Why Do I Crave Sugar After Eating? How to Stop Sugar Cravings
Why do I crave sugar so badly, and how do I stop? That one came out of the question pool on a recent Reset Room call, and when I asked who on the call craved sugar, everyone did. I have too. So this is not a lecture from someone who has never stood in front of an open freezer at ten at night.
Why do you crave sugar right after a meal?
Because your insulin overshot. If you are insulin resistant, your pancreas releases more insulin than a meal needs. Your blood sugar goes up with the meal, the flood of insulin brings it down, and it keeps going, below where it started. Your brain notices the dip and asks for the fastest fix it knows. That is the craving. You just ate, so it is not hunger.
Here is the scene. You have a meal that is totally satisfying. You did not overeat, you are full, you push away from the table, everything is great. And for some reason, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you have to have dessert. There is always room for dessert, right? That is the mechanism, and the fuller the meal, the bigger the insulin response that follows it. Doctors call the extreme version postprandial reactive hypoglycemia, and an exaggerated insulin response is one of its recognized causes. Most people never get anywhere near a diagnosis. They just get the craving.
The nasty part is that it feeds itself. The more insulin resistant you are, the more you crave sugar. The more you give in, the more insulin resistant you become.
Is it hunger or a craving?
A craving, and the difference matters because the two behave differently. Hunger builds slowly and stays until you eat. A craving comes in a wave. Think of standing in the surf. When a wave hits you it is incredibly powerful. It throws you around, and then it recedes and the water goes calm. Yes, there may be another wave behind it. But you only have to survive one at a time, and each one passes whether you give in to it or not.
How do you stop a sugar craving?
Walk through it. If you know the wave hits fifteen or twenty minutes after dinner, then ten minutes after dinner, before it arrives, go for a twenty-minute walk. By the time you are back, the wave has come and gone. Then you prepare for bed, or read, or put on a show, and the craving is already behind you.
This is not a distraction trick. Walking after a meal flattens the rise in blood sugar and the surge of insulin behind it, which is the thing driving the craving in the first place. A 2022 review of the trials found that breaking up sitting with short bouts of light walking, including after meals, cut the rise in blood sugar by about 17 percent compared with sitting still, and kept insulin steadier than either sitting or standing. Smaller rise, smaller overshoot, smaller wave.
You can use willpower, which I do not have a whole lot of. Or if you know that craving is going to hit twenty minutes after the meal, ten minutes after the meal is when you go for a twenty-minute walk.
One of the best things about having a dog is that this part is built into your evening already.
Why does one dessert turn into a week of desserts?
Because the reward restarts the cycle. Say you have been on a strict low-carbohydrate diet, no dessert, doing a 16-and-8 fast or even a 13-and-11, and it is all going well. It is summer, you are on the boardwalk, and you have some ice cream. Who can object to a little ice cream? Nobody. Then the next day you have something else, and before you know it you have four or five days in a row of rewarding yourself for being so good.
Those four or five days push your insulin resistance back up, and with it the cravings, and now the ice cream is not a treat, it is the wave again. One ice cream is fine. The pattern is the problem. There is a second reason refined sugar is hard to stop at one, which is what it does to your brain’s reward system, and I have written that up in eating too much? addiction can be the cause. This post is about the insulin half.
Why do you crave sugar after a nap?
Someone on the call said that whenever she wakes from an afternoon nap she craves sugar so badly she feels she will die without it, whether or not she ate before lying down. Usually around one or two in the afternoon. Two things are going on there, and they stack.
The first is a hormone called ghrelin, the hunger signal from your stomach. Ghrelin runs on a schedule set by your routine. If you eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at roughly the same times each day, your body learns the pattern and ghrelin peaks right before those times; researchers at the University of Washington showed that rise before meals in people back in 2001. So if you nap through your usual lunchtime and wake at two, you are waking straight into a ghrelin peak. Of course you want something.
The second is the nap itself. If you had lunch and then needed to lie down, that urge to doze at your desk after eating is, in my experience, one of the signs of insulin resistance. It is the Thanksgiving phenomenon. You eat the big Italian Sunday dinner at two o’clock and you have to take a nap, because you are completely insulin resistant after that meal. Then you wake up on the far side of the overshoot, and the craving is waiting.
What should you eat so the craving never shows up?
A protein and fat lunch. No bread, no chips, no wraps, no rice, no pasta. If lunch is just protein and fat, the likelihood that you will want a nap afterwards drops a great deal, and the insulin overshoot that produces the two o’clock craving never happens. The woman who asked the question had noticed exactly this herself: in the weeks she eats low-carb, she is wide awake in the afternoons.
The carbohydrates that do not do this are the ones that come packaged with their fiber, which means fruit and vegetables. The ones that do are the refined kind, where the fiber has been stripped out and the sugar arrives all at once. Eat the first kind, mostly, and keep the second kind for the boardwalk, once. And if the craving hits late at night rather than after dinner, that has its own explanation, which I have covered in is it bad to eat before bed.
References
- Brun, J. F., Fedou, C., & Mercier, J. (2000). Postprandial reactive hypoglycemia. Diabetes & Metabolism, 26(5), 337–351.
- Buffey, A. J., Herring, M. P., Langley, C. K., Donnelly, A. E., & Carson, B. P. (2022). The acute effects of interrupting prolonged sitting time in adults with standing and light-intensity walking on biomarkers of cardiometabolic health in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Sports Medicine, 52(8), 1765–1787. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-022-01649-4
- Cummings, D. E., Purnell, J. Q., Frayo, R. S., Schmidova, K., Wisse, B. E., & Weigle, D. S. (2001). A preprandial rise in plasma ghrelin levels suggests a role in meal initiation in humans. Diabetes, 50(8), 1714–1719. https://doi.org/10.2337/diabetes.50.8.1714
