Can hypnotherapy help with binge eating?

Do you feel stuck in a cycle of binge eating or emotional eating? Perhaps you find yourself eating in response to stress, overwhelm, or difficult emotions, and afterwards feel guilt, shame, or frustration. For some people, hypnotherapy may offer a supportive way to explore the emotional and subconscious patterns connected to food and eating behaviours.

Understanding binge eating disorder

Binge Eating Disorder (BED) is characterised by eating an unusually large amount of food in a short space of time. It is associated with eating that food quickly and is accompanied by feelings of guilt, shame or embarrassment. It does not have any compensatory behaviours with it; in other words, you do not purge (vomit) or over-exercise to compensate for the overeating. 

You may have some of the characteristics of binge eating disorder, but not meet all of the criteria for the full disorder. However, that is not to dismiss your experience, as you may experience disordered eating. 

The binge eating cycle

Binge eating can be classed as an addictive behaviour as it follows a cyclical pattern. Specifically, it follows a three-stage loop that is known as the addictive cycle. 

Stage 1: the binge

An emotional trigger happens that you may not be aware of. Yet it sets off binge urges. You can't resist any longer, so you engage in compulsive eating. This gives you a dopamine hit. For that brief moment, it feels good. The feel-good feeling can be so fleeting that you may not consciously register it. During the binge, you are not in control of your compulsive eating, and you are not able to stop, which means you overeat. 

Stage 2: the remorse

As the high wears off, you experience a crash, a low and some form of emotional distress. The physical symptoms could be emptiness, anxiety and/or irritability. You realise you have done it again, the very thing you said you were not going to do. You may then begin to experience difficult emotional or physical effects linked to the binge eating cycle.

Stage 3: the craving

Our brain adapts to this euphoric feeling. For some, everyday activities no longer make you as happy as they used to, and the only way to feel good is by eating your favourite foods. We become fixated on food, and this is what we might call food noise, the mental chatter that revolves around food. It does not quieten down until we get our next fix. This leads back into stage 1 again. 

How hypnotherapy may help

Hypnotherapy works by us being in a deeply relaxed state. In this state, we can access limiting beliefs, thoughts and emotions that are in the subconscious mind that self-sabotage us. 

Positive suggestions are used. We can accept these as the logical part of the brain, the part that is argumentative and rigid, is turned down. The part of the brain that is open to suggestion, willing to consider other alternatives, is therefore given space and is not overshadowed by the logical side of the brain. This is what helps to create long-lasting behavioural change. 

Hypno-psychotherapy is where psychotherapeutic and hypnotherapy interventions are used by a therapist to not only help you find solutions to your issues, but to help you get to the cause of your disordered eating. This may help to reshape some of the underlying thought patterns linked to binge eating, helping you move away from the binge eating cycle.

Hypnotherapy and the binge eating cycle

If we look at the stages of addiction again, we can break it down to understand how hypnotherapy and hypno-psychotherapy can help us to stop binge eating. 

Stage 1: building awareness around eating patterns

The therapist may encourage you to start mindful eating. This is becoming aware of your thoughts and emotions around eating. More so, the therapist is helping you to understand what that euphoric feeling is about. The hypnotherapist can help you to recreate that in practice. Knowing and being able to experience this feeling allows the therapist to help you to start to break any subconscious associations the mind has made between euphoric feelings and food. 

Stage 2: processing difficult emotions

At this stage, we often feel a range of emotions such as guilt, embarrassment, frustration, shame, desperation and anger. This makes us question our self-worth and if we are good enough. Will we ever be able to stop? Hypnotherapy can be used to help you process these emotions.

We explore what you are feeling, what that relates to and how we can come to a more positive emotion that serves you better. Hypnotherapy works well here in that we use it for confidence, building your self-esteem and bringing in empathy and compassion for yourself, so you learn to feel better about yourself. 

Stage 3: managing triggers and cravings

This stage is a middle stage where we are learning to adapt to a new way of being. Feeling good, so we are not binging, but also trying to stay in this state so that we do not get triggered and binge again. 

Hypnotherapy can help you to manage those triggers. We work through what might trigger you and help you to manage them better emotionally or find different ways of managing them. This then contributes towards you preventing the next binge and feeling better equipped to deal with future binge urges. 

What happens in the hypnotherapy sessions? 

We work through your experiences and what comes up for you that stops you from having a healthy relationship with food. We use guided imagery to help imagine a life without emotional eating. We work with the subconscious mind to help change those negative implicit messages you may have received that are contributing towards your disordered eating.

We use techniques such as guided meditation and suggestion work. We sometimes work with your body image if it is playing a part in how you view yourself, and we work on changing that to a more positive one.

With hypno-psychotherapy, we are not only helping you to find solutions to your emotional eating behaviours, but also helping you to heal the causes of them. This could mean we use guided relaxation to do some inner child healing work. Healing parts of your childhood that may be contributing to your binge eating.

Can hypnotherapy safely and effectively treat binge eating disorder? 

That very much depends on you and your binge eating symptoms. For some people, it changes their eating patterns and gives them a more positive view of themselves. For others, where you may have a more severe form of disordered eating, it may help you to have further help, such as counselling and or nutritional help.