Do you reach for the chocolate or crisps when you’re feeling low or stressed? Many of us do, and comfort food certainly seems to do the trick. Briefly.
Comfort eating leads to more problems than it solves, causing unhelpful eating habits and potentially weight gain. In this blog, we look at how solution focused hypnotherapy can break the emotional eating cycle and reset your relationship with food.
It’s perfectly normal to use food as comfort – we’ve been doing it since we were soothed with milk as babies. Culturally, we also use food and drink as rewards – we celebrate all sorts of occasions with meals out and maybe a glass of something chilled, and even reward ourselves for reaching Friday with a pizza or a takeaway. The association of food with mood is strong and goes back a long way.
However, it’s all too easy for food to become a coping mechanism when life feels too much; and unfortunately when we’re low or stressed, we rarely crave fruit or veggies. A lot of comfort eating or “emotional eating” involves less-than-healthy food, which can lead to weight gain and its associated mood and confidence factors.
Why is there a food and stress connection?
Surprisingly (or not), emotional eating can be traced back to our old nemesis, the sabre tooth tiger. During periods of stress, we crave quick-energy-release and digestible food so we can easily run away from that threatening tiger. Unfortunately, these tend to be fatty, starchy and sugary foods – and this leads to another issue. This type of food tends to be high in dopamine, that feel-good chemical. Eating a biscuit makes us feel happy and comforted as well as ready to run from tigers – so we have a second, and a third…
Stress leads to our primitive brains telling us to eat, and then we get a dopamine hit from the foods we choose, and we carry on. We then feel guilty or ashamed of ourselves, which leads to more stress and more comfort eating.
This is the emotional eating cycle – completely understandable and hard to break. It’s even trickier to break the cycle if weight gain also comes into it.
How do we know we’re not simply hungry?
We all know the feelings of physical hunger – rumbling tummy, an energy dip, general grumpiness. We eat, we immediately feel better and back to our old selves. What’s more, we’re generally happy to eat whatever is available.
Emotional eating is a need for comfort rather than sustenance. It often comes with a craving for a specific type of food (often carb, sugar and fat-heavy), and there doesn’t seem to be an off switch – the whole packet of biscuits quickly disappears.
If you’re physically hungry, you feel pleasantly satiated when your body’s had enough to eat, and you certainly don’t feel ashamed of having eaten.
Is emotional eating the same thing as binge eating?
Emotional eating is when we turn to food for comfort, in times of stress, sadness or anxiety. Binge eating disorder involves eating a lot of food in a short space of time, often in secret. It’s a recognised mental health condition and is characterised by the frequency of these bouts and the amount of food consumed.
If you think you might have binge eating disorder, please speak to a medical professional or confide in a trusted friend, so you can make sure you get the support you need.
How can we break the emotional eating cycle?
Fiest things first – you can, and will, break the emotional eating cycle. If you’re reading this, you’re already actively doing something to make a change.
Here are a few things you can try.
- Start with a “food and mood” diary. Make a note of what you eat and how you were feeling before and after you ate it. This helps you focus on the negative food behaviours and learn about your mood triggers and habits
- Pause. Once you become familiar with your moods, you can pause to ask yourself whether you’re actually hungry, or rather stressed, low or bored when you open the fridge. If any of the latter, what can you do instead of snacking?
- Low mood and / or low energy makes cooking nutritious meals a lot harder to achieve. It’s less daunting to stick a ready meal curry in the microwave than prepare a healthy one from scratch. Try websites like BBC Good Food for simple, quick, nutritious (and cost-effective) alternatives, as well as healthy foods that give you that dopamine hit
- Think about your sleep patterns as well as your eating habits. We eat more when we’re tired – as much as 400 extra calories after a poor night’s sleep
- You don’t have to do this alone. A friend on a similar journey or a slimming club can really help to motivate you to stay on track
- And because it’s essential to break that emotional eating cycle and understand why you’re comfort eating, combine a healthier diet with solution focused hypnotherapy
How does hypnotherapy prevent comfort eating?
Hypnotherapy can prevent comfort eating and facilitate weight loss by understanding why you have negative feelings and behaviours that lead to comfort eating. Therapy can then help you manage these negative behaviours by setting a positive future goal and a series of helpful steps towards it.
Methods like weight loss jabs and gastric bands can be effective; however, they don’t change mindsets. Slimming clubs are good because at least they re-educate you about what you eat and cook, but again, they don’t really deal with why you’re making unhelpful food choices in the first place. Hypnotherapy helps you identify why you have this negative behaviour then works towards resetting your relationship with food. Without this new, different mindset, jabs and diets won’t be as effective.
Will weight loss hypnotherapy help?
Yes, hypnotherapy is an effective way to manage your weight by looking at the psychology of overeating then setting you personal targets. Along the way, we look at motivation and positive thinking encouragement, and ways to overcome self-sabotage. It’s this combination of goal focus and practical techniques that makes solution focused hypnotherapy so successful for weight loss.
Combine hypnotherapy with a healthy diet and exercise, and you’ll very quickly feel so much better about your relationship with food and your weight.
At Great Minds Clinic, we offer a 6-week hypnotherapy for weight loss programme – it’s one of our most popular services. It’s about much more than a weekly weigh-in – we’re resetting your relationship with food and how you personally deal with stress.
Hypnotherapy for emotional eating
Do you feel ready to break the emotional eating cycle or start on your weight loss journey? Call me for a confidential chat and we’ll take it from there.
