Ep 83- The Hidden Reasons Behind Why You Binge with Hypnotist Adam Cox

September 11, 2025

Today I’m joined by Adam Cox who is a leading hypnotherapist, international speaker, and the creator of The Hypnotist podcast — one of the world’s most popular hypnosis podcasts with over 12 million downloads. Known for blending therapeutic expertise with compelling storytelling, Adam helps global audiences harness the power of the subconscious to transform habits, beliefs, and emotions.

We discuss how to use hypnosis to stop overeating plus…

• How hypnosis transformed Adam from socially anxious to confident

• What hypnosis is and isn’t

• The common themes he’s seen after helping 100’s of people with food & weight loss

• The hidden payoffs of binge eating (like comfort, protection, or even drama) that keep you stuck

Transcript:

 Amber: Hello, confident eaters. Welcome back to another episode.Today we have a special guest, Adam Cox on today to talk about hypnosis. Hypnosis is something that I include in my coaching practice. As you know, if you go back a couple of episodes, I have a whole. Deep dive on it, but I'm really excited for Adam to share his experiences. We met at a hypnosis conference recently, and I think he's just gonna have so much value to offer you from his years and years of experience of working with people in all different areas.

So, Adam, why don't you say hi, introduce us to you and a little bit about your story of how you got into this work.

Adam: Yeah, lovely to be invited on your podcast. My name is Adam Cox. I'm known as a hypnotherapist. As a hypnotist, and I have a podcast called The Hypnotist. And for me, I think a lot of hypnotherapist go through something as a bit of a struggle themself before they become a therapist, a coach.

And that was certainly the case with me because I was a very shy, very introverted child, a teenager. Ironically, when I left home, I was studying psychology, living my own for the first time, and it was almost kind of like a series of unfortunate events meant that I became very self-conscious and that self-conscious way of thinking led to a lot of social anxiety.

And then the social anxiety, I think a lot of. People try and cope with whatever they're feeling. So I felt very self-conscious and very socially anxious around people, particularly people I didn't know. So I found my anxiety went down when I was on my own. So as a result of that, basically I became a recluse at the age of about 19, just avoiding people.

I would leave my tiny apartment at night to go to a 24 hour supermarket to get groceries when there wasn't many people around. Because I was keen to fix myself, go to a 24 hour library at my university and became obsessed with finding a solution because I knew I didn't wanna feel that way. So I was reading hundreds and hundreds of books on psychology and therapy and anxiety and all of these kind of things because.

I knew that I didn't want to be medicated. I knew that if I went to a doctor and said I was feeling this way, they would give me antidepressants or anti-anxiety medication, like SSRIs or beta blockers, and I knew I didn't want that. So it led to this obsession with trying to figure out what worked. And initially what I tried is what most people consider traditional therapy, things like psychoanalysis, and I just found.

It just seemed weird to me that you had this kind of non-interventional kind of approach, but then that led me to explore more therapeutic modalities that are actually designed to create change. Things like behavioral psychology, we would kind of consider that CBT now, but also things like hypnotherapy and something called NLP, which gets associated with hypnotherapy because the founders of NLP modeled a very famous hypnotherapist called Milton Erickson.

So there's lots of kind of hypnotherapeutic approaches to language and change that form part of NLP. And when I tried more of the HYPNOTHERAPEUTIC and NLP approaches. Actually my emotions changed. I could change the underlying belief and then that made a difference. So I went from being a very anxious recluse with suicidal thoughts to actually someone that became pretty good at managing my own emotional state and going from very anxious to quite confident in situations.

And at the age of 23, I set up my own company. It was a PR agency. And when I fixed myself, and I used the word fixed in, in inverted commerce. Work to myself to break through these kind of things. I had no interest in helping other people. I wanted to just enjoy living my life. And that was, you know, building a business, investing and doing the kind of things that a guy in his twenties wants to do.

And that is, you know, success represents quite material. Things like financial success and other things. What I found though, and what got me back into hypnotherapy is at the age of about 35. I come across this Japanese philosophy called Ikigai, and if you're not familiar with Ikigai, it's this four circles of Venn diagram that represent kind of like the sense of purpose or meaning of being.

And what I found is that through the business that I'd set up, I had three of the circles kind of ticked off. I was good at what I did, I was being paid for it, and the world kind of needed it, but it wasn't making me feel fulfilled. I didn't have a sense of passion around it. So I did that self-reflection where I was asking myself, what are the kind of things that I do, not because I'm being paid to, but because I'm just interested in that thing.

And it was all psychology. It was all hypnosis. And then literally the next day, I signed up for a post-graduate, you know, course in hypnotherapy. And I just became obsessed with. Hypnotherapy and because I had a background in business, it meant that I had the qualifications, but then also had certain skill sets that mean that I could actually build a practice.

I was running a PR agency so I could do publicity for myself. I had a prestigious location that got me high caliber clients. I would give free sessions to celebrities, not famous celebrities, but like D-list celebrities in exchange for video referrals and those kind of things, so I could then get even more media exposure.

And it just became this kind of wonderful thing where I was feeling fulfilled, building a reputation and enjoying it. And my belief system when it came to hypnosis was, you know, to use a weird metaphor, nobody learns to swim by reading a book. You know, you've gotta jump in the pool. And for me, jumping in the pool in hypnosis was.

Working with real clients. So I just tried to see as many clients as I could. Then COVID came along and I thought, there's no point having this prestigious address if I'm not actually gonna see clients. So at that point, I decided to kind of choose a different avenue for my hypnotherapy, and that was a podcast.

And the podcast was called The Hypnotist, and I wanted to do something different. I wanted to share real hypnosis that featured. Clients facing real issues, but protecting the confidentiality of those clients and what started off as me doing the odd episode every now and then has now become a daily episode approaching 1,700.

Episodes and getting very close to 13 million downloads, which if someone would've told me that at the time, I wouldn't have believed them at all. But I think when you do something from a place of genuine passion and genuine enthusiasm, people get that vibe and then they kind of respond in kind. So that's the short version.

It was kind of like deeply anxious and kind of insecure and low self-worth. And by working on myself, I found that actually I learned some skills that might be helpful to other people.

Amber: Absolutely. And it's such a cool story too, to see how much it obviously helped you change in your life. For someone who is new to hypnosis, and they might be like a little skeptical, like what are some common myths or misconceptions you see come up when people are thinking about doing hypnosis or just their preconceived notions of what it is?

Adam: Yeah, I think my favorite misconception comes from stage shows and Hollywood, and that is that you're under the control. Of the hypnotist, you know that you can still see repeats of these old Scooby-Doo episodes where the villain is a hypnotist and they've got that dangling watch and then suddenly they're, they can control whoever that kind of person is.

That's the biggest misconception, and obviously that can create an element of trepidation. People don't want to be controlled by other people, so that's the big misconception. I think the other misconception is. Almost like what hypnosis actually is. I think some people have to believe that they've got no memory of what happens.

They're actually like, they wake up and then suddenly, you know, oh, where am I? What happened? So it's control and it's a myth as to what the level of the experience is tend to help people out with these myths and misconceptions with the element of control. I use a metaphor where I say, look, imagine if you're lost in a really.

Kind of thick, large, you know, forest and you didn't know your way out, but you met someone that really understood that forest really well and they offered to lead you out of the forest. You're not obliged to follow them, but you may acknowledge that they know the terrain better than you know the terrain, and therefore it's in your interest to be led out of the forest by that person.

That's no different from a good hypnotherapist. They know the terrain of, you know, some of the issues that you are dealing with. They might have dealt with that same issue with. 30, 40 other clients, and therefore they know that terrain better. It doesn't mean that they're controlling you, it just means that you're choosing to work with someone that may be able to help you escape the forest more efficiently.

When it comes to this idea of what a TRA is or what hypnosis is, I let people know that they go into trance all the time. You know, I live in London. I see more people in a trance on the London underground than I see in a therapy room. You know that arm epsy where people are staring into their phone, you know, it's a deep trance and you get people, their eyes glazed over and they're somewhere else that they're not in that physical place.

That's a trance. Sometimes people have had the experience of driving in their car and they're on autopilot, and they might be driving for miles. Now they're changing lanes. They're moving. But they can't remember that. It's almost like their brain's on autopilot. That's a trance state. Or if someone's reading a really good book and they almost become a character in the story, they're not even aware of the words on the page and turning the page.

You know, that's a trance state. So I think there are misconceptions, but these misconceptions are pretty easy to overcome when you give a good example as to what's really happening.

Amber: Absolutely. I love those analogies and ways of showing that it is already happening for most of us every single day. It's not like some foreign state to us.

It's something that our brain already does very naturally. So you mentioned that you started getting into hypnosis for like some self-worth, some anxiety issues. Is there anything that you felt like really stood out to you or was a big aha moment of helping you? Overcome some of these insecurities because for a lot of us who are struggling with food in our bodies, it is hard to get out of this place where sometimes they're feeling like really hopeless or worthless or just really insecure about the way that their body has changed.

Adam: Yeah. So one, one of the things that I was always fascinated is all elements of psychology, and I love the idea of mnemonics, which is like memory tools and the most profound thing in terms of like the speed of change and the level of difference was. It dawned on me that it was actually my belief systems about people.

That was the real cause of my anxiety and not the actual situation I was in. So I just wrote out the word people and then I turned it into an acronym where each of the letters became a new word. And I had this idea that actually as much as people were, I thought, causing my anxiety, it dawned on me that it was my beliefs about people that were causing my anxiety.

And it's, some people have seen the Tom Hanks movie cast Away, where he's on an island on his own. If there was no people at all on the planet, that would be a horrible place. So I came up with this metaphor that people are precious and actually, you know, by looking at each of the letters of the word people, and it was, well, people are kind of personable.

And then it was kind of like they are respect driven. And I had all these kind of basically updated belief systems as to what I looked at people. And I did this at night and I went to sleep, and then the next day I just went into the town center. Then I noticed people smiling at me that I'd never noticed that before, and there was a lightness in how I was walking.

It was almost kind of like a switch had been flipped and the world was as it was, but because I was different, I saw it different. It was almost like wearing glasses and everything changed. And I thought, wow, you know, all I've done there. I say, all I've done is I've fundamentally changed my beliefs as to what.

People represent, and in doing so, it completely changed my physiology. It changed my emotions, it changed my perceptions. I was noticing different things, and it literally happened the next day, and I'm like, mm-hmm. I just done self hypnosis on myself. You know how I literally updated a belief system and it was like night and day, like it was such a contrast.

But then you get addicted and you're like, oh, have I found this superpower? Then you're like, what other beliefs can I change? So now you know, I've got this weird belief about beliefs. You know, we might call it a meta belief. I don't care really if beliefs are true or not. What I care is if they're useful or not.

Mm-hmm. So when I see people squabbling on the internet about political beliefs and religious beliefs. I'm an atheist, but I actually think a lot of religious beliefs can be really empowering. I care about the utility of the belief. Is the belief useful or not? And if it is, why not have that? I mean, everyone knows at least one conspiracy theorist, and they absolutely believe something that probably isn't true, but they believe it with every fiber of their being.

Why can't you believe you know, things that make you feel good? I have a belief, which I'm pretty sure isn't true, but I believe it anyway, and that is that. I can learn anything I want to, I don't care if it's true, but by me believing that means that a typical barrier that stops people trying things is that, oh, I don't know how to do that.

But if you have the belief that you can learn anything that you want to, well then that barrier is just temporary. You just learn the thing that you need to acquire the skills to do whatever you want. So now you know, I have lots of very empowering belief systems. When I was that anxious recluse, I had lots of disempowering belief systems and, and I think.

Beliefs are just one of those things that you can change. But why? I like changing beliefs rather than emotions. Everyone is gonna have a rollercoaster of emotions in any week. They're gonna change all the time. But when you change the underlying belief, that can be like a portal to consistent emotions.

So I try and change things at the belief level, values level, or identity level in myself and with clients rather than. Behavioral, environmental, or even emotional thoughts level, it's much better to deal with the things that are the cause or contributing factor to thoughts and emotions,

Amber: right? There was so much good stuff in there.

So first, with the beliefs about other people, I think that is so important to call out because if you are believing that other people are just naturally judgemental or they're mean, or they don't wanna be around you, of course you're gonna believe that. It's a horrible thing if my body is gaining weight and people are going to have these horrible thoughts about me because we're thinking of that about ourself and we're believing that other people are thinking that too.

So I think a really good exercise would almost just be like writing out like, what are my beliefs about other people? Kinda like how you change them into these more positive things. And it's like, well, what are my beliefs about people right now asking? Is it true or helpful? And this is, I love that you said that because it's actually something I say in my lesson.

I give my clients in my program on their body image. I tell them it does not matter to me. What you're believing about your body is true or not. It's, is it helpful? I say the exact same thing because it's so true where you know, you can say X, Y, and Z is true about my body. My body has gained weight. It does look X, Y, and Z way.

It does feel pinched in when I'm wearing this outfit. But looking at, well, is this belief actually giving me the results that I want and helping me show up in my life? In a positive way, and if it's not, it's optional. Like their beliefs, meaning they're not true either way. I say you can either think whether you're thinking positively or negatively.

Both are delusional beliefs because they're just thoughts and all thoughts are just decisions we ultimately make and what we want to choose to believe. None of them are facts. So if all thinking is delusional, like let's think delusively positive so we can actually get positive results in our life, then.

So I love that you said that, and I think it's also important to find little pieces of evidence that these things are true. So as you said, like when you started to believe different things about people, you went on the world and you're like, well, like. People are smiling at me and your brain starts collecting all this positive evidence of look like people are good.

People do wanna be nice to me, people do wanna talk to me and come up to me. And until we start to make those little shifts in the beliefs, we don't really notice all that evidence, but once we do, it starts to build that belief up even more and makes it more true.

Adam: Yeah, and I love self-fulfilling prophecies, but it's a very sharp, double-edged sword because if you believe that.

You are stupid. You might not try things. If you believe you're ugly, you might see a micro expression of someone else. There's evidence that they're judging you, you know? But equally, if you believe that you are smart, you're gonna try new things. If you believe that you are attractive, then you're gonna see a different version of you when you look in the mirror.

Like it's this weird thing where whenever you believe, your brain is very good at finding evidence to support that belief, so you believe it even more. In the world of psychology, we recognize the cognitive biases, but that doesn't make us immune from them. So if we're not immune from these cognitive biases, why not just utilize the cognitive biases?

For example, I don't believe in magic and I don't believe in wishes, but I never pass a wishing well without throwing a coin and making a wish. I don't believe that the law of attraction works at the quantum level, but I have a vision board. I think a lot about what I want in my life because it's useful.

It's useful to have those things because when you do those things, a very powerful belief system actually is self-efficacy. It's interpreting the underlying belief that you must believe in order to do that thing. So your brain's like, well, if you threw a coin into a wishing well, you must believe in wishes.

It's like, okay, but now I've activated the reticular activating system and now I might. Find that thing that I look as a coincidence, but I increase the probability of that thing that I actively desire and want. So I think there's these wonderful cognitive processes going on, and why not utilize them?

And they work in almost every area. And I feel like as a hypnotherapist, when you're working with a client, they're there because they want to change. They don't want the status quo. So anything that you can use, whether it's a direct suggestion, a metaphor, you know, a protocol, some kind of resource state.

They wanna experience something that feels like magic. And I think magic is an excellent metaphor because if you were to see an illusionist, it looks magical, actually. You know, it's probably misdirection, it's probably mirrors. It's probably very fine wise that you can't see. But that spoils the whole thing.

Actually. It's better to see it as this magical experience, and I think, you know. It's a hypnotherapist. Like if we explain too much about what we're doing, it kind of takes away some of the magic. If you say, you know, oh, I just identified a resourceful state in a different area of your life, mapped that across to this unresourceful state wire, the neural pathways together, and now you feel more resourceful.

It's kind of like takes some of that magical away. Like it's better for them to feel just like, wow, what happened and what happened with me in that kind of. Situation is that I'd effectively updated disempowering beliefs to empowering beliefs. But how I experienced it, it was like profoundly different.

And I think, you know, as therapists and coaches, we get to do that with the clients. You know, we get to change their realities through their perceptions.

Amber: I love that. That is such a fun perspective on it too. So you've obviously worked with a lot of people in a lot of different areas. Weight loss and food stuff being one of them.

After all of these sessions with people, have there been any big themes or things that you found really worked for people who are struggling with eating issues, their weight, body image, any of those?

Adam: I always look for the underlying belief. I always look for an early coping strategy. For example, what I found as a pattern, particularly with women, a lot of women that have issues with food, I noticed the pattern where not all of them, but some of them had some kind of.

Interaction where there was some kind of predatory experience, maybe some kind of an assault. And in that moment the brain went into overdrive to think, how can I protect? And there's this feeling of maybe I was targeted because I was slim. Maybe I was targeted because I was thin. And when you've got this kind of element where years and years later, they're now in this real deep conflict where a part of them wants to be slim because they feel like that would make them more confident and healthier.

But this protective part is like, no, that's too dangerous. So that leads me sometimes to do parts therapy and you're working with a part and you're saying, look, what's the positive intention? Is protection, is there a better way to protect rather than overeating? And of course there is. So sometimes there's those dynamics.

Sometimes it's just childhood associations. When I was a child, whenever there was a family gathering, I was given a fizzy drink and a chocolate bar. So I had all of this things related to approval, validation, love connection, all these things. And it was kind of basically processed foods. Mm-hmm. But then you get older and you're like, why am I craving, you know, I feel a bit lonely.

Why am I craving this thing? Because it represents connection or it represents love, or it represents these things. Now that might be an association, but that association isn't necessarily useful and probably isn't true. Does the chocolate bar really represent connection? No, but it can feel like it does and people will do what feels like it's working in the same way that a smoker might feel like, you know, smoking is rewarding, or again, it helps them relax or it makes them feel more social.

None of that's true, but you get this, again, this belief system where it becomes a placebo effect. If you believe it enough, then actually the thing ends up actually helping in that way. So, you know, I see a lot of what I do is playing detective and not judging the client and their situation, but trying to reverse engineer it and say, what would they have to believe or think or have experienced in order for this to be completely rational as to what they're doing.

And then you go back sometimes use regressions, sometimes use, you know, CBT approaches, but then you're looking and you're saying, okay, well. Believing that takes you to there. What if we had a different belief or a different emotion, or a different resource, or a different coping strategy? Then you wouldn't need that to kind of keep you in this kind of loop or rut.

And so many people use the word stuck or trapped or struggle. It's because there's opposing forces. You know, at some level, they are benefiting from sticking with whatever they're doing, either because it feels familiar or it's giving them some kind of payoff, even if that's gratification rather than real joy or pleasure.

But it's giving them something. And I think too many therapists are very quick to say, oh, you're doing it all wrong. Just do this instead. Okay. But those neural pathways already built, it's giving them something, there is some secondary gain. It, it is, as you say, a habit that's already there. So you know, a lovely metaphor that I give clients if I'm gonna use regression.

And I'm gonna do something because they do feel stuck. So I asked them to imagine the biggest tree that they know, and everyone knows a large tree somewhere. It might be in the garden, in the park. And I said, how difficult would it be to remove that tree from the roots? And they're picturing cranes and they're picturing all it, and they're like, oh, that would be difficult.

And I said, but if you were to go back to when that tree was just a few weeks old, how easy would it be to remove the tree then? And they're like, well, you could do it with one hand. And I get them to say that before I do the regression because now they've got a belief system that if we go back to the time of inception, what would be impossible to change now is super easy when we go back and that paces their experience to make that change.

So I love metaphor and I love distorting time, but. Honestly, I look at the whole thing like a game. You know, it's kind of like the clients living with something that they don't want, and my job is to figure out how they're doing that and then introduce some element of catalyst for change that then becomes empowering and useful for them.

Amber: Absolutely. I'm curious if you've had anything come up that a client is doing that maybe ma is like making a mistake that's like kinda taking them backwards out of their eating habits or just any patterns you notice that way where like a client will be holding onto something or doing something or trying a new method that you feel like is working against what you are trying to do

Adam: all the time.And I think that's because. People will second guess, you know? But the most memorable one, it was a fairly early client, she'd spent years on this rollercoaster of losing weight, gaining weight, losing weight, gaining weight, and, and I asked her this question, I said, if you were just at the weight that you would want and you just stayed at that weight, what?

How would that make you feel? She was like, bored. It didn't occur to me that the secondary game was drama. Like actually by this constant state flux and the constant challenge and she gets to go on these juice retreats and get all this kind of stuff, it was giving her stuff to do. She also had a secondary belief, which is for her, a lot of her weight gain came from like alcohol and dining and restaurants and that kind stuff.

You know, she believed that her identity would be less fun, uh, if she didn't do certain things. So we've got two massive reasons not to change there. Like if you lose your drama and you lose your sense of fun and your identity don't even know who you are at that point, well of course you're gonna sabotage it and keep doing what you're doing.

And what she needed was a way to have the belief that she could still be fun and have fun with a different relationship with food, and have a different outlet for drama that didn't involve all of this. You know, oh, I've weighed this and I've weighed more and I've gained this. Like for her, it was giving her so much.

Almost like entertainment and stimulation, but she never even realized that was the payoff. And I see that a lot, you know, for people to have something for years, it has to be giving them something. And therefore, quite often it, a lot of therapists and coaches will say, you know, how do you benefit by changing?

It's the obvious question. Like all the benefits. Hey, I asked that, but I also ask if we make this change, how does your life get worse? And that also becomes a pattern interrupt because they're not expecting me to ask that, but I'm really direct and insistent. And they're like, well, you know what? Yeah.

Think of a minimum wage person that's smoking, and you're like, how would your life be worse if you stopped smoking? Okay, well, I'd miss out on about 10 minutes, an hour of cigarette breaks. I'd miss out on gossip. I'd miss out on the connection with other people. That feeling of being on the same status of another smoker, even if they're earning a lot more.

Actually you figure out that actually, you know, for that individual there might be things that even though they know it's not good for their health and, and not good for their bank account, it's giving them something that actually they value more. So I'm not convincing them that actually they're gonna get healthier.

They already logically know that I need to convince them that actually that 10 minutes that they're saving per hour to have chats and gossip is not worth it. It's a price too expensive for what they're doing. So. I think when you do something enough, you figure out the areas of self-sabotage and the ways in which people mess up things, and then you can map that off to other clients.

And there's this metaphor that I've used a couple of times. It's, imagine if you are, you know, a police officer, you work in the narcotics department and you are, you're searching the apartment or house of a drug dealer and it's day one on the job, but you don't know where to look. But imagine it's your 10th year in the job.

You've done so many searches, but you know exactly where to look for. And then seeing that experienced detective like know where to look, that would look like magic. Like how did you know to look there? Yeah, because other people have hid their stuff in that exact same place, like it would look like magic.

And I think that's one of the wonderful things of the more you do what we do, the more experience you get, the more you know where to look. And sometimes just knowing where to look. That can turn something that could take five sessions into one session. You can just get there quicker.

Amber: Yeah. I think it's helpful for people to remember and to get out of the shame of it that.

Everything we're ever trying to do is for a survival benefit. Mm-hmm. That's how our brain perceives it. So as you mentioned with the smoker example, it's like there's a perceived better survival benefit of smoking and getting that social connection versus not doing it even though they know that there's long-term health consequences.

And so it's being able to show our brain. The behavior that we're doing is actually a survival threat and is not bringing us a true net benefit from what we're doing from it. For me too, for so long, dieting was my only hobby. Like it was all I thought about, it was all I researched. It was only the only podcast I listened to.

And you know, that can be sometimes useful when you're trying to find a way out and gather more information. Our brain is trying to figure out the situation and gathering information is a skill to do that of. Trying to understand what's going on so we can get out of it, but at the same time becomes a point where you're just kinda keeping yourself stuck in it because your whole life is just dieting.

And then maybe you have your mom diets and your grandma diets. And so it's almost like the family dynamic of what diet are we doing? Or you do that with your friends, and you and your friends are always struggling with your weight together. And then, oh, she's doing ozempic. Maybe I should do ozempic. So then kind of there's that social thing too.

So a lot of times it's like this, it stems out from more than just the food where it starts to bleed into like, this is kind of who I am as a person is I'm just someone who diets and this is what my life looks like. And a lot of times our relationship with food can be very much like a toxic relationship with a person where they give us like a just enough high.

To wanna stay, even if they're causing pain. And sometimes that can feel hard to leave. And you mentioned the drama around it where it's like, it's exciting, it's fun. And I think that's a big thing that people in toxic relationships have a hard time with is, you know, the good guy is like kind of boring.

And they're like, well this isn't very fun. Like, it's nice, I guess, but where's that high? Where's that low? Where's the drama? And all of it of the, is he gonna love me? Is he gonna not, what's he gonna do for me today? What's he gonna not do? And that sometimes is, you know, we need to feel. One. Okay. Like moving away from that, but also just seeing, you know, is there somewhere else I can get that feeling of fun, that thrill, you know, maybe there's another new hobby you want.

Maybe just like the thrill of like working out like the highs and lows of just life that will naturally come. Also, just accepting that I like to think about it as many of these toxic relationships, food. Alcohol. You get this high, but you're always gonna get the low that comes with it too. Amen. And so there's big peaks in these big valleys, and we need to be okay getting used to like this nice, slow, steady state of dopamine, which does feel different.

But the good news is that when there's not the high, there's no low. You just get to feel pretty good all day because you're nourishing your body, you're feeling energized. But just recognizing that I think is important for people of like, yes, I'm giving up the highs, but I'm also giving up the lows in favor of a slow, steady.

Really feeling good type of pleasure that actually lasts.

Adam: I think there's so much truth to that. And I also think that when you change the time horizon and you say, okay, yeah, having a binge is, you know, that can feel really pleasurable in the 10, 15 minutes that you're having. That binge doesn't feel so pleasurable in the hour that follows.

And if you were to kind of carry on in the status quo for the next 10 years, you would have lots of feelings of gratification, but. If you had to trade like your body shape and overall health 10 years from now, would you trade all of that gratification? If you could have that kind of version of you, and actually what you're doing is you're then contrasting.

Quite often gratification with actual, a real sense of pride, a real sense of kind of confidence, a real sense of kind of joy or worthiness. And then when you do that, it's like, well, I can do that. I just don't want it. And that feels very different from, you know, oh, but I'm missing out on all this pleasure.

Quite often isn't pleasure, it's just a perception of pleasure is more like gratification, which is very temporary. And if it was so pleasurable, why do you need to do it again? So soon after the, the time before. And I, and I think when you find those parallels, or, you know, sometimes what I look for is the resource state in the individual, which is the closest parallel to what they're doing.

So if someone binges, like is there an area of your life where you get to enjoy it? But there is no desire to kind of have it all at once. You know, you just have it when you want it. And that might be with music or it might be watching tv, or it might be something like that. And it's kind of like you already know.

How to have this good relationship with the thing. Let's light up that oral pathway and getting it across to this thing so that if it was more like that, would it enhance your life or make it worse? And they're like, oh, definitely enhance. You've already got kind of pre agreement even before you do the technique or the approach and, and I think a large part of it is giving them a sense of reassurance that the life doesn't get worse.

I think that's the key fear because. A lot of it is a survival instinct, but some of it is just kind of like that hierarchy of needs and people want more pleasure and less pain, and if they feel like they're gonna miss out on pleasure, well, no, that doesn't feel good. I wanna have that. But you need to make the change more pleasurable than the status quo.

And then, yeah, it feels like an easier jump to make.

Amber: Right? If someone ever comes to me and they're like. I'm scared of, you know what that life will look like because if you have been struggling with food, you know, since you were 10 years old, you might not know that reality. And it does kind of feel scary.

I always tell them like, let's make a promise to yourself. If we do the work and you signed up with me, you're paying all this money for a reason. Part of you does wanna go there, but if you do get there and your life is worse than it was when you were binge eating, you can go back. No one's gonna keep you from going back.

And I find sometimes just giving your brain that reassurance. Like we know logically, like, okay, if we were to solve these habits, we're not gonna wanna go back. But just to even be like, you know what, if for some reason I was like, life was better, then, then great, we can go back. But then at least we'll know because we made the effort to try.

Life in a different way. So I saw this and it wasn't really a statistic, and I don't know if I'm gonna fully say it right, I'm so bad with remembering statistics about things, but it was something along the lines of people who were trying to quit cocaine did so in a like faster way, or struggled with it a less amount of time than people who smoked because there was a greater negative impact that they could recognize on their life, even though.

Smoking is still kills many people. I'm curious, have you ever found, like, have you ever worked with anyone who was struggling with drugs and did you find that it was easier for them to quit or that their mind worked a little differently than someone who is dealing with these more drawn out things where you don't notice the effects of overeating for, you know, potentially 10, 20, 30 years down the line?

Adam: So I always thought as parts therapy and different parts of an individual, there's just this kind of like fun metaphor of oh yeah, there's different versions of ourself. The first time I worked with a guy with a crack cocaine addiction. He was a farmer and he had lost his wife. He had lost a lot of kind of money and finances.

He was going through a really tough time and, and, and when he arrived, he was missing some teeth, he was missing some fingernails, and he sat there in the chair and, and I said, look, I know you wanna quit this thing because it's being very destructive, but I need to talk to the part that doesn't wanna let this thing go.

I dunno if you've ever seen like Lord of the Rings, you know, with the Gollum character, but there's this character called Goum and he's also Smeal. And Smeal is this kind of like nice, you know, kind of thing. And then Gollum's this like gimme the precious, like it was this thing. And I asked this guy and he's in a trance and I said like, I wanna speak to the part that, you know, wants to keep, you know, smoking this crack cocaine.

And it freaked me out. This guy, it was kind of like those movies where you see like split personalities, it's kind of like. His whole face contorted. It was kind of like his whole body language shifted. You know, I had chills run down the back of my neck. He went from this mild-mannered farmer to this mean obsessed, and I can only think of like Goum and the precious, because to him, Craig was everything and he couldn't care less about other people, his farm.

He just needed to have that thing, and I completely changed my perception on parts after that. Because it's kind of like that part was gonna get that crack, whatever happened. And I tried my normal approach of saying, okay, but what you really want is how it makes you feel. And he's like, yeah, but crack makes me feel that way.

I was trying to get the underlying attentions we could kind of find it, you know, a different way to do that. But that part was entrenched and it changed how I thought about parts, but it also changed how I thought about when people are like really addicted in, in the sense that sometimes. There is this kind of obsessive compulsive part that just has this belief that is the only thing that is gonna work and that does apply to food.

Sometimes there is this kind of element where people, they, you know, when they get the idea in their head of chocolate or something, like they're gonna have it. Like they have to have it. And of course you can do different things. You can do parts therapy, you can do these kind of things. But it taught me firsthand how entrenched some of these kind of.

Parts are that kind of crave certain things. Like you've got disassociated parts and you've got that. And that was so disassociated that the whole body changed. And I, and I think as therapists were always learning, like we're learning. Like, you know, anyone could say, oh, with addictions, just to kind of like parts therapy.

Just meet the underlying need in a different way. But what people are living with. Sometimes it's not self-sabotage, it's just like the sabotage is just the consequence of them absolutely pursuing that thing that they're pursuing. And you know, logically everyone knows like if you eat lots and lots gonna gain weight that could lead to, you know, lifestyle diseases.

You get a lot of weight that could lead to stretch marks and lose skin if you then lose the weight. None of that matters in the moment. Like that thing just feels like it's everything. And I think it gave me a whole new level of respect and empathy for what people are going through. And I think sometimes therapists need to get away from their books and actually kind of really look at the client that they're working with and kind of connect with them.

And I think that's why therapists that have actually. Been to that dark place and escaped it, are always better therapists and have just read about it in books. Like it gives a whole different level of understanding and rapport and connection with the client.

Amber: Right? Absolutely. And I think that's so true, and that's a lot of what I've talked about on your episode too, whereas.

You know, really finding how the negative impacts of binge eating in that moment of like what you don't like about the taste, about the food, how it feels in your body in that second to try to bring those long-term impacts into that present moment of what don't I like about this experience? And maybe it was something like drugs.

If there's anything about that initial experience too that maybe isn't fun, because I know every time I've ever binged it was also done in this. Such frantic out of control way and that didn't feel fun either. Like it was so fast happening, you're not even tasting the food. It's just like going down in the speed of light and it ha really actually wasn't fun that sometimes it almost felt like the drama was kind of fun.

But when I actually sat down and looked at it, I'm like, that experience of. Tornado of events that goes on, that is really stressful too. And so I think sometimes seeing those little moments of, oh, you know, this little part isn't fun, this little part isn't fun, and this little gremlin inside of me that wants it, it isn't fun to experience that part of me.

And it is a part of me that I can like come out with love and compassion, but it's not actually making the experience enjoyable there. Now there was a little bit of a problem with the last part of this recording of where you can find Adam, so I want you to know that you can find Adam on his podcast The Hypnotist, as well as he has a free seven day course that will be in the show notes below.

So be sure to check him out there and have a good week. Hey, before you go, don't forget to hide to the show notes to grab my free guided audio to stop a binge before it starts. This proven seven minute meditation has helped thousands of people just like you interrupt a binge and get back in control.

And right now, before you forget, be sure to hit follow for the show so you never miss an episode every single Thursday on my top. Tips to help you become a confident eater.