Hypnotherapy for weight loss involves helping you understand the cycle of emotional eating through identifying triggers and ways to overcome cravings in order to maintain a healthy weight.

“Emotional eating” is a term used to describe using food as a way to make yourself feel better, filling an emotional need rather than your stomach. Many of us turn to food for comfort, stress relief or reward ourselves by using food. Most people reach for junk foods, sweets and other comforting types of food such as pizza, cakes, biscuits or crisps. These types of food can make us feel better temporarily and provide us with a welcome distraction from the stresses and strains of life but when this becomes a regular habit, it can lead to many problems.

It’s important to understand that emotional eating is not a sign of personal weakness or lack of willpower. In many situations, it’s a combination of the body’s biological pathways and coping mechanisms for negative emotions such as isolation, boredom, stress and low mood.

When your body is under stress, the stress hormone known as “cortisol” is released. It’s linked to our flight or fight response, causing an increase in blood pressure, pulse and breathing rate, enabling us to physically escape from danger. However, the problem is in modern times, even the smallest issues can trigger the full flight or fight response, leaving us with chronic stress and high levels of circulating cortisol. High levels of stress can lead to food being stored as visceral fat, which tends to collect around our organs.

Many of the comfort foods we consume during periods of stress have also been created to target the pleasure receptors in our brains. That’s why sugary foods like ice cream or chocolate make us feel good. These foods release dopamine, which helps prompt feelings of euphoria, motivation and pleasure. The ‘high’ from these foods can be addictive. The next time we are feeling stressed, anxious or a bit flat, our brain recalls how these foods made us feel, prompting us to repeat the same behaviour for the same response.

If you are prone to emotional eating, it can be more difficult to differentiate between when you’re genuinely hungry and responding to emotional eating, which makes it difficult to deal with triggers and practice mindful eating. Emotional hunger can be very powerful but there are cues to help you differentiate. Emotional hunger happens very suddenly but physical hunger comes on more gradually. Emotional eating leads to craving for specific comfort foods but when you’re physically hungry, you’ll eat almost anything. Emotional hunger leads to mindless eating without paying attention to whether you’re enjoying it or full.

Not all emotional eating is connected to negative emotions as some behaviours are learned during childhood which influences our behaviours later in life. For example, if you were rewarded with your favourite foods such as chocolate as a child, it makes sense for this cycle to continue as an adult. Furthermore, it’s easy to overindulge when we’re out with friends or family in social situations and surrounded by comfort foods.

The most obvious impact of emotional eating is weight gain. This can make it harder to stay in shape, leaving us feeling stressed and can lead to longer term health issues such as coronary heart disease or diabetes. Emotional eating can also have an adverse impact on our mental health causing feelings of regret, shame and guilt afterwards, resulting in lower self-esteem and risk of depression.

Examining your relationship with food and understanding how it impacts on your body will allow you to make better decisions. Keeping a food diary can also be helpful to identify patterns and triggers. Planning your weekly meals in advance can also assist in making more mindful food choices and ensuring you make time to eat when you’re hungry rather than waiting until you are ravenous when you’re likely to overeat and make poorer food choices. Try to identify what type of situations prompt bouts of emotional eating and what comfort foods you crave during these periods. Keeping comfort foods out of sight or only storing limited quantities in your home may also be helpful.

Keeping in touch with friends, family and work colleagues, even remotely, helps bring down our stress and anxiety levels and reduces our reliance on emotional eating. Being kind and compassionate with yourself is also important. Don’t allow an emotional eating slip-up to overshadow your weight loss goal or any other targets. Remind yourself that you can easily get back on track and this is only one day.

If you are struggling to lose weight or finding it difficult to maintain a healthy weight, hypnotherapy and BWRT can really help. For more information or a free 15 minute discovery call, please do not hesitate to contact me via the enquiry form page.