Are You A Binge Eater?

By vanessa
January 11, 2020
Binge Eating
Binge Eating , Emotional Eating , Self Soothing With Food

When it’s never enough food.

ARE YOU A BINGE EATER? Maybe you have the double whammy of binging and purging. A particularly nasty combination. If so please don’t feel alone. I know that’s easier said than done but there are so many of you out there doing this. Secret, closet binge eating is a physically and emotionally painful merry-go-round. It can be a hard hamster wheel to step off. I liken it to being on the highway with no exit but you can break the back of this powerful habit and heal.

If you are binging there could be 1001 reasons. It’s likely some kind of self soothing, self calming behavior. People will often say to me: I just can’t seem to stop myself from self sabotaging. I always like to re-frame that. Perhaps you’re not self sabotaging, perhaps you’re just trying to feel calm and safe within. Very few people are deliberately trying to harm themselves. For many people and for many reasons food is used to feel nourished and loved. There can be any number of messages stored deep within, usually from childhood. Messages loud and clear that food is a comfort and a friend. Anxiety, stress and loneliness are also common triggers for the compulsion to binge.

I vividly remember early in my career as a hypnotherapist here in Northern Virginia receiving a call from a woman who was struggling with binging. She was in floods of tears, sobbing uncontrollably holding her phone in a crumpled heap on the kitchen floor. She described packets and boxes of food all around, wrappers strewn about. She told me that after work that day she had hit not one but three different fast food places bringing a massive quantity of food home with her. She had eaten every bite of it. She then started opening the kitchen cupboards, making sandwiches, going at the ice cream from the freezer and pretty much anything and everything in her site was fair game as part of the binge. She told me that she was doing this frequently and hiding it from her husband. Being careful to binge to this degree when he was out of town or she could hide it. I’ll literally never forget the depth of sorrow and desperation that came from her voice as I heard her cry out, “PLEASE HELP ME.” My heart had such sadness for her as I knew that feeling inside. Yes, I knew it well. I too so many years before had wrestled the beast but won the war on binge eating.

This particular lady was in her mid-40s and became a client of mine. Hypnosis would not have been her first line of defense but in desperation and willing to try anything, she thought it was worth a go. Little did she know at the time that this would turn her life around. She came to love hypnosis and what it could do for her and went on to work with me for her long time struggle with panic attacks also with fabulous outcomes.

Bingers are loaded with guilt and shame. They’re often literally almost drowning in it. Living a life full of secrets, self-loathing and disgust. I hear it over and over again and of course I know myself how I used to feel. It was after that first lady calling early in my career that I made it my mission to specialize in binging, weight loss and anxiety. It is predominantly women that find their way to me for this issue but I certainly have worked with many men who have gotten caught in the trap of the binging cycle too.

Tapping into the subconscious, using hypnosis to re-frame the negative and release trauma is a key component of healing. We have to let go all that inner turmoil from whenever, wherever and why ever it came. We learn to cope with life free from the compulsion to fill our emotional voids with food. Stuffing our heartaches and wounds into oblivion and numbness. We learn perhaps for the first time how to have a healthy relationship with food. A relationship based on respect and joy instead of dread and obsession. We can literally re-train the mind, break the back of negative habits replacing them with healthy ones.

The subconscious mind is our friend. It wants us to be safe. It wants to protect us. Although I’m not sure that there’s any proof of this, experts believe that only about 10% of what’s going on in our minds is conscious and the other 90% subconscious. That’s VAST! The subconscious runs our breathing, blinking and just about anything you can think of is run by the subconscious. So believe that working with a skilled and experienced hypnotist, that part of the mind can be contacted and information updated. Old embedded messages and imprints can be re-framed; inner child work can occur to heal the lost one within us. So much heavy and unnecessary baggage can be released. Extraordinary changes and shifts not only can but will occur. I see it all the time in my work and it never gets old. It’s so exciting to see clients healing and finding their stride. Feeling happy again and losing weight, taking control back of their lives, sleeping better, feeling less anxious. The complete joy of a renewed confidence. So are you a binge eater? If so, get in touch.The glory of freedom from binge eating can be yours too.

There are times that people just need support and to not feel alone in their struggles. If I think it will be of help for that particular client I sometimes recommend they join a sensible program such as Weight Watchers: https://www.weightwatchers.com/us/ for the added support or even Over Eaters Anonymous: https://oa.org/. Adding tools to therapeutic Hypnosis can be a great thing as long as it doesn’t involve silly diets that create feelings of deprivation which further propel cravings, compulsions and guilt.

Get in touch. Virtual, remote sessions also available.

https://modernhypnosisworks.com/contact.

For further reading and information about the use of hypnosis for overeating and weight loss, you may learn a lot from this article from the Oprah magazine. http://www.oprah.com/health/hypnosis-for-weight-loss-can-hypnosis-help-you-lose-weight/all

To Your Success.