How hypnotherapy cured one women’s lifelong battle with obsessive eating
A recent article in the Daily Mail saw eating obsessed Charlotte Eager try out hypnotherapy to see if it could put a stop to her fluctuating weight.
In her teenage years through to her early 20s Charlotte experienced both anorexia and bulimia, and though she overcame her eating disorders, her obsession with what she ate coupled with yoyo and crash dieting continued.
Charlotte went from a size eight, to a 12, 14 then 16, and during this time she was constantly trying out new diets and visiting health farms in a bid to keep her ever fluctuating weight under control.
When Charlotte reached her 40s she was still struggling to control her eating habits and her new engagement to her now husband and the pressure to lose weight for her pending wedding caused her to over eat once again.
Soon after Charlotte ran into an old friend who had managed to lose 4st in a matter of months with the help of Lily Allen’s hypnotherapist Susan Hepburn.
Charlotte booked herself a session at Hepburn’s London based Harley Street clinic and went along to her first session not really knowing what to expect.
During her first session Charlotte was given the opportunity to outlet her feelings for 20 minutes, giving her the chance to rant about everything which was causing her distress.
The next step was to take Charlotte into a deeply relaxed meditative state, which meant that any attention could be focused on suggestions made by the hypnotherapist, allowing them to make positive changes.
Hepburn used a number of techniques to help Charlotte, but one of the most notable for Charlotte was learning about the root cause of her problem.
Charlotte was asked to think about the first time she had eaten comfort food, and the memory which first popped into her head was sitting in the kitchen with her mother when she was 12 learning how to cook. At the time her mother was fighting terminal cancer which would eventually kill her, and this memory is why Charlotte associated food with comfort.
After various other techniques were used such as visualisation, Charlotte was asked to keep a food diary and was given a meditation CD to listen to between sessions.
After her first session Charlotte noticed that her behaviour patterns and attitude towards food were beginning to change. She no longer felt that she wanted to eat continuously, and when she did she craved different kinds of healthier foods which she wasn’t as interested in as before.
When Charlotte did eventually walk down the aisle, she did so as a non eating obsessed healthy size 10.
For information about how hypnotherapy could help you to gain control of your eating habits view our hypnotherapy for weight loss fact-sheet.