Never before have we been given such a variety of high calorific food to pick from. Advertising for snack food reaches far and wide and shelves of sugary sweets are often sold at supermarket tills to catch you on the last leg of your shopping trip. Hypnotherapist Karen Martin said: “My local supermarket in Tunbridge Wells is expert at inspiring shoppers to over-purchase and therefore to over-consume.”
For many people these temptations are easily avoided yet, for some, they can trigger a terrible conflict within the mind.
People who struggle with compulsive snacking or eating comfort food are often not given the same kind of compassion or understanding as those that struggle with other harmful addictions like, for example, smoking or drinking.
For this reason, problems such as self-hatred or low self-worth can frequently end up making the issue more pronounced.
Of course, people can in reality become obsessed with snacks like biscuits, crisps, cakes and sweets in the same way a person might become dependent on smoking or alcohol. That’s why people are often unable to stop their habits with sheer self-discipline alone.
Why can’t we stop eating sugary food?
Addictive behaviours originate from the subconscious. “We can’t just wake up in the morning and say to ourselves: ‘Right! I won’t eat chocolate today’ because if that’s our habit and desire, the intention will be overruled by out subconscious emotions. These are much more powerful influences than our conscious, rational thinking. This is where hypnotherapy plays a role in enabling us to change our subconscious mind to match our conscious objectives,” Said Karen.
When we journey through life, we store the consequences of the ordeals we’ve been through, and when we are inevitably confronted with difficult situations, our mind creates methods for us to deal with them.
After we discover ways which help us feel better, the mind may get ‘hooked’ on these types of systems, driving us to do the same thing whenever we feel upset or stressed out.
Youngsters are often rewarded for good behaviour with unhealthy treats or snack foods.
Unhealthy food can also be used by parents to help relieve a child’s bad mood or to compensate for something which has turned out badly (‘I’m sorry you didn’t win your netball match; let’s go for a pizza’).
This may then lead to the development of life-long habitual patterns of behaviour, where these kinds of food are associated with joy and excitement. This may mean that, whenever you feel unhappy or depressed, your first reaction is not to think about the situation or speak to someone regarding it but to go for the cake tin.
Dealing with the subconscious mind
A hypnotherapist can help you stop eating sugary foods like sweets, biscuits and cakes, by using the subconscious.
In the same way a hypnotic approach may be used to make smokers think that cigarettes taste or smell disgusting, a hypnotherapist can implement the effectiveness of suggestion to generate new feelings about snack food. This eliminates the temptation to visit the cake aisle next time you go shopping.
Different from typical weight loss plans, which rely primarily on a person’s motivation, hypnosis gets to the fundamental cause of your eating habits. It replaces the previous thinking with new thinking, releasing you from the habitual beliefs you have about food and eating.
Instead of needing all of your willpower to avoid food cravings, it should feel normal and straightforward to stop eating sugary food and other snacks.
