Get Back to Where You Once Belonged!

Hypnosis Puts You in Control

You were not born with poor eating habits. You learned them.

Watch a baby who has had enough. The face screws up. The mouth clamps shut. The head goes one way and then the other way, and the spoon can sit there all afternoon for all this baby cares. No excuses offered. No waiting for a polite moment.

That was you once. And the equipment that did it is still installed.

Four Ways It Got Talked Over

Emotional eating. The comfort food on a rough evening. Notice what is waiting at the bottom of the bowl: the ice cream is gone and the evening that sent you there is sitting exactly where you left it.

Social eating. The hostess has been cooking since noon. Everybody else is going back for seconds. Somebody is holding a plate out to you saying just one more slice, and turning down a person is far harder than turning down cake.

Guilt eating. Clearing the plate because clearing the plate is what you do. Because good food should not be thrown out. Because somebody said, years ago, that there was no dessert until that plate was clean, so the prize for overeating turned out to be more food.

Unconscious eating. The handful of something in front of the television, gone before you noticed reaching for it. Count the food commercials next time you watch. Television is one of the most hypnotic devices ever built, and nobody spends that kind of money on those ads for the fun of it.

Read back over those four. Hunger does not appear in any of them.

So You Have Already Been Hypnotized

Nobody sat you down and did it on purpose. It happened anyway, a few thousand times, in kitchens and at other people’s tables. A suggestion at the right moment, an emotional state, enough repetition, and a behavior that now runs without ever being asked to.

Every one of those habits was learned. And anything learned can be learned differently, which is the entire business of hypnosis.

Why Willpower Wore You Out

Willpower works on the arguing part of you, and the arguing part never runs out of material. You can win the argument about the cookie at four in the afternoon and lose the identical argument at nine at night, because you have to keep turning up to it.

Hypnosis goes underneath the argument, to the level where the habit is actually kept. When the reach for the bowl is no longer automatic, there is nothing to resist, because nothing turned up to be resisted. That is the layer the work is aimed at.

Add Up Last Year

Think about all the food you ate in the past twelve months that you did not enjoy. Not the birthday cake. Not the Friday pizza you had been looking forward to since Wednesday. The other food: the pleasureless handfuls, the finished plates, the polite seconds, the bowl in front of the television.

Picture how trim you would look today if none of that food had happened.

Now picture next year, if this changes this week.

The Treats Stay

Nothing in this asks you to hand in the food you love. What changes is who is doing the choosing. When you indulge, you will have decided to, and you can enjoy the whole of it without the guilt that used to ride along beside it.

Take out the eating that was giving you nothing, and the food you actually wanted is what is left.

You Knew This Before You Could Speak

You had this skill before you had language, before anybody taught you a single thing about food. It has not been deleted. It has been shouted over by a few decades of habit, and it is still down there, on your side, waiting to be asked.

That goal you have privately filed under impossible is a habit. Habits are learnable in both directions, and that is the only reason any of this works.

Where you once belonged is not somewhere you have to fight your way back to. You lived there first.

District Hypnosis works with everyday habits, motivation and personal goals in Washington DC. 202-853-8400.

District Hypnosis provides hypnosis for everyday stress, habits, motivation and personal goals, and does not diagnose, treat, cure or manage any medical or psychological condition. Hypnosis as offered here is not medical care, is not psychological care, and is not a substitute for either. Nothing on this page is nutrition advice, and decisions about what you eat rest with you and a licensed dietitian if you have one. Work involving a diagnosed or suspected medical or psychological condition requires a written referral from a licensed provider. Individual results vary. Nothing on this site is medical or psychological advice.