Snacking is delicious and nice, but in the long run it is unfortunately unhealthy. Stopping snacking is therefore quite useful. When you snack too much, it can have all kinds of adverse effects on your health. You get overweight, type II diabetes and perhaps high blood pressure[1]. All not convenient.
So if you want to stop snacking, that's a pretty good idea, but where do you start
Replacing old habit for new habit
Quitting something is much harder than replacing something for something. Instead of unhealthy snacking, for example, you can snack on healthy snacks. Like snack carrots, snack peppers, apples or cucumber.
By replacing a habit, you may still have that "snacking feeling," but because you've replaced the candy with something healthy, it doesn't bother you as much as the sugary snacks you might otherwise eat.
Thirty-day challenge
Another way to challenge yourself to stop snacking is to challenge yourself to not snack for Thirty Days and then reward yourself, but with something other than candy.
In fact, it takes about 28 days to learn a new habit. So this 30-day challenge - combined with replacing the candy for healthy snacks - can help you stop snacking.
Hide the candy
Often the sight of candy is a trigger to start snacking. Therefore, it's best to put candy in opaque boxes so you don't see them when you pull open a kitchen cabinet one day.
This keeps you from being triggered to snack.
Put off snacking
A fun hypnotic trick is to change the way you deal with stopping snacking. For example, you can tell yourself to put off snacking, such as until your cheat day.
Saying this to yourself, procrastinate instead of quit, can make it much easier to resist sweets.
Read up on candy
What is actually in the candy you eat and what does it do to your body? By delving into the substances mentioned on the candy label, you will make yourself aware of all the junk that is in candy.
If you are what you eat, you don't want to be a licorice eater, do you? For example, you'll find out that sugar is not only bad for your blood sugar, but also for your blood vessels, which can cause plaque to form.
This in turn can cause blockages in blood vessels, which in turn lead to such things as thrombosis or heart attacks.
If you know that candy does this kind of thing to your body, you won't feel like snacking from the candy jar at all.
Reducing the cause of snacking
Snacking may also have become something you reward yourself with because of parenting methods. There are multiple ways parents have influenced the development of certain snacking habits.
For example, research on parents and giving candy to their children shows that it is often done to:
- Reward good behavior.
- Motivate children to do something.
- Making children feel special.
- Distract children (so they can be quiet for a while while shopping, for example).
- Keeping children quiet at night (late night snack)
- Feed extra food to prevent hunger.
- Finally being able to relax (during a busy day)
- Preventing guilt toward the child.
- Express their love to their child (or grandchild as grandparents give candy).
- Prevent the child from getting less than friends.
- Candy is cheaper than fruit[2].
So there are all kinds of motives for parents to give their children candy. Early on in your childhood, this can cause snacking to become a habit. It can even cause you to start snacking only in your adult life because, for example, your parents did it with you after a busy day at work. Which can cause snacking after work to become a habit.
Now you've seen quite a list, but sometimes you can't immediately find a cause, and if you found one, that's great, but then what?
With regression, you can find out what beliefs cause you to snack at certain times and how this ever came about. You are then first put into hypnosis and then suggested to go to the first moment when snacking in the way you do now became a thing.
Next, a moment in your life will reveal itself to you. In your mind, you see that moment before you, so to speak. Then, with the help of the hypnotherapist, you can change that moment in your mind. This reduces the impact of that moment and can quickly weaken the belief that causes you to snack. This can also quickly reduce the craving for snacking.
Image of what you don't want replaced for what you want
If you don't feel like going into such depth on snacking, we also have another technique you can use to stop snacking quickly.
With the swish technique, you can quickly change a habit, such as snacking. You do this by replacing the image of what you don't want with the image you do want.
So a woman in training wanted to stop snacking. The image of the hand in the candy jar needed to be replaced. She didn't want that anymore.
So then you have to see yourself in that image with the very behavior you want to exhibit. So you visualize yourself in the image and you exhibit the behavior you would like to do.
The participant then wanted that hand to go to the mop or broom, but at least not to that pot. So we swished that in, so to speak.
This means super fast alternating these two images and making sure you get lots of good feelings with the image you like. You pair good feelings with the desired image, so to speak, so that your brain automatically chooses it.
Because when you have a choice, you choose the best choice.
If you really enjoy it very much, you often choose to do so.
This is also the trick and the quick change creates a kind of confusion, making it a logical choice to choose the image with good feelings.
Only problem is that when you are an unconscious snacker, you don't always know how often you do it. So the next day she came back to training, and by then she had mopped her kitchen five times. Which of course is nice and clean, but that behavior is awkward.
This does get you to change that new behavior quickly, but the snacking stops.
I have performed this swish technique more often to change an old strategy, such as with fears or compulsions. Then it involves specific situations, such as:
- Eating through boredom.
- Nail Biting.
- Snooze while reading.
So then when you're bored, you want to do something other than snooze, like take a walk.
Instead of nail biting go paint your nails.
Instead of snacking while reading, drink tea.
This swish technique has been around for forty years and is still super effective for quickly changing a habit.
Also listen to this podcast:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/195236/1620019-hoe-je-minder-kan-snoepen-of-iets-anders?play=true
Aversion therapy with hypnosis
A case study of an obese woman who wanted to eat less soda and candy showed that hypnosis and self-hypnosis can be very helpful in stopping them. In her therapy, she received a type of aversion therapy. This means that you are then given suggestions that cause you to get even aversion to sweets.
Usually you will get post-hypnotic suggestions that you get super nauseous when you eat candy. You then also get reinforcement of the belief that candy is unhealthy for you. Because hypnosis affects your subconscious, your body will react differently to candy after the hypnosis session.
In addition, this hypnosis session also used visualizations of what her body would look like if she indeed ate less candy.
In this case study, the woman also reported that she ate less "sickly sweet sugary sweets" after hypnosis[3].
Stop snacking
Quitting snacking can be done in many ways. When it is difficult to change a habit, hypnosis can help in several ways. For example, through aversion therapy, the swish technique and through regression therapy.
Want to learn more about how hypnosis works? Then come to the free online master class on hypnosis.
Want to learn the techniques right away to help yourself or others manage healthy nutrition? Then enroll in one of the training courses of the Hypnosis Institute Netherlands. The trainings are given online from a professional studio and whenever possible in a classroom setting.
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0234355
[2] https://research.bangor.ac.uk/portal/files/16878544/QHR_FINAL.pdf
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mark_Leahy/publication/308803479_Case_Study_Weight_Loss_for_a_Female_with_Numerous_Comorbid_Conditions/links/57f3884d08ae886b897d952a/Case-Study-Weight-Loss-for-a-Female-with-Numerous-Comorbid-Conditions.pdf
