Ep 78- Does Hypnosis Work For Binge Eating?

August 07, 2025

Could hypnosis be the answer to stop food addiction, reduce sugar cravings, and finally feel normal around food?

In this episode, I break down the science behind hypnosis, bust common myths, and explain why it works so well for when you “know what to do, but don’t do it” moments around food.

You’ll learn:

• What hypnosis actually is (and how it’s different from meditation)

• How hypnosis rewires the unconscious beliefs that fuel binge eating

• Research-backed stats on hypnosis for food cravings and weight loss

• A simple self-hypnosis practice you can try today

TRANSCRIPT:

 Hello, confident eaters. We are talking about how hypnosis can help you stop binge eating today. So if you listened to last week's episode, I talked a little bit about this practical neuroscience training I went to, as well as a hypnosis conference, and this was the second year I have been to the hypnosis conference.

And every single year I start to learn more and more about hypnosis. The more and more I start to include it in my coaching practice. So hypnosis is not all that I do. I also use a lot of aspects of cognitive behavioral therapy when I'm working with people. But it is such a hot topic and something that's so many people are curious about.

If you have tried other approaches before  going to a therapist, a dietician, any of these other coaches. You might have made a little progress, but are still stuck in wondering what is another solution for this. And hypnosis is usually a last resort situation people go to when people are using hypnosis for smoking and sleep and everything else that you can use hypnosis for. It's usually not the first resort and I understand that, but, so let's talk a little bit today about what hypnosis is, some common misconceptions around it and how you can use it specifically to help you eat healthier, overcome food addiction, and become the normal, natural, confident eater that you want to be

so what is hypnosis? All hypnosis is, is just relaxing your conscious mind enough in order to access deeper layers of your unconscious brain. It's similar to doing something like a guided meditation where sometimes your eyes are closed, your focusing in, but hypnosis is more direct and targeted to your specific goals than just a meditation.

 Meditation is more of this open focus mindfulness, practicing seeing your thoughts from a distance and a little bit more removed. Whereas hypnosis is a very focused state of attention where unconscious mind is more open to suggestion. You are not asleep or unconscious. Yes, we are addressing your unconscious brain, but you are still awake, aware and able to recall everything.

And how it works is we are addressing the unconscious parts of our mind where habits, belief, emotions, and automatic responses live. It can be done conversationally. So if you are my client, you might not realize that we are actually doing hypnosis. A lot of times it  conversational hypnosis, where through intentional language patterns, we can change your brain and access your unconscious as well. It doesn't always have to happen when you're laying down eyes closed.

Some real life examples of when you are in this trance hypnosis like state is  when you are watching a movie. So this is also something that's probably already happening in your life  that you're not even realizing.

So when you're getting emotionally invested in the movie and you feel scared when something pops out, or really sad when a character dies, you know that the movie is not real  We know that someone did not just die, but we feel like someone did in our body because our logical mind has turned off and said, okay, let me just pretend I'm in this movie.

Let's just imagine that this is real. Because if the whole time we are telling ourself throughout a movie, oh, this is just all fake, this is all made up as our conscious mind would do, it wouldn't be very enjoyable. So we consciously turn off our conscious mind in order to watch a movie.

There's a concept called highway hypnosis. Highway hypnosis is when you drive a long stretch of road or a route that you drive repeatedly and you suddenly don't realize you're driving. You get to where you wanna go, your final destination, and you're like I don't even remember the last 30 minutes. I was just so on autopilot. This can happen on the long stretches of the road because there's like these repetitive white lines that you're saying over and over and over again, and that can act as a way of putting you in a trance. Or when you're driving the same route over and over again, your conscious mind's like, I already know how to do this. You take over unconscious. You got this down. Let me go think about my grocery list or what I'm doing tomorrow, or that call I had with my boss today.

So those are just some examples of where you're already getting hypnotized in your day-to-day life. So a few common  misconceptions about hypnosis. The first is people think it's mind control, that you see these crazy people going on stage eating an onion like it's an apple clucking like a chicken. They must be out of control, and that is not true. You can not be made to do anything against your morals or wills.

So if you are doing something. Hypnosis, there's a part of you that is okay with doing it. If there was something that was immoral to you, like cheating on your partner. No amount of hypnosis could make you do that unless you actually wanted to do it deep down. So you're still in full control during the session and you can choose to accept or reject any suggestions.

So if I were to give you a suggestion of you no longer desire eating large amounts of sugar, because you can tell how horrible it feels in your body. If you don't wanna believe that, your brain won't believe it. But we do do some things in order to help you believe the things that are going to be helpful that you know deep down you would like to believe.

Second misconception is that only weak-minded or gullible people can be easily hypnotized, but the truth is hypnosis is actually easier for people who have a strong focus, imagination and a motivation to change.

Next, it won't work on me. Studies show that 70 to 90% of people are responsive to hypnosis, and even people with lower suggestibility still benefit when it's done and especially when it's combined with coaching or therapy. And we'll talk about a really interesting study about a hypnosis and weight loss and when it's been partnered with cognitive behavioral therapy.

And the final myth that I will talk about today, if you guys have any other misconceptions or like ideas about what hypnosis is that you're curious about. Feel free to send me a message on Instagram and I'd love to chat with you about it. But the final one that people think is like, it's a one and done fix. I do one hypnosis session and I'm fixed. While a lot of people will experience breakthroughs quickly and a lot of shifts while they're in this state. Lasting responses only come from repetition and integration, especially when we're rewiring these deep emotional responses around food. It can take some time.

And it also depends on the type of hypnosis you're doing. Meaning if you are doing just a general recording that you can buy on the internet, which feel free to try those out, maybe they'll help. But there are two general, oftentimes for your unique history with food. So the more specific you can get, and  I'll give you some suggestions at the end of today with ways you can do this for yourself.

But it is going to be the most effective when you work with someone through this simply because it's hard to do a deep hypnosis to change our unconscious beliefs on ourself because we believe all of our unconscious beliefs, we don't really realize we have them and we're just operating from them. So if someone were to do a hypnosis for me, it would be a lot more effective than if I did it on myself, even though I know about this stuff just because I live in my own brain every day.

So why does hypnosis work? What is the science behind it? It isn't estimated that 95 to 97% of our brain activity is unconscious, meaning it occurs without conscious awareness. So things like our breathing, digestion, habits, emotions, storage of long-term memory, this all happens unconsciously. So our conscious mind in contrast is estimated to only handle about three to 5% of our mental processing.

So if you are someone who has ever said to yourself, I know what to do, but I'm not doing it. This is why. Because when you know what to do, when you have like a random tip that you found on Instagram, it's going into your conscious mind. Unless it is something that is so mind blowing, so belief shattering that it gets into your unconscious, it usually doesn't work that well.

It might work for a couple days, but there's still these unconscious beliefs that are going on in the background. I. Our brain has associations to everything in life. So our brain has often formed some sort of positive connection to binge eating, thinking it's pleasurable, it's beneficial, it's fun in some way, otherwise we wouldn't keep having it and doing it.

Every single thing we do each and every day is tied to our brain's understanding that it is giving us a survival benefit in some way. Every single thing we do, we would not do anything if it had no perceived survival benefit. So yes, while binge eating can start to be a habit and we don't need to go that deep into it often, it is good to see of where might my brain be believing that this is something that is helpful and useful to me because that will give us some understanding on why you're still doing it.  So I promise you that binge eating is not just a willpower problem. It's not I just need to try harder, learn a new tip, make myself more motivated. It is a programming problem that is going on in our unconscious mind. And over time, these patterns, these beliefs, these thoughts, they become automatic, almost like muscle memory.

You also might be holding onto some unconscious beliefs around food. Like I can't be trusted with food. Once I start, I won't stop. Food is my only comfort. And these beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies. When we believe we can't control ourself around food, then we sit down and we eat. Guess what?

We're such someone who's out of control. So we just keep eating. So hypnosis helps us rewrite these beliefs. And get to the deeper layers of why we might be holding onto them. So through hypnosis, we can change those associations. At the root level, we can create new beliefs and emotional responses to food cravings and stress, and we can reinforce positive identity shifts like I'm someone who listens to my body, or I can trust myself around food. I'm starting to be the type of person who just eats normally.

All right. Let's look at some fun statistics. Here I am all about the statistics and what the research shows. So a meta-analysis in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology from 1995 found that adding hypnosis to cognitive behavioral therapy more than doubled weight loss outcomes.

Okay, so when people did cognitive behavioral therapy on its own, which is what most people are doing to stop binge eating, they lost a certain amount of weight, but then they added in hypnosis on top of that, and they doubled their weight loss more than that. That is how powerful it can be, and this is the approach that I take in my coaching.

I use a lot of aspects of cognitive behavioral therapy because it is so life changing, and that was one of the first things that helped me stop binge eating was understanding that just because I had a thought doesn't mean it's true. Just because my brain told me I need to eat a lot of food, it does not mean I need to actually eat a lot of food.

Just because my brain told me that binge eating was gonna be pleasurable and delicious and the food was gonna be so amazing, doesn't mean that was actually my experience. And oftentimes when I was binge eating, the food would actually taste horrible because I was eating it so quickly and I was filled with so much guilt that I didn't even notice it. And I was just so ashamed the whole time I was doing it.

All right next. There was a study in 2010 that was published in Contemporary Hypnosis by Elkins, and participants who underwent hypnosis, reported a significant reduction in sugar cravings, and proved their ability to delay gratification. Along with this functional brain imaging. So F MRIs have shown that hypnosis reduces activity in craving related areas of the brain, making our urges feel less intense and more manageable.

So hypnosis literally changes the activity in brain regions involved in self-awareness, decision making, and emotional regulation. And this is just the tip of the research. I could go so much more into it. There's also a lot of research around people using hypnosis to stop smoking, which is another deeply ingrained habit for so many people  Smoking is a lot more similar to binge eating than we might think, because a lot of times people think one more time won't hurt, it's just one more cigarette. They can't conceptualize the long-term impacts of it, but when they start to realize you are literally poisoning your body. You are consuming smoke that is degrading your body with every inhale, then at they start to wake up to it a bit more.

And it's the same thing with food where we don't always realize, hey, these habits could create diabetes where we couldn't walk anymore. Where we would be in the hospital for weeks on end for issues where we would die 30 years sooner because of our binge eating. We don't often recognize that in the moment that we're doing it because it's a long-term effect.

So if you're interested in more hypnosis studies, it's also really interesting to look at the smoking ones. To give you an example of what this might look like in a session with me, I'll give you an example of a client who this is just one strategy of many that I might use. But we were talking about how to sit with her urges more so the strong craving she was getting right before she went into eating.

We went into her body into a deep trance to understand, okay, what does this urge feel like to me? And she said, oh, it's feeling like this really big red balloon that's inflated and it feel like it could pop at any second. That was how her brain was coding it.

Our unconscious brain thinks a lot in shapes and pictures and metaphors in imagery. So to her, when we got to the root of it, it's like, oh, my brain is processing that. This is an ever inflating balloon that's gonna pop at every second. I'm gonna be in the cabinets and eating. So what we did in that moment is I asked her, you know, what would feel a little bit better? How could we change this balloon? She said, oh, we could let out the air. So we imagined letting out the air of the balloon. We imagined it shrinking, deflating getting smaller, and then when she imagined the food, again, she didn't feel an urge. She went throughout that week, she imagined the balloon deflating, getting smaller, disappearing, and every time she had that visual image that we did with her through hypnosis, she was able to get through her urge effortlessly and easily, meaning she wasn't overly full, she wasn't adding additional food to her body that she didn't need that week. She left her meals energized and satisfied. So that's just one fun example of how it might look like conceptually.

So some tips for you if you're wanting to get started with hypnosis. The first thing is, if you haven't already, please go to the show notes and get my guided audio to stop a binge. This is where I walk you through a visualization. That is essentially hypnosis. I don't call it hypnosis. I'm not always saying what I'm doing is hypnosis, because sometimes people's conscious mind gets on board then, and it's like, wait a second, she's doing something here. So a lot of times I'm doing hypnosis with you, even if you don't know, and it's already working.

So when you're listening to that audio, we're taking you through a deep visualization that can help rewire your brain and help you understand the long-term impacts of binge eating. But here's a simple method that you can try at home. I want you to sit somewhere quiet. In closing your eyes counting slowly back from 10. So you can start with 10. Imagining the number 10, fade away, going to nine. Imagining the number nine, fade away. I'm not gonna walk you through the whole process right here, right now, but keep on going down until you get to one. And then I want you to imagine a safe, calm space in your mind somewhere really, you feel really happy.

Maybe a beach, a lake, a calm corner in your house, and once you get to the space, you can say a few positive suggestions, either out loud or silently. Of things you want to remember, some sort of affirmation. Now, in order for affirmations to work, they have to be believable. This is a huge mistake I see with people and something I call them out on all the time is if you're just saying a positive affirmation, just 'cause you found it somewhere on the internet, but you don't believe it, it actually can have a negative effect where it doesn't work and it makes you feel guilty and bad and ashamed because it's not working. And you're having the other belief instead.

So a positive suggestion might be like, I can have food anytime again later. I don't need to eat it all right now. Every day I'm learning and growing and getting closer to being a confident eater. It's possible for me to listen to my hunger and fullness signals. I have done it at some point before. And then breathing deeply, and then you can count back up to reawaken yourself. So 1, 2, 3, all the way back up to 10.

So even doing something like this, exercise, five minutes a day, three minutes a day, one minute a day even can start to begin to rewire your brain's automatic responses because as I mentioned in last week's podcast episode. When you're in this deep trance state in hypnosis, your brain is literally more neuroplastic, meaning it changes easier, it has better ability to rewire itself when we're in a hypnotic state.

You can even record this as a audio for yourself. You can do your own voice reading your suggestions that might resonate with you.

And the final question I want you to ask yourself is what part of me might be afraid to change and why? This is like the golden question of starting to see what part of me wants to stay the same. Because that part of you is the part that's holding you back.

Finally, if you're wanting deeper support with this, if you want a customized session, which are always the most powerful things, this is what I do inside of my Confident Eater program. It is a six month program where we meet together every single week for a session. You also get unlimited text and voice message support. You get access to my full course, which includes a daily eating hypnosis audio. And this will give you that personalized support that you're missing. It will help you address that 95% of your brain that is unconscious that you are not addressing right now.

And that is why my results are so freaking powerful and people change so well in my program. So if you are interested, book a consultation, go find out more about me on my website. Take that leap. Because I promise you, life on the side of food freedom is so much more fun.

Okay? Have a good week everyone. Talk to you next week.