Hypnosis, Eating and Weight: binges, snacking

Understanding certain eating behaviours

Why diets fail

You know the cycle by heart:

• restriction ("this time I am giving up sugar"), which holds for a few days or a few weeks
• the crash, often set off by stress, tiredness or something going wrong
• the guilt ("I have no willpower")
• then a new, stricter restriction

And the cycle starts again, often with a few more kilos than at the start.

This cycle is not a personal failure.
It is written into the very mechanics of restriction.
Depriving the body triggers storage mechanisms and amplifies the pull of forbidden foods. The ban feeds the obsession, and guilt, far from motivating, is one of the most powerful triggers of bingeing: you eat to comfort yourself for having eaten too much. In other words: it is not you who lacks willpower, it is the method that organises its own defeat.

That is why our support offers no diet, no bans and no weigh-ins.
It works where eating behaviour is really decided: in the automatisms and the emotions.

Physical hunger, emotional hunger: the distinction that changes everything

Physical hunger settles in gradually, is felt in the body, will accept any food and stops at fullness.
Emotional hunger appears all at once, demands one specific food (rarely broccoli), takes no notice of fullness and leaves guilt behind rather than contentment.
Most weight difficulties come not from the first but from the second: you eat your stress, your boredom, your loneliness, your tiredness, your swallowed anger.

Food is then doing a job that is not its own: settling, rewarding, filling, keeping you company.
As long as that job is not handed to other resources, any attempt to "eat less" amounts to taking away a part of you its main source of comfort.
It resists, logically enough, and it always wins in the end.

How Hypnosis can act on eating behaviour

What hypnosis does, concretely

The hypnotic state is a natural state of focused attention, in which you stay conscious and in control, and in which automatisms become accessible and changeable.
In practice, the support works on four levels:

• Reprogramming the automatisms. We work at uncoupling the identified triggers (coming home, the screen, the empty hour in the afternoon) from the eating reflex, through the same learning mechanism that installed it.
• Handing emotions to other resources. Rather than creating a gap, the work replaces the services food was providing (settling, comfort, reward) with resources that do the same job without the drawbacks. That is the heart of the method: we do not fight food, we relieve it of a role that was never its own.
• Relearning fullness and pleasure. Eating more slowly, feeling the "just enough" signal, rediscovering that a small amount savoured satisfies more than a large amount swallowed. These capacities exist in everyone; diets and years of autopilot have simply muted them.
• Reconciling your self-image. Self-contempt has never made anyone lose weight: it feeds exactly the binges it criticises. Restoring a fairer view of your body is not indulgence, it is a condition of effectiveness.

The "virtual gastric band": what you should know

Some practitioners offer a protocol known as the virtual gastric band: fitting, under hypnosis, an imaginary band meant to recreate the quick feeling of fullness of a surgical band. Our honest position: it is one suggestion tool among others, which can help some people find the fullness signal again, but it is neither surgery nor a miracle method, and it in no way removes the need for the deeper work on emotions and automatisms described above.
Be wary of offers that sell it as an equivalent of bariatric surgery without the scalpel: the comparison is misleading, and obesity surgery belongs to a specialist medical pathway that is anything but trivial.

What do the scientific studies say?

A randomised clinical trial run by a French hospital and university team (the HYPNODIET programme, AP-HP / Université Paris Cité) showed that a programme of Ericksonian hypnosis and self-hypnosis, added to dietary support, significantly reduced eating impulsivity and disinhibition in selected patients. That is, precisely the mechanisms that make dietary advice fail on its own (AP-HP press release).

One notable point: the researchers themselves stress that the direct weight loss observed remains modest at this stage, and warn against offers promising spectacular results.

That is our reading: hypnosis has shown its value on eating behaviour (impulsivity, bingeing, the relationship with food) and it is by that route, slower but more lasting than diets, that weight changes. Any numbered promise of weight loss through hypnosis cannot be an argument.

How the support works

The support always starts with an in-depth conversation: your history with food and with diets, your triggers, your dominant emotions, your medical context. Generally count on between three and six sessions, two to three weeks apart to let the changes settle…
Eating behaviour is retrained in real life, between sessions, notably through the self-hypnosis you will learn. Sessions work equally well in the practice or by video.

Hypnosis also fits very well into multidisciplinary support: it complements the work of a doctor, a nutritionist or a dietitian. They deal with ruling out possible medical causes and with the "what to eat", while we deal with the "why do I eat when I am not hungry".
The two together are more effective than either separately.

When to see a doctor first

See a doctor first, and make hypnosis a complement (never a substitute), in the following situations:

• Confirmed or suspected eating disorders (anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder), which need specialist and often multidisciplinary care.
• Obesity, particularly if a medical or surgical pathway is being considered.
• Diabetes or any metabolic condition.
• Rapid, unexplained weight gain or loss, which must be explored medically.
• Pregnancy.

We will ask you these questions at the first meeting, to be sure we are the right resource for you.