How do you tame a food craving?

"If I crave a certain food, I can't rest until I have it," declared a friend, gripped by an urgent need for sushi rolls last weekend. "I can eat ten different foods to try and pacify the craving, but unless it's the food I really want, the craving won't go away."
Food cravings are common and while they're probably not a problem for most people, they can derail attempts to lose weight, says Professor Marika Tiggemann of the School of Psychology at Flinders University in Adelaide. Tiggemann and co- researcher Dr Eva Kemps are working on ways to help overweight people cope with cravings. What they've learned so far is that seeing mental images of the food or imagining yourelf eating it are an important part of cravings - but if you can somehow disrupt the mental imagery you can decrease the craving.
Tiggemann and Kemp's research, published in the June Issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology, found that rather than actively trying not to think about the food you crave, it's better to focus on an image of something completely different. "Instead of trying not to think about chocolate, we found it was better if people imagined a completely different object - like a rose, for instance," Tiggemann says.
There's no one explanation for what causes cravings, she explains. Some can be physically based like the cravings women sometimes get in pregnancy or before a period that are thought to be related to hormones.
"Cravings can also be caused by a nutrient deficiency - though these are less likely in our society," she adds. "Sometimes they're related to depression, but often cravings emerge spontaneously - they just come into your head."They are linked to restraint though - which may explain why chocolate is the most craved food - in our society at least.
"We crave it because it's delicious, but because we think we shouldn't eat much of it, we restrict it - and restricting things can make you crave them more," she says.
While there are women who pine for pizza and men who yearn for ice cream, women typically crave sweet foods while men are more likely to crave something salty and fatty. But it's also possible to crave healthier foods like salmon, a roast - or a sushi roll.
Other strategies for taming problem cravings? Some people find it helps to avoid the foods that trigger their cravings, or to have a healthier, less kilojoule dense version of the food they crave - like wholegrain bread with a little honey rather than cake. Or, given that restriction can be part of the problem, adds Marika Tiggemann, eating just a small amount of the food you want so badly may be enough to put a craving to rest.