If you have read the post of my failure, you will know that I, too was struggling a LOT with cravings. By now, I think I managed to figure out how to beat them and I hope you will also find this useful.
First to get straight is that all I am saying here is my personal experience, you may not agree, or it may not work for you but I am just telling you how I am doing it and what my thoughts are. Let's get cracking then :)
The conclusion I have come to is that there are probably two types of cravings. One being psychological, the other physiological. To beat the physiological craving, I think, is easier because all you need to do is give your body what it needs. Of course, what you are craving may not be the thing your body needs, so you certainly need to be careful, but here is a link to a fantastic article, that helped me immensely. This was the article that gave me the final push, the one that gave me the answers to all the questions in my 'failure post' and the knowledge to be successful this time. Where else would it be from than Mark's Daily Apple? :D Go on, read it, it will put a lot of things into place for you. :)
The above linked article touches on the psychological craving in point 6 (Stress eating) but it doesn't really offer solutions. I probably have one for you. Now if someone knows what comfort eating is, it's me. Whenever I was stressed, I headed to McDonald's, had a huge meal and then topped it off with a glazed doughnut. No wonder then that in the stressful job I was in, I quickly started putting on weight. But when being stressed was not the only time I would comfort-eat. Sense of achievement? Food as reward. Being happy? Food as celebration. Being sad? Food to cheer me up. Bored? Some cooking and eating will occupy me just fine. For every emotion, there was an excuse for food, it was like eating was the way to express my emotions. Sounds familiar? Read on then.
Even before I came across the Paleo diet, I knew that this comfort eating had to stop or I would be huge in no time. By then I had failed with diets on numerous occasions, first I thought I just had no willpower at all. That made me quite worried because how are you supposed to succeed with a diet without willpower? It seemed impossible. Fortunately however, I was creative enough to say, I don't care about willpower, I will just find another way. And I did. It is called hypnotherapy.
I knew the problem was in my head, and that what I needed to do was to break the link, the automatic association between expressing emotions and food. And I found the perfect way for me to do that in hypnotherapy, it worked like magic.
Now if you have doubts, let me clear up certain things about it and explain what it feels like. First of all, the hypnotherapy that you see 'magicians' do on TV where they get the audience do funny and embarrassing things, is not the thing you experience during a session at all. In fact, hypnotherapy is taught in school to psychology students (at least in Hungary it is, I suppose it must be the same in other countries) and is used a great deal to help people quit smoking and come over phobias (among a lot of other things). It is basically a very intensely focused state of mind that the therapist takes you to. In this state of mind you can concentrate on the problem you have and following the suggestions of the therapist you can change your mindset, you can uncover emotions you did not even know you had. Despite what you might think, you are in control the whole time and you can snap out of this state whenever you want. It is actually quite pleasant, even with the intense emotions you experience (I cried almost all the way through). Depending on how severe your issue is, you may need more or fewer sessions. All it took for me was three sessions, which is really good I think, and it was worth every penny.
So there you are. you can beat your cravings, all you need is some understanding of your body and its needs and some understanding of your mind. Once you have these, it's just a matter of finding out about your food options and daring to be creative and experimental in the kitchen.
Good luck, I hope I could help :)
P.S: I am not an expert in any of the topics covered above, everything you just read is my personal opinions and experiences.
