Tackling sugar addiction: It doesn't take willpower

Do you have a sugar addiction, want to quit, but can't? Maybe you've already stopped temporarily once, yet you've started again. The button has apparently not been pushed properly.

This is a response I received from a woman on a call to submit problems. I then asked her what stopped her from just quitting again, since she had succeeded before anyway.

But yes, it snuck back in.

Filters and your sugar addiction

I find that interesting because it makes me think about filters. You get an awful lot of information to process every day. You get 11.2 million bits of information (1 letter is 5 bits) per second.

But you can't process that so you filter. That's what your subconscious does with your senses. What you see, hear, feel, smell or taste.

You know yourself that you don't see or hear everything. Bats hear more than we do, a dog smells better, a snake sees very different things (even heat). So as humans we are very limited and when you are born you can still hear up to 20,000 Herz, but after that it only gets worse.

That's 1 of your filters. In fact, we have dozens of them. This is what I call metaprograms. In fact, the way you think is also a filter.

I take out 1 filter because that's where the solution lies.

After all, people either want to get somewhere, or they want to get rid of something.

• 70% (over ^2/3rds) of people want to get rid of something, that's how they generally think. These want to get away from pain.
• 30% (just under ^1/3rd) of people want to go somewhere, that's how they generally think. Those want to move toward pleasure.

If you know how you think, you can change it. The woman I helped said she had stopped because she was fed up with it. She even experienced physical pain and stiffness, and had a heart spasm—and then she was able to stop and reset her system through fasting and juicing.

Of course, you can never keep that up for long. Willpower runs out because you draw it from a kind of mental reserve of energy. I think the same way—I also try to escape the pain—but once the pain is gone, I only have enough willpower left to stop, and that’s often not enough[1].

Indeed, the incentive that initially gave the energy to quit is gone.

So she tried some things again and a candy here and there and before you know it she's in her old pattern.

I once had another one of those clients who wanted to lose weight and had succeeded, but a year later was there again. Namely, he could no longer button his favorite pants.

And every time he came back after a year.

So the strategy was to get away from the pain. After one session some things worked, but at some point the pain was gone and things went wrong again.

Tackling sugar addiction without willpower by using your filter

By changing your filter, your way of thinking, you actually ensure that you can pick up a healthy lifestyle without willpower.

Instead of the filter, away from pain, as a hypnotherapist you then install in people the filter: toward pleasure. Or you have to make the pain different.

As a therapist, you may hear "I don't want this, I don't want that, I get pain everywhere etc. etc."

Then, as a therapist, you ask, "Where do you want to go?"

That often leaves them blank. Not everyone knows that.

But the realization comes then, that otherwise they will remain stuck in that circle of being fine, and then slipping again until there is enough pain again to quit the sugar addiction. The so-called yoyo effect.

That's how I think too, but because of that, I know I need to change. That's why I changed my goals.

I changed it so that if I'm not working on my goal, it hurts. I also added that when I am working on my goals I move toward pleasure. However, that does diminish because that means I have the pain filter instead of the goal filter.

For example, I go to basic-fit at 5:15 in the morning, but I don't do it for fun. I do it because if I don't, it's painful. Now I don't go every day, but when I don't go it feels like a miss. I can do this for a few days, but I can't not come for 1 week. I can't, because it doesn't feel right.

I’m drawn to fun. But don’t get the wrong idea about fun. Short-lived fun is great. I felt great after a training session! But I don’t feel that way every time I train. Sometimes things don’t go as planned, and sometimes you feel weak and it’s tough. So that doesn’t help in terms of short-lived fun.

But I do it because I have a goal . I have something very important on my mind. By the time I’m 80, I want to be able to deadlift 200 kilos. That’s my goal. I can’t even do it yet, but I’m 48, so I still have 32 years. So I’ll be able to do it then.

The idea of age breakdown is not in my head. No, in my head is that with 32 years of training , I am going to reach this goal.

This means much more. Even if I don't succeed, suppose it only gets to 150 pounds? Then I will still be strong and fit. If I fall then I still get up.

So the goal has many implications. Muscle strength, for example, is important. One of the factors that’s important for survival when you have cancer is having muscle mass. That makes it easier to tolerate chemotherapy. That doesn’t mean you’ll survive, but it improves your chances.

I also quit smoking by using this strategy.

So if you're thinking "I need to get away from pain". So then you have to link the thingy that is sugar with something painful. You get the idea that every time you take a bite of a cookie, it causes a cramp or other pain.

A hypnotherapist can also help with this. That’s because you’re creating the nocebo effect—the opposite of the placebo effect. This often occurs with medications, but you can use it to your advantage.

So a therapist might tell you that every time you take a bite of something, you’ll feel a kind of pain. That’s how I quit smoking, too. Every time I took a drag, I felt tightness in my chest. It got worse and worse, and that’s when I quit smoking. When I think about it now, I still feel it. So I haven’t smoked for over 15 years now. Essentially, you’re reframing your addictive behavior, and that helps you break free from addictions[2].

So can stopping snacking. It has purely to do with how your mind works; it doesn't have to be real.

The best part is that it doesn't require any willpower, because the pain just makes you not want it anymore.

We did the same with this woman. It's a good starting point. It looks real, but it's not. It's purely for the idea of being done with it.

So you start fast like a hare, but for the long haul, you also need a goal. Something you can do as a tortoise.

So what do you want? Make that SMART (specific, measurable, autonomous, realistic and time-bound). So when I'm 80, I can deadlift 200 pounds. Found that to be a realistic goal.

I did this purely for my brain. You can also say "If I'm 75 and I'm playing with lego with my grandchildren, I can get up without help.". In fact, many 70-plus people can't get up without help, and especially as you get older, it becomes increasingly difficult. The ultimate big goal is that you can.

So, in your mind, you have to really emphasize that eating sugar will prevent you from achieving those goals.

You understand that your brain can still say `yes, but we all die'then, so you have to flip that switch to kind of realistic pain.

So you need to make a very important big goal, so that you also have the button turned right in the long run. This big goal is to link pleasure and then therefore pain to sugar.

Keep in mind, however, that emotions like guilt or shame don’t help[3]. They often just lead you to eat even more sugar.

It must be painful in the sense that you physically feel something. This does not have to be real, with hypnosis you can manage this mentally. It has to be something that scares you.

On the contrary, if you have a style of thinking toward pleasure, then you just have to make the image you want to go to totally awesome.

Helping people with hypnosis

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