‘Pour some sugar on me, in the name of love,’
Def Leppard
Doughnuts… ice-cream… black forest gateaux… cookies… Belgian triple chocolate chip cookies dipped in chocolate…
If your mouth is watering just reading those words then you’ll have a thing for sugar. I mean who doesn’t, right?
But for some of us, sugar-lust can get out of control – and never more so when we’re feeling low.
Emotional eating is rarely triggered by having a great day. It’s triggered by feelings that bring us down. Like feeling judged, feeling sad, feeling lonely, feeling less than in balance…
Sometimes the strangest things can throw us – and before we know it we’re stood in the kitchen, fridge door open and scanning for the foods that satisfy our personal craving needs.
Of course, a Rapid Transformational Therapy (RTT) session will help you identify what happened in your past that created these associations.
Reframing these associations in hypnosis can be incredibly powerful because the subconscious is then on board with what you want. It stops the ‘go on, eat the cake, cake makes you happy’ mantra because the whole of the mind – conscious and subconscious – understands that it was never really about the cake.
The mind’s job is to move you away from pain towards pleasure. Once the mind understands that the craving is triggered by a memory, the need for the cake evaporates.
Let me give you an example. On my 18th birthday my mum took me to London. A big treat. We had lunch in a pizzeria in the Brompton Arcade and in the afternoon mum bought me a glass necklace in Harvey Nichols as my present. There, we went to the cafe for a drink.
While I found us a table she bought us three slices of cake each, plus fizzy drinks. I remember remarking on the amount of cake she’d bought, but I also felt duty bound to eat it all with her. You never left anything on a plate in our house. My parent were World War II children, food had been rationed in the UK and going hungry was not unusual. Food was not to be ‘wasted’. Besides, leaving any would have made me ungrateful and I didn’t want to spoil the day.
Children look to their parents constantly for cues on how to behave. ‘Food as a reward’, ‘over-eating as a privilege’ are both powerful messages.
Did this one incident turn me into a cakeoholic? Not entirely, but it was key and it was reinforced with lots of ‘cake = rewards’ messaging over the years beforehand and so my ‘sugar = reward’ thinking was a sealed fate.
Now I understand that these scenes are really about love. The cake is merely the messenger. Connecting to the memory of love is just as powerful. And my subconscious understands that now too.
The need to binge can be complex, but it is invariably about recreating an emotion or sometimes pushing one away.
Understanding is power, but understanding in hypnosis is a phenomenal power because the whole mind is engaged in your desire to change.
I now hear myself say ‘No thank you, I don’t really like cake.’ Because really it’s just a mush of sugar and fat that makes me feel a bit giddy and then slightly sick.
If you want this kind of change for you, contact me for a free first consultation.