Hi Lisa, and welcome to the list. Craving for carbs, and more specifically for sugar, is indeed a common problem. I think part of the solution is just to get the habit of non-sweet foods. When I was a child, I put 2 pieces of sugar in my cup of tea. A few years after, I suppressed the sugar in my tea, but I still used sugar for my coffee. It took a while before I became able to drink coffee by itself (but I gave up coffee when I started raw food). To decrease the need for sweets, what worked for me: -do not have fruit-only meals. I know that some people on the list will disagree and say that fruits shouldn't be combined with any other food, but unless you eat a high quantity of fruit, hunger is difficult to satisfy and fruit-only meals can promote carb-cravings. -Don't finish your meal with something sweet. It can be hard at the beginning to be satisfied with a meal which starts sweets and finishes bitter, but once you get the habit, you become less addicted to the sweet taste. -Fats satisfy hunger very quickly, and the satisfaction by eating them replaces the need to be satisfied by sweets. > Dinner is the hardest. If I eat a couple of crackers with my mate-(who is a > bread/salami & heavy cheese man), I end up binging on them. Then the cheese, > which dosen't set well in my system. Is your cheese raw or cooked? [In the latter case, replacing with raw cheese in moderation can be an improvement]. Also, as Tom said, eating a raw is not a goal in itself; rather, you should aim at eating foods your body is comfortable with, raw or cooked. If you find that you binge excessively on crackers, it could suggest a lack of satisfaction in your current raw diet [I am speculating], which may fade away or not. Perhaps introducing a small quantity of lightly cooked food can help to decrease cravings? JL