A buzz or a glow?

“Your body craves what it needs. Listen to your body.”

“Your body often craves most what it needs the least. Learn to ignore your cravings, and just eat healthy.”

I have come across both of these ideas in the course of my readings about the body and food. Something that has been frustrating and confusing for me on my low-carb journey has been coping with cravings. Sugar or carbohydrate cravings, usually, but I also crave  protein and fat.  Sugar and many carbs are bad for me, while protein and fat are good. However, (and this is what has been confusing) the way I feel when I satisfy any of those cravings is pretty good. For example, I like to tell my husband after we’ve had a nice dinner of perfectly cooked pork chops with a nice border of fat on them that I have a “pork chop buzz”.

So what’s the difference in how all the different cravings feel? I never thought much about this before, but I’ve been led astray by so many carb cravings that I have decided I need to do myself the favor of figuring this out. The body has different physiological responses to each type of food. As informative as it might be to provide some nice facts here about that, that’s not the purpose of this post. I want to discuss my own subjective experience figuring out the way different cravings feel, before eating, and the happy feelings I have afterwards.

I mentioned the “pork chop buzz” above … buzz isn’t quite the right term for it, though. “Buzz” is more closely associated in American English to the reaction to drugs. Sugar may not be a drug, but the phrase “sugar buzz” is still pretty accurate, because the body’s reaction is almost instantaneous, thanks to the easy digestibility of highly processed carbohydrates. The body also has a good-feeling reaction to consumption of protein and fat, but I think the term “glow” is probably a better descriptor of that feeling, which I’ll explain further here in a minute.

Sugar cravings feel urgent. Back in the day when I consumed a lot of caffeine and chocolate, those cravings were urgent too (although they were always consumed with sugar, which complicates this a little bit … but not much). My experience with these cravings is that I feel them usually in my head, and that they are in response to some sort of shortage in the body – sugar/blood glucose, caffeine/thyroid hormone (possible), chocolate/magnesium. When I satisfy sugar cravings, I get a buzz. It’s not a dramatic one (which perhaps is why it’s legal), but I’d say I feel it mostly in my head and chest – a mild happy feeling, a sense of well-being and satisfaction with the world. And then, of course, once the buzz wears off a few hours later, I feel bad. Not normal – I go from feeling better than normal to worse than normal. My body doesn’t seem capable of maintaining a steady feeling of normality when I consume sugar (or caffeine or chocolate) in the volumes I’d really like, which is to say, the volumes that are generally considered 2 or 3 servings.

Protein and fat cravings, in contrast, come on gradually and I don’t recall ever feeling a sense of urgency when I experience them (now that I am on a low-carb diet). The feeling of protein and/or fat cravings are more diffuse, spread between my gut and my head, and feel like more of a hint or a cue rather than a sense of lack. When I satisfy these cravings, I feel deep satisfaction and sense of well-being, again spread between my gut and my head. I called this feeling a “glow’ earlier because it’s more of a gentle feeling spread throughout the body. To use an analogy with light, I would say that a buzz is like the glare from a bare light bulb with clear glass, while a glow is more like a soft white light bulb behind a nice cream-colored lampshade.

I could, of course, go into more physiological detail as to why buzzes and glows feel the way they do, but as I mentioned earlier, that’s not the purpose of this post. I just wanted to talk about my own experience in figuring out different cravings. Regarding those two sayings at the beginning, I’d say the first one is probably right – and when I have an unhealthy craving, I need to be more aware of what is behind that craving, and work on correcting the deficiency rather than indulging in a quick fix that ends up causing more harm than good.