Eating
Eating
Compulsive Eating
Hypnosis can be very successful with weight issues.
There is a strong psychological element to most problem eating.
Hypnotherapy will help with the root causes, but the results
will not be instant and it may take several sessions to
discover why the mind feels compelled to eat.
It's not about willpower
Most people with weight problems already know everything there is to know about protein and carbohydrates and balanced eating and vitamins and diets and everything else. Their problem is not lack of information.
Their problem is a compulsive need to eat, an inability to stop eating, to eat sensibly. Everybody has to eat, so there is no escaping the temptation. But some people just keep on eating and get overweight. Others are unable to stop themselves eating but manage their weight by vomiting it up later when the compulsion has passed. Others spend their lives constantly yo-yoing up and down the scales and feeling bad about being unable to control their weight.
Most of these people go through their lives ashamed of not being able to control their eating, embarrassed about their size and live a double life: a public life in which they pretend everything is OK, and a secret life in which they hate themselves for failing and despair of ever getting well.
These people are not weak willed or self indulgent. They are obeying an internal irresistible psychological drive. The purpose of that drive is to keep them safe and their personal identity is mixed up with feelings about food. Food nurtures, food comforts, food is fulfilling, food expresses love, food shows you care, food is something you give, food connects, food is something to talk about, food brings people to together, food is teaching a teen to bake, food is a happy family around a table laughing. Food is warmth, comfort, love. Food is being accepted, cosseted, included, valued. Not having it brings up feelings of loss, loneliness and rejection.
RATIONALE
The exact details of why individuals over eat varies from person to person, but the reasons are all basically the same: the person associates food with being loved and cared for, and knows that not having food is the same as being being on their own, lonely and isolated. Food is everything. Not having food around means there is a danger of not being loved. That danger has to be avoided, it cannot be allowed to come to pass. That is the root cause of the compulsion - a dread of being unloved.
The origin is usually in childhood, when the child decides that getting food means being loved. Mother provides food, mother shows that the child is important. No food - no love. The punishment of sending a child to their room with no food associates hunger with unhappiness. It is often compounded by the mother rewarding good behaviour with food, or dealing with her own problems through food. Many children learn to associate happy times with meal times, and when the family breaks up the pain of the loss is associated with different eating arrangements, and the child believes that if only the food was there again so would the happiness.
Food is a basic human drive, and it easily gets mixed up with other emotions. Every time some people feel bad, they reach for food.
PROCEDURE
The cure for food problems and eating compulsions lies in changing how the person feels about food. The drive for self protection needs to be kept, but deflected from food, so that food becomes just something you enjoy and not something that is a substitute for happiness, or that defines who you are.
It is necessary to find out how the person identifies with food, how they represent the relationship, to explore and change their mental associations.
The best way to do that is by by metaphor modelling.
The Metaphor Modelling process is described here.
The treatment is often combined with Dragon Therapy described here.
Reorientation
The session ends with repeated testing to ensure that the client has replaced all the old fears and now feels different about food.
Follow up
In many instances eating problems are linked to some more general issue such as lack of self esteem or anxiety. It is often useful to consider using hypnosis to deal with those other issues.