Eight cravings a day

Count how many times a day you want something sweet. Most people, once they start counting, get to eight or nine. Mid-morning, after lunch, the slump, before dinner, after dinner, and a couple more they cannot account for.

We put this down to physics rather than character. Every time you eat sugar, or the things that turn into sugar in twenty minutes, your blood sugar spikes, your body overcorrects, and forty minutes later you are lower than you started. Low blood sugar feels like a craving. So you eat something sweet to fix the craving the last sweet thing caused, and the cycle runs eight or nine times a day, and each time it runs it makes the next one likelier.

Bear's word for it is a grip, and it is a good word, because a grip does not let go by itself.

The way out is to stop the spikes rather than to fight the cravings, because you cannot out-argue your own blood sugar. Protein and fat at breakfast rather than cereal. The walk after eating. Fruit as fruit rather than as juice. A fortnight of that and the cravings mostly stop turning up, and the ones that do are much easier to say no to, because they are wants rather than needs.