loss
How can you lose weight when all you can think about is food? Emotional food cravings are hard to conquer when dieting. To some of your friends and family losing weight seems all too simple: eat a healthy diet and exercise. Poof! The weight falls off and you can have the body of a super model. As you probably can attest to, for 99% of us it just doesn’t work like that.
Losing weight—no matter who you are—is no simple task when food cravings are tied to our emotions. In most cultures around the world, we find joy in food. Meals are often the central theme in holidays and celebrations and major life events. We even see food as a reward for accomplishments. In both joy and in sadness, there is most often food, and it’s not always the healthiest of options. We eat birthday cakes, not birthday carrots!
Overcoming your emotionally-driven food cravings
One of the most difficult things to overcome when trying to lose weight is the feeling of deprivation. The feeling of having to give up something you love or deprive yourself of the “good things” you like to eat. It can be very emotional and can impede any chance you have at accomplishing your weight loss goals. If you are a person who feels like part of your joy in life comes from eating, dieting can be very difficult. You know you need to lose weight, but you don’t want the diet to have such a negative impact on the quality of your life.
Depending on your individual needs, a weight loss program can include phentermine, hormone therapy, ProLon or other diet. To conquer the emotional food cravings, a medication like Contrave® might be just the thing to help you achieve your goal.
What is Contrave?
Contrave is a prescription-only, FDA-approved weight-loss pill that is believed to work on two areas of your brain—the hunger center and the reward system. The purpose is to reduce the feeling of hunger and help control your emotional food cravings. Contrave contains two medicines: bupropion and naltrexone. These two medications have been prescribed for many years to treat depression and to help clients quit smoking, and for alcohol or opioid dependence.
How Contrave can help control emotional food cravings
We gain weight when we consume more calories than our bodies can burn. Those extra calories are stored as fat. The brain is programmed to trigger hunger pains and cravings when you diet and begin to lose weight. Unless you consume more calories, you are left feeling hungry and unsatisfied.
FDA-approved Contrave works on the areas of your brain that control hunger and cravings. It can help speed up your weight loss and you may even lose more weight than a simple diet and exercise plan.
VIVA Wellness can customize a weight loss plan for you
As you may have read in our other Wellness Blog articles, there are different reasons why weight may be a struggle for you. VIVA Wellness clinic nurse practitioner, Jennifer Hruz, will create a customized weight loss plan for you. And she will be there every step of the way to help you achieve your goals. Schedule a consultation today to find out if a weight loss plan including Contrave is right for you.