Overcoming bulimia with hypnosis + tips

Bulimia is a disease that is easy to keep hidden, which is precisely why it is so dangerous. The binge eating you can get from bulimia is dangerous to your stomach because you can put too much food in it. Again, throwing up that much food is not good for your teeth, nor is it good for your stomach and esophagus.

To overcome bulimia, in this article I will discuss what bulimia is now, what causes it may have and provide tips for treatment.

Bulimia nervosa

Bulimia is an eating disorder characterized by binge eating. After binge eating, many people with bulimia induce vomiting to stay thin despite the binge eating. In some cases, they also use laxatives or engage in excessive exercise.

Vomiting can cause you to develop thicker skin on the knuckles of the fingers, as you use them to vomit after which the skin is damaged by stomach acid. Also, this stomach acid damages the teeth, causing them to wear down faster. This is not a pretty sight.

Bulimia is also often associated with other disorders, such as depression or anxiety. Alcohol and drug use are also common among people with bulimia. In addition, there is a higher risk of suicidal thoughts.

Bulimia causes

Bulimia is more common among people who have someone in their immediate circle who also suffers from this disorder. Genetic factors can influence the development of this disorder. Parents can also have an impact if they worry about their own or your weight.

Other causes are more psychological in nature, such as psychological stress, cultural pressure to conform to a certain body type, low self-confidence, and being overweight.

Bulimia Features

There are a number of symptoms for bulimia that are typical. In bulimia, you suffer from rapid binge eating that stops only when you are disturbed by another person or when your stomach hurts because of stretching of the stomach wall. So this is followed by either vomiting and laxation to keep the food from actually being absorbed into your body.

In serious cases, this can occur daily. There are also people with bulimia who do this "only" a few times a week.

Other features include:

• Chronic reflux after eating a normal meal.
• Dehydration from excessive vomiting.
• Cardiac arrhythmias due to electrolyte deficiency. (This can even be fatal)
• Inflamed esophagus
• Hemorrhage at the connection of the esophagus to the stomach (seen with endoscopy)
• Cuts in the mouth due to vomiting.
• Tooth decay.
• Thicker skin on the knuckles.
• Swollen salivary glands.
• Acid Burn.
• The stomach takes a long time to pass food through to the intestines.
• Constipation.
• Stomach ulcer.
• Infertility.
• Constantly fluctuating weight.

Not all characteristics can be seen from the outside, and so some only emerge after medical examination. Therefore, it is sometimes difficult for the layperson to determine if you suffer from bulimia. But I think if you start vomiting after eating food you should seek help anyway.

That's why I've come up with a short test for you.

Bulimia test

There are also other things you can tell for yourself that you suffer from an eating disorder. Check with yourself if you suffer from these characteristics:

• You control the number of calories you eat.
• You are extremely aware of your weight.
• You feel insecure.
• You have low blood pressure (you can measure this at home with a blood pressure monitor).
• Irregular menstrual cycle.
• You constantly have to go to the bathroom.
• You’re experiencing feelings of depression.
• You regularly eat abnormal amounts of food.
• You have a belief that isn’t shared by others.
• You are no longer concerned with anything but nutrition.

Bulimia tips

There are a number of things you can do if you suffer from bulimia to reduce it.

Tip 1: Establish a good diet

Scientific research in 2016 showed that people who suffer from bulimia benefit from a good dinner and a set eating pattern. This makes you suffer less from binge eating and, as a result, you also vomit and laxate less.

Tip 2: Relax

Stress can be a trigger for bulimia. To reduce stress, it’s important to relax regularly. This can be achieved through meditation and self-hypnosis, among other methods. The key to meditation is focusing on your breathing for a few minutes, which helps you completely unwind. Research shows that just 10 minutes of meditation a day can help reduce your stress.

In this relaxed state, you can also perform self-hypnosis exercises given to you by your hypnotherapist to further deepen the relaxation.

Tip 3: Recognize your triggers

Often, certain moments or cues are needed before you have a binge. Perhaps for you, this is at 4 o’clock sharp, or after you’ve experienced a certain emotion. By keeping a journal about your binges and what preceded them, you can identify your triggers. Then you can figure out how to deal with them differently. For example, if it’s a specific time of day, you could choose to read a few pages from a good book instead.

Are you struggling to determine and stick with new behaviors or recognize your triggers? If so, a hypnotherapist can help you with this.

Bulimia treatment

It is very difficult to get rid of bulimia on your own, so it is not at all crazy to mention to your doctor that you have a problem.

Bulimia is usually treated with psychotherapy. Treatments that are effective in adults consist mainly of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT works in 30% to 50% of participants with bulimia to stop the disease.

CBT is known to work better if the therapy takes place while the patient is under hypnosis.

So the percentages can be higher then.

Beliefs and patterns under the microscope

During this type of therapy, your beliefs and thought patterns regarding your body and nutrition are examined. Next, the validity of those beliefs is assessed. If they are not accurate, the root cause of the belief can be examined, and in this way, you can be helped to develop a new belief that is accurate and helps reduce binge eating.

For example, a belief might be: “Eating carbohydrates makes me fat.” Of course, there’s no truth to this. Eating a small amount of carbohydrates isn’t harmful, and there are also different types of carbohydrates that have different effects on your body, so this statement isn’t accurate. The therapist can help you identify the root cause of that belief through techniques such as regression.

During such a session, you might discover that belief was planted there, for example, by a classmate who once said something like that. Seriously, the strangest causes can come to light during regression. In another article , I describe the cause of someone’s inability to lose weight, which could be traced back to something very illogical that had happened during her childhood.

Other thought patterns may include "I feel fat, therefore I am fat." Again, in many cases, none of this is true. If your BMI is between 20 and 25 you are normal and up to 30 you are even slightly overweight. Only at a BMI higher than 30 is there obesity or very overweight. Moreover, even BMI is not always a good tool to check if you are "overweight," because muscle is heavier than fat you can be mistaken as "fat" according to BMI when in fact you are just very muscular.

A hypnotherapist can help you break down and revise beliefs and thought processes that lead to binge eating and vomiting.

Seeing bulimia as another

Another technique to stop bulimia is to see bulimia as something that is not your own. Part of you does bulimia, but another part does not. You can get those two parts to argue with each other, under the guidance of a therapist. The therapist makes sure you can engage in discussion with the bulimia part of you and not suffer from feeling split. In an experiment in which bulimia patients participated, it was found that this technique combined with self-hypnosis made them suffer much less from binge eating followed by vomiting.

Empowering Ego

Bulimia can stem from feelings of insecurity. A therapist may therefore ask you to describe your feelings before, during, and after eating to see if, in your case, these are the cause of your binge eating. In a case study involving a 17-year-old girl, it emerged that during a particular binge-eating episode, her entire handwriting had changed. Upon further inquiry, the hypnotherapist discovered that her bulimia was caused by feelings of failure and disappointment in herself. During the hypnosis session, the therapist talked with her to identify those emotions and uncover the underlying beliefs, and to give her the tools to cope with them more effectively. This allowed her to find an alternative to “eating” as a way to process moments of self-failure in a better and healthier way.

Would you like to learn more about what hypnosis can do for you? Be sure to check out the seminars and training programs offered by the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands.

Sources:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1471015315300234

http://www.londonhypnotherapyuk.com/publications/Gestalt-Therapy-Paper.pdf