emotional eating

Edmonton Hypnosis for Life Inc. is run by Dr. Terri Cooper. We provide ethical, confidential & affordable hypnosis and hypnotherapy services in Edmonton, Alberta and for guests from surrounding communities.

Weight and Emotional Eating

Managing our weight is much more then “exercise and healthy food,” it is also about how we manage our emotional states. We know that food is often used to stuff down emotions and manage day to day stress. Take a look around; on the whole we have a society that is overweight.

If we managed our emotions in a consistently healthy manner our mental health centers and hospitals would not be overflowing. That is not an exaggeration. We know that long term poorly managed stress can lead to mental health concerns and that obesity is linked to many disease processes.

This, I believe is where the weight loss “chains” miss the mark. We need to make a commitment to learning to manage emotions and learn the basic fundamental skills of altering our states. Only then can we hope to move into a healthy weight as you will begin to understand as you read on.

To move into a healthy weight emotional eating must be addressed. We all understand the concept of using food for comfort as a way to assuage uncomfortable feelings. But let’s take this a step further and remove the “pathology” from emotional eating. When we shift to consider emotional eating as a HABIT versus only a strategy to avoid facing deep issues, we suddenly move into a place of empowerment.

The beauty of addressing eating concerns as a habit is that we can then begin to ask ourselves… so how are habits formed? Once we are clear on the principles of habit formation we can begin to interrupt patterns and replace them with new healthier ones.

We do not necessarily need to spend oodles of time revisiting and dredging up past emotional events tied to eating. For the most part people are already pretty clear on what their issues are before they come to hypnotherapy. Rather then continue to condition a less then desirable response by focusing on past hurts, moving forward from a programming framework has proven to be the most powerful with my client base.

After assessing thoughts habits it usually becomes very clear as to how an individual is staying stuck with a weight issue. Combining hypnotherapy and neurologinistic programming is incredibly powerful. It is a hands on opportunity to become fully conscious, fully aware of how we literally program ourselves. How we focus, how we engage our senses and what the internal dialogue is comprised of begins to shift. When this occurs the outward behaviors change and become much more consistent with developing a state (mind body and spirit) that is congruent and ready for weight release.

During the process the goals begin to shift: -from weight loss to weight release to -to adopting a healthy lifestyle on all levels, body, mind and spirit and then to - learning to manage emotions and stress

Utilizing an experiential environmental allows individuals to develop the necessary skills for managing one’s state minute by minute. Consciously programming or conditioning new responses to those stimuli that have in the past triggered overeating and/or emotional eating can be powerful. Often this learning is then generalized to other aspects of living.

Moving into a feeling of balance and release are good states to be in when it comes to bringing our bodies back into a healthy weight. When we are stressed, clenching, pulsating with adrenaline “loosing weight” is more of a challenge then it needs to be. We do not shed weight when we are in hyper protective mode.

When we begin to take a hold of and manage our emotions and emotional responses through new behaviors we can naturally begin to move into weight release mode. When we begin to honor ourselves in small meaningful ways everyday we naturally begin to make choices from the wise place within that is always seeking health.

We learn to let go of words with less then desirable connotations and begin to develop new healthy internal hypnotic patter about how we treat and nurture our body mind and spirit. For example:

-The absolute joy of moving my body in dance vs. forcing my self to go to the gym -The loving act of nourishing my brain with plenty of delicious wonderful water vs. depending on willpower to make myself fill my water bottle

We can engage learning styles and conditioning principles to become open to enjoying the sights, smells, shapes, colors, textures and taste of nutritious food. We can develop an internal response that allows us to begin to savor each bite with the message that this food allows my body to function well, all the organs working together in perfect harmony.

When shifts begin to occur for a client I will often comment that “things seem like they are progressing nicely." A common response to this is “Well, maybe sort of, just a little bit, I will wait and see if this lasts before I get too excited..."

We can’t wait to fit into an outfit or wait for the scale to show a certain number before we will allow ourselves to feel good. In order to maintain momentum in the change process we absolutely MUST reinforce the little baby steps along the way. It is a requirement of conditioning a new response.

When we look at emotional eating from a “habit” perspective and seek to develop new ways of managing stress and altering our states we become powerful. Maintaining the change process at the conscious and deliberate level until a new attitude, belief and/or behaviour follow suite, automatically (subconsciously) takes time, energy, repetition and positive reinforcement. These are wonderful principles when applies to managing stress as well, it is all part and parcel of moving into “release mode.”