Cravings: A problem with Vocabulary, not Character

The Wisdom of Cravings: Why Your Body Keeps Asking for What You're Not Giving It

There is a conversation happening inside you right now that you probably don't know about. Your brain is talking to your gut, your gut is talking back, and both are trying desperately to get a message through to you. The problem isn't that they're not speaking. The problem is that we've forgotten how to listen carefully, interpret what we hear, understand the message, and act upon it.

We often wage war against our cravings, viewing them as signs of moral failure, a lack of willpower, or the whispers of an addiction. We label ourselves gluttons and resign ourselves to a lifetime of conflict with our own desires. But what if we've been interpreting the signal all wrong? What if a craving isn't an enemy demand, but a desperate, misdirected plea for help?

To understand this, we must first understand the three distinct parts of ourselves that are in constant conversation.

The Three Players in an Internal Drama

First, there is the Physiology. This is the vast, silent nation of our body, every cell in our hands, our feet, our stomach, and our brain. It is the factory floor, constantly working, building, and repairing. When this factory floor runs low on a specific raw material, say, a particular mineral or vitamin, it doesn't shout. It sends a signal.

This signal is received by the second part: the Neurology. But we must be more precise here. The brain itself has two roles. There is the subconscious part, the tireless analyst and messenger that receives the raw data from the body. And then there is the third part: the Psychology or the conscious mind. This is the "me" that feels hunger, desire, and craving. The subconscious brain translates the body's chemical needs into a feeling and projects it up to the conscious mind.

Herein lies the fundamental problem of the modern craver. The physiology sends a message: "I need magnesium." The subconscious brain faithfully transmits this request. But the conscious mind, our "self," has to interpret this abstract need and decide what to do about it. And how do we make that decision? We base it on our database.

The Database Problem: Why You Keep Asking for a Saw When You Need a Knife

This database is our personal library of food experiences, built from everything we have eaten since childhood. If my body wants magnesium, but my database is full of entries for pizza, soda, and processed snacks, what will my conscious mind request? It will scan its limited library and request a pizza. It's not a moral failing; it's a data problem.

Think about a tribal person living in the wild. He knows that for a certain kind of pain, this particular grass can help. He would use only that grass. He wouldn't know about all the other solutions out there because he's not exposed to them. We become like tribals. When we have a restricted diet, when we're eating food that stimulates but doesn't nourish, our database contains only those foods we're used to.

So the body requests magnesium. The brain says, "I need pizza." And you eat pizza.

Imagine a housewife who needs a knife to chop vegetables for her family's meal. She doesn't know the word for "knife" or "cleaver." She only knows that she needs something to cut with. If you hand her a saw, she will try to use it, fail, and put it aside. Later, needing the same thing, she asks again. This time, you give her a pair of scissors. She fails again. The next time, you give her a hammer and chisel. With every wrong tool, her requests become more desperate, more frequent. She seems insatiable, but the problem isn't that she's greedy for tools. The problem is she's not being given what she actually needs.

This is exactly what happens with our bodies. As the pizza goes in, as it's broken down, the body does get certain things: glucose, some proteins, some amino acids. But along with that, a lot of other things are missing. The way pizza is prepared, the way its elements interfere with the absorption of other elements, means that the magnesium we were looking for never arrives. The body realizes, "I didn't get what I asked for." And it sends the signal again. We wonder, "I just ate a pizza. Why am I still hungry?" So we devour another pizza, or a burger this time. The craving intensifies. We feel we are becoming gluttons, when in reality, we are simply failing to meet the body's specific request. We are ordering the wrong thing, over and over again.

The Room Full of Walnuts: When We Overwhelm the Workers

When we overeat in response to these misunderstood signals, we create another problem. Inside the gut, especially when you've overeaten, absorption becomes a huge challenge. There's too much of one thing and not enough of another. This impacts the gut's ability to absorb and, most critically, it impacts the microbiome. These trillions of bacteria are the laborers in our internal factory. They are the ones who break down our food, unlocking the precious functional molecules woven into its fabric.

Imagine you had to process walnuts. You have ten people sitting in a room, and there's a heap of walnuts on one side. It's easy for people to access those walnuts, break them, and collect the meat. They are efficient and productive. Now imagine someone fills that room up to everyone's neck with walnuts. The whole room is filled. How can these people work? They can't move their hands, they can't move their limbs. They're stuck in a sea of walnuts. They're drowning. They can't break the walnuts, they can't utilize them.

That's what happens to your microbiome when you flood your system with food. The workers are overwhelmed. They can't do their job. The complex molecules, including vitamins, peptides, antioxidants, minerals, and countless bioactive compounds, remain locked inside the undigested food. The only things that get through are the simplest majority elements: sugars, fats, and the stimulatory molecules.

The Fraud on Your Plate: When Food Puts You in Awe

And why do we flood it? Because of the signals the food itself sends. I've eaten pizza. I've eaten biryani. I've eaten things that are tasty. Surprisingly, these foods are called "tamasic" in some traditions. Tamas is darkness, that which misguides. Certain foods are so potent at stimulating that your own inherent mechanisms of awareness, the ones that know when to say "I'm full," stop working. They malfunction.

These mechanisms are in awe of the pizza, in awe of the biryani. They just watch the food coming in and in and in, like a person standing with their mouth gaping open, someone having to come and shut it for them.

When you're in awe, that's how the body reacts. It's getting all these excitatory chemicals: the glutamates, taste enhancers, and excitatory combinations from spices and flavoring molecules. These can impact the body's ability to signal accurately that it's full. You don't get a satiation signal because it has been hijacked by the stimulatory signal that keeps telling your body, "Go on, go on, go on."

The stop signal we finally get isn't one of satiation. It's a mechanical signal that there is simply no more physical room in the gut. And then, hours later, the body, still starved of the magnesium it originally asked for, sends the signal again. This is the vicious cycle of craving.

The Power of a Rich Vocabulary: Learning to Ask for a Knife

How do we break this cycle? We must expand our database. We need to give our psychology a richer vocabulary of real, functional foods. The best way to build this database is to eat foods in their simplest form. To experiment with things that are safe, that have been tried and tested. To take foods that are more sattvic.

What is sattvic? It's food that doesn't create excitement in the body, doesn't create wanting more and more. Foods that aren't so enticing, that don't have a lot of spices. Foods that are just the way they're supposed to be in nature, where you don't mix and mash a couple of things to create some juxtaposition that has everything yet gives nothing.

I discovered the power of taking raw bananas, steaming them, and eating them without salt, without any spices. I was surprised. I loved it. Take the colocasia root, for example. Earlier, we would make a heavy gravy with it. I never really liked it that much. But later, I started taking it simply steamed, opened the peels, and ate it as it was. No salt, no pepper. I started liking it more. Because now my body could interpret it. There wasn't too much confusion, not too much data. And with that pure, unsullied data, it could analyze and understand what was truly there. Today, when I don't have enough fiber, my body asks for a simple steamed colocasia root or some salad. With its rich vocabulary, it can ask me for exactly that which it needs.

The proof of this principle lies in a simple observation from my own life. When my son was an infant, whenever he had a cold or a cough, we used to give him yashtimadhu (glycyrrhiza glabra). Later, we observed something strange. This was before he could speak, before he could communicate. When he was about one or one and a half years old, there were times he would point to the bottle and ask for it. The bottle was always in the same place, yet he asked for it not regularly but only at certain times. And when he wanted it, he really wanted it.

We wondered, why is he suddenly asking for it? But then we noticed the pattern: even before a cold set in, even before a fever developed, his body knew what to request. By giving him this herb, by associating it with healing, his body learned to ask for it before we could even see symptoms. That's the power of having information in your database.

When your own database expands, your body learns to ask for what it needs. When I need prebiotics now, my body doesn't vaguely crave "something." It specifically asks for colocasia root. When it needs probiotics, it asks for kanji, a fermented drink. The craving becomes precise, and more importantly, it becomes satiable. We go from being a desperate housewife with a hammer to a skilled chef with a drawer full of the exact knives she needs.

One Conversation at a Time: The Discipline of Simple Eating

Here's something important to understand. The first bite of a new, simple food isn't going to give you a kick. It won't make you say, "Aha, this is what I want." You need to give your body time to analyze it. You need to use it for a couple of iterations. Your body needs time to try it out, to use it, to tag the things that are in it. Later, when you have a deficiency, your body will know exactly what to ask for. If you've never given cultured rice to your body, your body can never ask for it.

It's like learning a new word. It takes time for you to understand its meaning holistically, to integrate it into your mental vocabulary, to get comfortable with it in a way that you can use it in a sentence during a conversation precisely, saving you the effort of having to use many more words instead of this new word that conveys so much more.

The Power of 'One' at a Time

I've found something useful in my own life. When I need to connect with somebody, I always find it easier to connect with one person at a time. I rarely go to parties or events. Because when I go to such events, there are so many people around. I can't connect with anyone. It becomes overwhelming. I can say "how are you," engage in a conversation, but it's all superficial. If I want to deeply connect, I find one-to-one connection best.

The same thing goes with food. Especially novel foods, or foods that you want to understand. For example, you have been having potato in various forms: as curries, chips, fried patties. The potato is always accompanied by salt, spices, fat, and taste enhancers. Have you ever had a one-to-one conversation with a bland, steamed, unsalted potato without all its makeup? Have you learned to connect to it and love it for what it really is?

When you want to eat, try to have a one-to-one conversation with your food. As and when possible, try to take just one item at a time. Relish it. Even if it feels bland, even if it's not exciting, let your body do the analysis. Let it take time. Maybe a couple of days. Maybe weeks. Sometimes even months. Once your body gets to know that food, once it can understand what's truly there, you'll realize your cravings die down. They die down because your body now knows what to ask for.

The Appetite That Wasn't

One more thing about overeating. If you tend to overeat, realize you're not overeating because you're a glutton. You're overeating because that food has stimulants that confuse your system. The system can't stop demanding. It's locked into a state where it can't say "enough is enough."

Many times, when I change people's diets, I make them take simple foods. They say, "My appetite has gone." I tell them that the appetite hasn't gone; it's reset. The appetite has become normal.

A person used to eating chapatis or rotis, rice, sambhar, rasam, two or three curries, curd followed by a post-lunch sweet, they think they have a voracious appetite. They think this is the appetite they need to have. I change their diet. I say, "Just take some green leafy vegetables. Take some millets. Take a salad. And don't put salt on the food."

A couple of days later I hear, "Oh, my appetite is gone. I can't eat much."

But here's the key. When there are no stimulants, their appetite has come back to normal. That low appetite is their actual appetite. Sometimes it's no appetite at all, as the body, no longer fooled by spicy stimulants, the media, the glamor, and the paparazzi, realizes that it has all the energy it needs and starts digging into its own stored reserves. You lose appetite, but you start using your fat. Without distractions, your body can focus on doing the right thing: finding balance.

The Three Pillars of Satiety

Getting out of the craving cycle is not about fighting yourself. It's about learning to listen and speak the body's language. It's a journey of education and gentle discipline.

1. Expand Your Database One Food at a Time

Systematically introduce whole, natural, unspiced foods into your diet. Try to have a meal of just one thing: steamed bananas, boiled colocasia, a raw salad. You can also combine them without mixing them, like how four or five people come together in a therapy session, each retaining their identity yet contributing to the healing experience. A therapy room is starkly different from a party with distractions. Have a one-to-one conversation with your food. Give your body pure, unsullied data so it can learn to ask precisely for what it needs.

2. Do Not Overwhelm the Workers

Nurture your microbiome by not overeating. When you flood your system, you drown the very laborers who unlock your food's nutrition. Fix your portions. Treat all foods equally, regardless of taste. This is a skill. Your favorite food and your blandest food should occupy the same amount of space on your plate.

3. Understand That Cravings Are Requests

When a craving hits, do not berate yourself. Ask: "What am I truly asking for? Am I giving my body the right thing, or am I just handing it a hammer when it needs a knife?" The craving is not the enemy. It is a misunderstood message.

Build your Vocabulary

The cycle can be broken. It starts with trying to understand by building your vocabulary. It starts with one food at a time. It starts with giving your body the chance to build its database, to know what's out there, to finally ask for what it truly needs and for you to be able to find the right word for the earnest request.

Practice listening

The next time you notice a craving, pause and replace the word "craving" with a neutral description of what your body or mind might be asking for. Take some time, give some time. Connect to the trillions of voices and try to decode what they really need. Don't give in to an impulsive "I want..." Take time to ask, "What is it they really need?"

With practice, you will be able to understand their language, and they will appreciate your vocabulary. When this happens, the cravings, those desperate pleas, will disappear. And in that silence, you will find peace, harmony, and holistic health.