Beyond willpower: breaking free from sugar cravings

There is a particular exhaustion that comes from knowing sugar isn’t serving you and reaching for it anyway.

I know this personally. A few years ago, I was managing type 2 diabetes, carrying three stone more than I felt comfortable, caught in a daily cycle of cravings that no amount of willpower seemed able to break. Today, my HbA1c sits within the normal range, the extra weight is gone, and my relationship with food has genuinely changed. I share that not as proof that any therapy guarantees a particular outcome, but as one of my reasons I now do this work with such conviction.

As a clinical hypnotherapist trained in EFT and EMDR, I spend much of my working life helping clients change their relationship with sugar. What I’ve learned, personally and professionally, is that sugar cravings are rarely just about sugar.

Why willpower alone so often fails

Sugar cravings usually have several layers feeding them at once: a learned habit loop, a stress-driven reward pattern, and sometimes a belief formed long before the craving appeared, about comfort, deserving, or control.

Telling someone to simply “eat less sugar” addresses none of this, which is why willpower-based approaches so often collapse under pressure. Hypnotherapy, EFT and EMDR offer something different: not more willpower, but a way of working with the patterns driving the craving in the first place.

Hypnotherapy: speaking to the subconscious habit

Hypnotherapy works with the subconscious mind, where most automatic habits live. In a relaxed, focused state, we can explore what sugar has come to represent – energy, comfort, reward, a brief pause in a relentless day – and begin installing more sustainable ways of meeting that same need.

Suggestion work can help reduce the intensity of cravings and rebuild confidence in a client’s own ability to change. Most clients describe the craving becoming “quieter” rather than vanishing instantly, which tends to be both more realistic and more durable.

EFT: tapping into the emotional trigger

EFT, or tapping, combines gentle tapping on acupressure points with spoken acknowledgement of what is actually being felt in the moment of craving.

For many clients, a 4 pm slump or evening craving is really tiredness or unprocessed stress wearing a sugar-shaped disguise. Naming the real feeling while tapping often settles the nervous system, and the craving frequently loses much of its urgency.

This isn’t just a clinical impression. A randomised controlled trial published in Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being (Stapleton et al.) compared an eight-week EFT programme with cognitive behavioural therapy in adults who were overweight or obese, finding that the two approaches produced comparable, clinically meaningful reductions in food cravings, which were sustained at twelve-month follow-up.

A further RCT (Stapleton et al.) examining an online EFT programme found significant reductions in cravings and weight, alongside falls in anxiety and depression, with benefits maintained a year later. EFT is particularly useful as a tool clients can use themselves, the moment a craving strikes.

EMDR: addressing the root, not just the symptom

Where a craving is rooted in earlier experience – a childhood association between sugar and love or safety, or a stressful period when sweet food became a primary coping mechanism – EMDR can help process the original memory so it no longer drives present-day behaviour. EMDR doesn’t erase memory, but it can change the emotional charge attached to it, often reducing the pull of habits built around it.

The evidence base here is earlier-stage than for EFT, and it would be misleading to overstate it. Proof-of-principle research has shown that eye movements can reduce the vividness and craving intensity of food-related mental imagery in experimental settings. A 2024 University of Southampton doctoral study (Coulson, A.E.J. 2024) found genuinely mixed results, including one randomised trial where adding an EMDR component conferred no extra benefit over standard treatment. I share this honestly: EMDR is a promising and evolving tool for craving work, not a guaranteed fix, and it tends to be most useful where a clear root memory has been identified.

Three modalities, one whole person

In practice, I rarely use these modalities alone. A course of sessions might use EFT in the moment a craving is described, hypnotherapy with the subconscious patterns maintaining it, and EMDR where a clear root memory is identified – addressing the habit, the emotion, and the history together.

My own three-stone weight loss and return to a normal HbA1c came from this same combination of approaches alongside the dietary changes recommended by my GP and dietitian. The therapeutic work changed my relationship with food and with myself, but it sat alongside, not instead of, proper medical guidance.

If you are ready to look beneath the craving

If sugar has become a daily battle rather than an occasional pleasure, it may be worth asking what the craving is really asking for. The answer is rarely simply “sugar”, and once the real question is identified, change becomes considerably more possible.

These approaches won’t work identically for everyone, and they are not a replacement for medical care where a diagnosed condition is involved. But as part of a wider, properly supported approach, they offer a way of working with the whole person behind the craving, which, in my experience, is where lasting change actually begins.

References

Stapleton et al., 2016. Food for thought: A randomised controlled trial of emotional freedom techniques and cognitive behavioural therapy in the treatment of food cravings. Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, 8(2), 232–257.

Stapleton et al., 2019. Online delivery of Emotional Freedom Techniques in the treatment of food cravings and weight management: A randomised controlled trial. OBM Integrative and Complementary Medicine, 4(4), 065.

Coulson, A.E.J. 2024. Food cravings: trialling an adapted EMDR protocol for food cravings found it helpful for reducing craving-related imagery, while a separate systematic review of EMDR for eating disorders more broadly.

Hatoum et al., 2024. Eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy for the treatment of eating disorders: A systematic review of the literature. Mental Health Science.