Emotion eating: how to help people as a hypnotherapist

Emotional eating is something that affects many people. As a hypnotherapist, one of the most well-known treatments you can offer is the hypnotic gastric band, which helps people eat less. One of the aspects you address in this process is emotional eating. In this blog, I’ll take a closer look at what emotional eating is and how you can overcome it—or how you can help others overcome it.

What is emotion eating?

If you struggle with emotional eating, you eat to cope with negative feelings . These can include feelings of anxiety, anger, frustration, and depression. If you struggle with binge eating, emotional eating can trigger a binge-eating episode[1].

That emotion eating can cause a binge eating binge may have to do with the fact that there are also people who actually get emotional from eating. So initially you try to eat away a negative feeling, but then when you have eaten you get another negative feeling from that[2].

Men and women can suffer from emotion eating, but the causes of emotion eating are different[3].

Emotional eating can cause you to become overweight. Usually, it is also overweight people who suffer more from emotion eating than people of normal weight. But even if you have a normal weight you can suffer from this.

Causes of emotion eating you can work with

Emotion eating is something that can originate in childhood. Then, for example, you may notice a connection between eating and how you feel.

There are also cultural factors, such as having a cake when you visit or something similar. In each culture, food can have a different role and that can cause you to associate food with sociability and joy.

Then you may also have personal characteristics that allow you to emotionally eat, such as through your perception of taste[4]. For example, you may really like sweets and cakes, but not like healthy vegetables and an apple at all. Then emotion eating does not help you, because then you often reach for unhealthy foods to feel a little better instead of an apple.

In women, emotions such as stress, worry, tension and anxiety cause emotion eating, while in men, confused mood often causes emotion eating (source 3).

In addition, recent studies show that not only negative emotions can lead to emotional eating, but also positive emotions[5]. As mentioned, socializing, for example, can make you think you need all kinds of snacks to make the experience even more enjoyable.

So, as a therapist and as someone who suffers from emotion eating, you can work with beliefs about food that originated in childhood. In doing so, you can also work with beliefs that are causing those negative feelings, which are often also created in childhood.

The way food is experienced can also be changed through hypnosis. For example, you can make people feel as though the time they spend eating is longer than it actually is, so they still feel as though they’ve eaten a lot. And you can offer suggestions about the taste of (healthy) food[6].

Treatments of emotion eating

Emotional eating is often treated with mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and acceptance and commitment therapy[7]. This treatment is often aimed at helping people maintain a healthy weight or lose weight, depending on the impact emotional eating has had at that time.

Interestingly, CBT can be combined with hypnosis, for example, to treat anxiety—a cause of emotional eating[8]. This combination is also used to help people who struggle with emotional eating. The main results include a reduction in binge eating, a decrease in negative thoughts, and greater body acceptance[9].

What is especially important is that the treatment of emotion eating matches the cause of the emotion eating[10]. Thus, to properly address this, it is important to identify the true cause.

In addition, mindfulness is often used, for example, to be able to accept a negative emotion without immediately doing anything about it to feel better. That mindfulness then also helps to reduce stress and this even helps to reduce belly fat (source 9).

Sometimes external cues can also make it difficult not to eat emotionally. For example, if you are not feeling well, or feeling very well, seeing cookies can trigger emotion eating. In that case, it's helpful to at least keep food in a place where you can't see it.

Hypnosis and emotion eating

Hypnotherapy is used with emotion eating to identify and treat the psychological problems that lead to emotion eating, to devise and be able to apply healthy alternatives, and to reinforce those alternative ways of coping with emotions and food[11].

Regression

Regression is a technique you can use as a hypnotherapist to help people get to the root cause of their emotion eating. With regression, clients find out when the idea arose that food is the solution to negative feelings.

In a regression, you go back to the moment when you first felt like "I'm going to have some dinner" when you had a negative or positive feeling. In fact, this is the moment when the belief that causes emotion eating was created.

Then, as a hypnotherapist, you help the person interpret this moment in a different way. This is because this moment is still stored in the memory as when that person was a child, but now he/she has adult knowledge, and reinterpreting the moment with that knowledge causes the memory to be re-stored with a kind of update. That update then causes the belief that causes emotion-eating to weaken, making you, the client, less likely to feel the need to eat when faced with certain emotions.

Dealing differently with seeing food

Seeing food can be just the straw that triggers emotion eating. So how do you help someone deal with seeing food differently? In that case, you can use visualizations about how someone acts when they see food in a certain mood.

For example, you can visualize the ritual someone is having in your mind. For example, as a client, you visualize how you always deal with food and emotions when you see food. Then you can start visualizing how you want to deal with it when you see food and don't feel good. So you can think of other behaviors that you then perform, such as taking a moment to clean up or something. Positive feelings can then be linked to that by the hypnotherapist, so that it is more appealing to your subconscious to just clean up when you don't feel well and see food than to actually grab that food.

Suggestions for installing new beliefs

If you have removed an old belief with regression, it is helpful to fill this gap with new beliefs. This can be done by repeating certain suggestions and even post-hypnotic suggestions.

For example, you can repeat the following suggestions:

"Negative emotions are okay to have."

"I can make negative emotions dissolve with different thoughts and movements."

"I am good enough the way I am."

"I am myself."

These are just examples. Depending on the beliefs that have caused emotion-eating, you can bring other suggestions that will better suit the client.

Usually, toward the end of the hypnosis session, people also receive a post-hypnotic suggestion. In it, you can paint a kind of future picture about how emotion-eating should actually be prevented less and less consciously over time and that at some point it will be automatic. So that the person is feeling good and fresh and just enjoying life.

Emotion eating is something you can do to deal with negative and positive emotions. This can become a problem if it has happened so often that it puts you overweight, putting you at risk for a variety of health problems.

The cause of emotion eating is often something from childhood, culturally determined or has to do with physical conditions such as your tastes. Hypnosis can be used to identify the cause for emotion eating, deal with emotion eating differently and reinforce new ways of dealing with food and emotions.

A variety of techniques can be used for this purpose, such as regression and hypnotic suggestions.

Want to learn more about how hypnosis works? Then come to the free online master class on hypnosis.

Would you like to help yourself and/or others with hypnosis? Then come to one of our seminars or sign up for one of our training programs to learn techniques that will help you make others feel better.