Ep 84- {Part 2} The Hidden Reasons Behind Why You Binge with Hypnotist Adam Cox

September 18, 2025

This episode was originally aired on Adam Cox’s Podcast, The Hypnotist, but you can listen to it here to hear me getting interviewed!

We cover…

• My story of how I stopped binge eating

• How scarcity thinking fuels overeating

• Using mindful eating to eat less

• The surprising way to notice how processed foods don’t actually taste as good as your brain tells you they do

Transcript:

 Amber: Today's episode is coming from a recording of the interview that I did on Adam's podcast.

So you may have heard his interview last week here, but this is where he interviews me and it was just such a good episode that I knew you had to hear it. And it's so fun I think for you two to hear a bit more about my story and my history of food and how I got to where I am today. So enjoy today's episode.

Adam: It's Adam here and welcome to the hypnotist. And today's guest hypnotist is Amber Abila. And Amber, welcome to the show.

Amber: Thanks for having me on today, Adam. I'm so excited to chat.

Adam: Yeah. Amber, you have a successful podcast of your own. Tell us a bit about your podcast and how you found yourself in that particular niche.

Amber: Yes. So I am a binge eating coach, and I help people rewire their brain around food so they can feel normal and control around anything they want. And I started my podcast, become a confident eater because I always love to listen to podcasts in my journey. It's so helpful to have someone in your ear giving you those tips throughout the week to really just give you these new perspectives.

So my podcast episodes are usually pretty like short, sweet, to the point of a topic of that day. Something around binge eating in general or struggling with thinking about food all the day, food noise, your body image, all of this stuff around that, and I just find it so helpful to have those little tidbits each Thursday.

Adam: Yeah. Perfect. So tell us a bit about your background, because I've worked with a lot of hypnotherapist and the niche they end up working in at some level, links into their own experience. Was that the case with you?

Amber: Absolutely. So I struggled with food myself for a lot of years. It started back in 2015. I started with calorie counting.

I thought I wanna lose like 10, 20 pounds, like might as well. Do some calorie counting. 'cause that's what the internet suggested to me. I was on a pretty low calorie amount. I was eating 1200 calories a day, and I stuck with it for a while. But over time, I couldn't keep fighting these urges and the strong hunger that I had to eat more food.

So the first time I ever binged, I remember it so clearly, it was on seven cookies. It was around Christmas time, and I promised myself I was just gonna have one. And then I ate it and I was overfilled with this overwhelming urge for more of them. And so I had another, and I had another, and I had another.

Until I had seven cookies, but I was so terrified. I promised myself it was never gonna happen again. This was a one time thing, but then it slowly started happening more and more where it was every week and then every day, and then multiple times a day to the point where I knew that something had to change, that it wasn't getting better on my own.

So that's when I sought out therapy, which is usually the first place people go to if they are struggling with more of these extreme eating habits. They're wanting to take this mindset or psychological approach to it. But for me personally, I found therapy did not help me a ton with the binge eating. It did help me understand the role of restriction and how I was undereating, and because of that, my brain was sending out these strong signals to eat, which are very hard to fight because if you think about it, if you were to go all day without water and you're trying to fight your way through not having water, it's gonna be a lot harder than when you're hydrated to tell yourself not to have water.

It's the same thing with food. Helped me to eat more calories. I was like, okay, I won't restrict anymore. But I was still binge eating and I was really confused because I couldn't connect it. There wasn't like a huge trauma that happened at that time or in my past that I could figure out, oh, this is why I started binge eating.

And I came across this blog post that described binge eating as just a habit that all of our eating habits are just that. They're just habits. And that really gave me a big insight and aha of. Oh, there's not something wrong with me or something broken in my brain. It's just over time. I have started binge eating every single day for like the past year, and so now when I try to not binge, my brain freaks out because it thinks, oh, we're getting rid of something that's important, a survival habit, and it creates a lot of resistance to it.

So when I started to view it as a habit, it one really simplified my recovery journey. It didn't make it this like big thing where I felt like in therapy I kinda had to have like all my ducks in a row in every single area of life in order to overcome this big problem. So it like shrunk the problem down for me, which made it easier to tackle and it also made it very approachable where I started to recognize that just because I had thoughts around food didn't mean they were true.

That my brain could just be going on a loop and I could see that. My brain is telling me right now I need a lot of food. But that's not actually the reality. The reality is I've eaten three meals today and a snack, and I'm not hungry, but my brain just is assuming that I need to eat because that's the habit I've conditioned it in to have.

Adam: And I think there is a strange paradox where sometimes the opposite to the intention tends to happen, sometimes links to the idea of scarcity. And I've worked with a lot of people that have gone on some kind of diet, some kind of regime. And their internal dialogue is very restrictive and scarce is, I'm not allowed this.

I can't have this. I mustn't do this. And then at some level there is that polarity response in all of us that wants to do the thing we're not meant to do. And it becomes almost like the forbidden fruit is that one thing we're not meant to do. Seems to feel more appealing than ever before. And sometimes I do 2, 3, 4 day fasts.

And I find it really important whenever I'm fasting to remind myself that, of course I can eat. I'm surrounded by food, I can eat whatever I want. I'm just choosing not to. So I don't get into that scarcity mentality. And the metaphor that I use when I'm working with people to help them fast is to say, look.

If you were locked in a prison cell and you didn't know where your next meal was coming from, and then suddenly there's a lot of food and you dunno where the next meal's coming from, you'd eat it all really quickly because it's a scarce resource. But if you knew for a fact that you could eat whenever you want and there's an abundance of food, but you're just choosing not to, you would have no scarcity, no anxiety whatsoever.

When you were calorie counting, did it feel like. With those kind of initial cookies that you're doing something you weren't meant to do, that it was somehow wrong or bad or naughty or something like that.

Amber: Absolutely, and you totally nailed it with the scarcity mindset where a lot of times dieting can artificially put us in this scarcity mindset where we feel like we're not allowed all of this food that we want when we are, but it feels like someone's telling us what to do and we just have to follow the rules.

It's very like authoritative versus making an empowering choice of. I'm choosing to do this fast because of X, Y, and Z reason. That feels really good and empowering to me. So yes, I think. That can be one of the biggest problems with calorie counting too, is ultimately calorie counting is just a tool. It's not a good or bad thing.

It's something that can be useful at times. But if we start putting the calorie count as like the ultimate rule and our body has no say in it, oh, I feel extra hungry today. Too bad. The calorie counts are says I'm done for the day, or I'm not hungry, but oh, who cares? If the calorie count just says I can have an extra 200 calories, let's fit that in.

Mm-hmm. Or totally disregarding our body then, and that's where it can get problematic. And so a lot of times it can feel like. Oh, I have this limit still. Even if it's a high limit, even if it's, let's say 2,500 calories is your maintenance, and that feels like a lot. Sometimes your brains can still perceive that, but this is still a limit for me, even if it will fill you and not make you hungry and you'll feel satisfied.

So it's important, like you said, to recognize that one, if you're doing this, you wanna make sure that you want to do this, that this feels like a choice, not something that you're being told you have to do. 'cause that's when we wanna rebel against it. But also reminding yourself that. Food is coming again later, that we live in a world where there are grocery stores on every single corner and gas stations that have food in it and fast food restaurants.

Not that we're gonna go eat at those all the time, but. To show our brain that food is there and then look at the average person's cabinet and freezer and second freezer here in the US, maybe third freezer somewhere. It is just an absolute whole bunch of abundance of food in our life, but we don't quite recognize it because our mindset is telling us that food is off limits and we can't have it.

So that's where that we start to feel restricted around it.

Adam: Yeah, it's the value judgment of. Not being allowed it, it's not permitted. And then suddenly it becomes more desirable. And there's a lovely phrase that I always think about when I'm working with people that they wanna lose weight, but sometimes they might get too rigid with that.

And the phrase is, too much control is out of control. And I think there's an element that sometimes people become a slave to, whether it's calorie counting or these kind of fad diets. To the extent that it feels very restrictive and rigid and that almost everyone wants to break out of rigidity and have that kind of freedom.

And I've worked with bodybuilders and their goal is to get for male bodybuilders quite often under 5% body fat. And I'm always fascinated because logically it doesn't make sense for them to have cheat days, but they do because they know that if they deprive themself. Anything like that, then actually they're gonna break, and then they're gonna have some kind of a binge and they're gonna mess up their thing.

So even though they are very focused and disciplined on having lots of lean protein and having that calorie deficit, they'll always give themself a bit of flexibility within that because otherwise too much control is out of control. What was the escape route for you when obviously seeing it as a habit was one of those things?

Was there anything else that you wish you could go back in time and tell yourself earlier to give you a different. Framework as to how you thought about food?

Amber: Yeah, so a few different things. How my journey progressed from there is I had this big insight and that did really help with this understanding of these urges and these cravings around food.

But it took a while to actually heal my relationship with food as a whole and to be what I call a normal natural eater. These people who can just eat when they're hungry, stop when they're full, move on, have a piece of cake at a birthday party, and just forget about it, or leave a couple bites behind and throw it away.

And a lot of that came for like my own research on how these intuitive eaters eat and what that process looks like for them. But I also worked with a weight loss coach for over a year, and I later started working with her as a coach under her. So I did her program and then she hired me as a coach and trained me.

And that's really why I got into the whole coaching industry, which is so huge for me. And I take this approach of more on the cognitive behavioral therapy side of things, where we're looking at how our thoughts aren't true, seeing how our brain is making a mistake in that moment and getting the separation from it.

Which I found was so powerful. But how I started getting in more of the hypnosis world was I had this one client who had her sister passed away a couple months before we started working together. We were doing all this like logical thought work together and she was making a lot of progress around food, but it just felt like we kept getting stuck somewhere and there was like these deeper emotional components and these deeper things happening in her brain.

And she was in therapy too at the time, but I felt like I couldn't quite get to the depth that we needed to. To in order for her to feel like I can let go of these habits, she was almost punishing herself with food because she felt a lot of guilt around her sister's death. And that's where I went to think, okay, how else can I take these tools deeper?

And I'm so grateful that I got to work from her because she really forced me to go explore out other methods. And that's when I came across hypnosis and visualization and more somatic work of getting into our body. And that really transformed my coaching practice where I really feel like I found the solution of both sides, where it is really fun to look at.

The logical side of things and how we can change our mindset around food, which hypnosis does too. But sometimes going to these deeper layers of working with our unconscious mind, which is how 95% of our habits and thoughts are going on in the background and how we're living our world. If we're not addressing that, we're missing out on a major piece of the puzzle.

And I find, especially in the eating space and the intuitive eating world where I'm coming from. I haven't seen so many people do hypnosis. There's a lot of weight loss hypnosis, but I haven't found people like focusing so much on binge eating, healing your relationship with food itself. So I was really happy to be able to integrate that in my practice and start to see greater results with people and how their habits took longer.

Adam: And I think, you know, you are right because it overlaps way more than people would think because at some level. There's always a positive intention behind this kind of behavior, and it might be pleasure or it might be freedom, or it might be just breaking the chains of something that feels really confining and rigid, but binging isn't the best tool to meet that particular underlying needs, but it can feel, I've worked with a few clients with eating disorders, and for some it's.

A form of escapism, like while they're in a binge, nothing else matters. It's almost like a, an escape from everything. But there is also this kind of law of familiarity that if you've done something enough, even if it's not necessarily the most healthy thing to do, there is something Yeah. Really familiar and comforting in the familiarity.

And I remember working with a former ballerina who there was a time that. There was consequences if you weren't a certain way or a certain kind of shape. She was an adult at the point. I'm working with her and she had this really. Tenacious in a dialogue, but it was always stated in the third person. It would almost like whisper in her ear, be like, you've got time, no one else is around.

Like now's the perfect time. And it was always like this insidious kind of voice, but it was disassociated, which meant it wasn't in control. It was just trying to influence. And I found a really great metaphor for her comes actually from. The vampire genre of movies that for a vampire to enter a house, it has to be given permission.

If it's not invited in, it can't get in. It can't cause any damage. Mm-hmm. And it was this whole idea that that inner dialogue that was trying to influence was seeking permission to do it, but if it was never given permission, it would not be able to go any further. And that was quite empowering because there was this feeling of inevitability that.

If that voice started, the only way they can make that voice go away was to have the binge. What you do in coaching with clients, have you found any kind of surprising things that the average person just wouldn't expect? Goes in the mind of someone that binges or has an eating disorder, or is sometimes obsessive with food.

Amber: I think so what you mentioned there of it feels like we need to act on it once it happens is definitely something I experienced where it's almost like your brain decides the second the thought goes through your brain. It's like it's over. And that's something that will happen is like the second your brain suggests the idea of a binge.

It's, I'm just gonna do it. It's just gonna happen because it's familiar because you're so used to the second that thought comes in, it does happen. So a big thing I work on showing people is that when you're having this thought, it truly is just a thought. It can live in your brain. One of my favorite kind of like practical exercises for this is just sitting on your hands and.

Trying to think. No matter what thoughts you have in this moment, no matter what your brain suggests you want to do, you're not gonna do anything with your hands unless you were to like lift up your hands and say, go do something. And I think that's a really good example to show people one, because you have the added side effect of if you're at a meal or something and you don't wanna eat, you can sit on your hands to be like, to create that physical barrier, but also is like your physical reminder of.

My thoughts are just thoughts unless I choose to say, okay, that my higher brain, my logical brain is the one that's in charge and that has all the power. So even if my brain says, oh, time to binge, and we're like, yep, it's time to binge. It's not going to happen until we say, yes, it is time. So we can use that as our like tactical reminder of, I'm in charge, I get to decide here.

But also knowing that those thoughts can't hurt you, it's also important to see that like when we're feeling this discomfort, it is uncomfortable the first time we get through an urge to binge, and I say that there's two ways to get rid of an urge to binge. One is to eat. It does go away. When you eat, you start feeling that desire, and that's what can be nice about it, is you get rid of that discomfort in that moment of that wanting to eat.

But the problem with that is that guarantees that urge will definitely come back again. For sure, because you have now just told your brain, this is something I wanna do by giving it the reward that it was asking for. It's like a child throwing a tantrum where it's, I want the thing, I want the thing. And you're like, okay, here you go.

Here's the thing. They're gonna throw another tantrum the next time they want something. Mm-hmm. And that's what your brain is doing and what you're rewarding it for. So then the second option when we get an urge to binge is we can sit with it. Now sitting with it does create some temporary discomfort because we are literally trying to change our brain pathway in that moment.

And so it is going to give like a little bit of a pushback of, Hey, are you sure you want to do this? Don't you want to eat instead? But if we can get through that temporary discomfort, which if we are doing it right, only has to last like 60 to 90 seconds of like truly feeling into our body what that's like.

Then when we get through it, it helps to not get that reward of the binge, which means our brain is going to decondition that brain pathway and make it less likely that we're gonna binge tomorrow. So we're making it so much easier for our tomorrow self and our day after that, and the day after that. But then what's really important too is that we give our brain the new reward.

And the new reward is celebration. Because celebration in our brain is like neural superglue. It will ingrain in the habits that we want it to have. So if this is a big mistake that I see people making, which is they get through like an urge to eat and they're like, oh, thank God I made it through. And they just go about their day.

They don't do anything to positively reinforce it. They're just like wanting to move on past it, which I understand 'cause it's sometimes it is a little uncomfortable, we don't wanna sit with it anymore. But really taking that moment to say. I did it. I'm so proud of you. That was so much fun because now I get to feel really good in my body the rest of the day.

Now I don't have all this extra food weighing me down. Now I have started to change my brain and I'm literally rewiring my brain pathway in this moment. And when we get really excited about that, our brain starts to pay attention and says, oh, what's going on? Something exciting is happening, and it says yes, because I didn't eat that food that I didn't want to eat.

And so it makes it more likely that you'll repeat that good habit moving forward then?

Adam: Yeah, it is. I use a metaphor. Sometimes these cravings or these compulsions or like cockroaches, if you feed them, they might go away, but they're gonna come back even more insistent. Don't stop feeding the cockroaches.

It was reminding me, actually, of my very first. BINGE related client. This is almost like 10 years ago, but she had this thing where she wouldn't realize that she was doing a binge until after the binge. Like it really was that high level of disassociation. And she had a really sad story because when she was in school, she would be like, really bullied.

Merci Leslie. It's like a horribly, and her trigger was if she was really anxious or sad. Then it would be ice cream first. And if there's no ice cream it'd be chocolate. And she would eat it until there's none left. But quite often, like she would be surprised 'cause she'd look down and stare at like an empty carton of ice cream and what have I done?

She wouldn't have been able to sit on her hands 'cause it would already happen at that particular point. And I never did regression too much with binging before that point. But I did with her and I said, look, I want you to, and this is really long induction, but go back to a time where you were sad, you were anxious.

To a time where you didn't use food as the coping strategy and she couldn't find anything. And then eventually she did, and there was this one time she was being bullied at school. She comes back, parents try to help, there was no chocolate ice cream around. And then in that moment, she could recall going into her room and she really liked.

Musicals and there's that song Defined Gravity from Wicked. So she listened to that and then imagined herself on a stage singing that song. And up until that point, she had no frame of reference that anything other than food would work. But in that she had evidence that something else also gave her that feeling of feeling empowered.

And escaping her reality and those kind of things. Yeah. And once she had that, we then that became the thin end of the wedge. And she found that actually mindfully walking around nature would also help make the anxiety and that sadness go away. And once she had that. Binging was still on the list. It was like sixth or seventh on the list rather than number one.

And it was about having that kind of an option. And I feel like a lot of people that binge, it's not because they want to binge, it's because the binging helps them in some way, and it's become so automatic that it almost feels like there's another part of them taking over in control. And they're left to tidy up the mess, which this client didn't purge afterwards, but sometimes they do.

It's like you've had the binge and it's how do I offset the consequence of this binge. When you are working with clients, do you have a standard approach all the time, or does it really change depending on the client and the circumstances that you are working with?

Amber: A lot of it's, the techniques work similarly for a lot of people.

Mm-hmm. Because it's a lot of the same stuff over and over. I'm sure the same for you, but sometimes, like you said, there's like little teeny moments that we can find that are different individual to each person of an aha of oh, a time where I was able to feel that emotion and not eat, or I find it really helpful to also show them like.

Maybe a time that they've done that and it felt really good after they felt really pleasurable after they didn't sit with that, or they did sit with the emotion and they didn't eat, because that shows their brain like, oh, I'm not getting deprived of anything if I don't eat the food. Because that's one of the biggest beliefs that I think I often see people getting stuck in is that.

Binge eating is fun. It's pleasurable, it's enjoyable. And this is oftentimes reinforced by some of the addiction talks in just normal people world, where I feel like a lot of times it's phrased as, oh, addiction is this like thing that you need in your life to cope. And sometimes just some of the wording around it makes it so we feel like I'm not gonna be okay without this.

I'm not gonna be happy without it. It's so pleasurable. It's so fun. It's bringing me so much in my life that what will life be like without it? So something I like to do for this, and I actually have a guided audio to help someone stop a binge in the moment that I'll have in the show notes for people.

And what I do in this is walk people through a visualization where they imagine taking the two paths and really playing that story forward. Because a lot of times in that moment. All we're imagining is how good the food will taste in our mouth. And I call that telling ourselves chapter one of the story.

It's like chapter one, I eat the food. It tastes amazing, the end. But if that were the end, like we wouldn't be here listening to this podcast, we wouldn't be here like searching out solution, because the truth is that there's also chapters two through 10 that come after that we're not telling ourself in that initial moment of desire.

And if it's happening with someone where they're like dissociating like that. Even just finding like 10 seconds of a pause is sometimes helpful where we'll get into our minds. It's like I'm either binging or I'm not binging and it feels too hard to not binge, so I'm just gonna do it. But waiting for five seconds before you eat is more than just going into it, and that's like creating space.

And then maybe next time you can wait 30 seconds, then maybe a minute, and then maybe you use my audio or you do a recorded hypnoses session or something to start to increase that space more. Anyways, so in this visualization, I have people really play the story forward of, let's imagine we do eat Okay, it tastes good.

For those 20 seconds, it's in the mouth. But then, and this is what we'll go through a little bit later today in this episode, as it starts to break apart in your body, how does it feel and what do you notice as you're looking at the wrappers around you? You're noticing the empty ice cream carton. How does that feel?

What is it like when you try to return back to work and try to fall asleep that night? What is that like? And then you're creating that picture of your brain of showing it. Oh. I can see what the truth of the story is. And then on the flip side, let's imagine path the other one. That we take where we sit with the surge and feels a little uncomfortable at first, we notice some sensations in our body.

For a lot of people, maybe it's, I'm noticing some tightness in my chest or a little bit of a fast energy, but I sit with this fast energy and I take some deep breaths and I get through it, and I'm feeling really proud of myself. What is it like to go through that day of work? Then? What is it like as I try to fall asleep that night?

How is it when I wake up in the morning and do my workout, and really showing that positive image to your brain too instead of just those first initial moments.

Adam: Yeah, it's expanding and people with anxiety do that as well. Like they'll hone in on that kind of ten second element of peak anxiety, but not when the relief they feel when they get through that anxiety is cherrypicking the bits that either make them feel bad or make them feel good to justify the behavior that they're doing.

So there is a lot of cognitive biases that take place, and it isn't you. It's not the full story. It's cherry picking parts of the story since you've had your podcast. What's the message you've received or the feedback that you've received from a listener that made you feel that what you're doing is really impacting maybe people you'll never meet?

What's the thing that you heard that really hit home for you?

Amber: Yeah, so I had one person who had been listening to my podcast for just two weeks, and she like binged it all. She listened to all the episodes. And she said she started implementing mindful eating through some of the things that I talked about.

And when she did that, she lost two and a half pounds and she had been like stuck at the same weight, gaining weight for so many years that she was so surprised that just something as simple as sitting down with food could help her eat less and be more present with it. And so I am a really big advocate of mindful eating because it helps bring our attention to what's actually going on in our body.

Whenever we're using a screen, which is what I really count as the distractions, whether that's our, we're sitting at the desk still working, we're watching tv, we're using our phone. There's like lights, there's sounds, there's colors. There might be some emotions coming up because we're watching something in the movie or with all of these things going on in our brain, and then we're also trying to do this very body-based experience of eating and it just doesn't really happen.

Then we're just so much in our head in the experience of what's happening on our screens. It's hard to pay attention to our body. So by being able to go into our body, we're able to notice more of these things, of our hunger and fullness, of our thoughts, our emotions that might be coming up during that and have more control over them.

But a big obstacle that often comes up for people is we are not used to sitting even for one minute without something entertaining us in today's modern world. Mm-hmm. It is always, you're waiting in line, you pull out your phone, you check your email. I'm at a stoplight. If you look around at a stoplight nowadays, notice how many people like check their phone.

It is really amazing. I was doing this the other day and I was like, wow, no one is paying attention. Everyone's having to honk nowadays to get people to go ahead because we have such a hard time sitting with nothing. And so a lot of times when people are sitting with food, it can be a new experience for them of.

It feels uncomfortable at first, but they might go to grow to really like it as I have, because it's the only time in my day really where I feel like I have an excuse to like fully turn off everything and just be present with what's going on in my body. So I've grown to really love it and find it a really beautiful part of my day.

Adam: And I think of it as like my brain cleaning time of like where I get to sweep out all of the junk that I've been consuming all day or anything that I don't need. Freshen it up for the whatever's coming. And like using that time to really just let my brain rest while I go into my body and eat.

And I think it's a really important thing one.

The irony of she was binging on your podcast rather than binging on food, I think is hilarious. But that element of mindful eating, because there is this kind of weird thing sometimes that people are paying the price of the calories, but not even enjoying it. It's like buying a theater ticket for amazing show and then just watching your phone all the way through that show.

It's like you're not really getting the pleasure. And there is that possibility that by being mindfully eating, they can actually eat less and get more pleasure from their food because they're actually. Using all of their senses to experience the food that they're eating, and I think that's a really powerful distinction in terms of the way in which you feel the future's going with, let's say eating, like there is more processed food coming up all the time.

We're now living in a time where, you know, 10 years ago it was bariatric surgery, gastric bands. Now it's things like the GLP ones, the Ozempic, and those kind of things. Do you think that element of how people think about food. Is being taken less seriously because they're like, oh, I can just have surgery.

I can just take ozempic or something like that. Do you think we're less engaged in the food and it is seen as, okay, I'll eat whatever I want 'cause I can just have a quick fix later?

Amber: Yeah, that's a really interesting question and I think as for as many a mental health professionals are out there, very few actually know how to help people with eating problems.

And my story of not getting help through therapy is not the only one. A lot of my clients come to me from therapy, I'm guessing yours as well, where we have a lot of outdated methods and outdated beliefs around how to solve these eating issues and. A really fun fact is that binge eating was not actually even recognized as an eating disorder until 2013, so that was only about 12 years ago.

You think about like how many research is coming out every day, and like if a therapist was trained before 12 years ago, they didn't even recognize that binge eating was a recognized eating disorder, and it was just kinda something like, oh, maybe we need more willpower, more self-control, or it just wasn't really thought about much.

And so I think that my hope is that over time. More people do get into hypnosis in this other world of mental health work. Where there's other options of seeing how we can change our brain, and there's so much new research on hypnosis and visualization and all the things that we're including that I just think so many people don't know about.

And it's easier and more mainstream to do some of these quick fixes because who doesn't want a quick fix? Like people wanted to lose weight last year. 10 years before, and they're still struggling, so they wanna stop it now, but we have to consider where we wanna be in 10 years from now and then 10 years after that and 10 years after that.

And so I understand when people are wanting to go on a GLP one or do bariatric surgery, you know, the desperation behind it. There's a lot there where they just want to get it solved now. And there might be so many big health consequences that are happening right now that they do just want to get out of it right now.

Mm-hmm. And sometimes that is. The right choice for people if they need that right in that moment. But also taking a moment to step back and be like, what haven't I tried yet? What else might be possible? And sometimes, yeah, you're gonna like risk losing some money or some time on some things that don't work.

But if you don't keep going and trying to find something else and you're gonna get continued. To stay stuck in this cycle of just quick fixes that don't last long term, which wastes so much more time, money, and energy than we ever would've if we sought out maybe other different holistic mental health solutions.

Adam: And I think that's why podcasts is such a powerful tool because it does two things. It gives inspiration and knowledge, but also when you're hearing stories of other people that have gone through a similar kind of pathway and have come out the other side, it's not just. Inspiration is also reassurance.

Okay, this game is now winnable. There is something I can do, and there is a lot of people going through things that lots of other people are also going through, but they feel very much alone in that journey. What's great about podcast is that it's very accessible wherever you are in the world, you can find this.

I know you can do a, a guided experience for us, but before you do that, just remind everyone about your podcast, where they can, where they can find your podcast.

Amber: Yeah, so my podcast is called Become a Confident Eater. You can find it anywhere you get your podcast, and I'm also gonna have Adam on, depending on when these episodes get released.

You should be able to find his episode on there as well, which will be really fun.

Adam: Amazing. So tell us about the, the technique, the experience you're gonna share with us before you actually do them.

Amber: Yeah, so this is one that I really like. If people have a hard time getting into their bodies, which is honestly a lot of the clients I work with, again, we're very like.

Mind base in our day-to-day world, we don't really have a lot of experiences going into our body. So this one is going to help us reconnect into our body on a deeper level and also see the impact of food. So a lot of times when I ask people, why do you wanna eat less sugar, for example, they're like, it's not healthy and it doesn't feel good.

I guess that is very abstract to your brain that's just gonna go right over your head. It doesn't really give us any concrete ways of why we actually want to change. So by going into our body and really seeing. If we're gonna look at how the food breaks apart a little bit more, and just seeing what insights we can find from that, that can help again, reinforce this idea of.

Binge eating is not pleasurable, and it causes me pain and eating foods that nourish me and fill me up and are actually healthy for me. Those are the foods that make me feel my best and are actually pleasurable in a very different way. It just helps us to get deeper into our body and what our unique wisdom already has to tell us.

We have so many signals, like our body wants to let us know and guide us what's good for us. It's doing that every single day telling us We're too hot, we're too cold. We need water. We don't need water. So it has all this wisdom inside of us, but a lot of times we just are so zoned out of it or we've been flooded with so many different diet rules that we are just paying attention to everything else except our body.

Adam: Amazing. You're listening to this at home. It make yourself relaxed. Amber's about to take you through this experience. I'm gonna put myself on mute so you get a nice clean signal there, Amber. And I'll be going along with this, so if you see my eyes close, I'm following along.

Amber: Perfect. All right, so we're gonna start closing our eyes.

Taking a big, deep breath in through your nose and out slowly, twice as long

in through your nose, sending your breath down your spine like it was an elevator to the bottom of your base. And exhaling out slowly, twice as long as that breath comes back up, that elevator,

and one more of your biggest, deepest breaths today. And through your nose, all the way down through the spine, through your body, and out slowly letting it go twice as long.

And we're gonna start by focusing on our muscles and letting them relax. Taking this time for you. Starting at the base of the top of your head, relaxing your eyebrows, your eyes, letting it all soften, allowing your jaw to relax, your tongue to drop away.

Moving down to your shoulders, your neck. Letting your shoulders rise and fall down deeper, releasing any tension so that your shoulders and your neck can just relax,

feeling your arms heavy at your sides as they relax down alongside your body.

Unclenching, any fingers, letting them be loose,

dropping into your chest, letting your chest expand and relax as you find a nice, deep, slow, natural breath for you.

Letting your stomach soften be at ease.

Dropping into your hips ing your hips to relax and soften as you feel supported in your chair, your bed,

feeling your legs heavy. Softening any muscles, any tension,

and down to your feet. So you feel your feet on the floor where your ankles relaxed.

And I want you to now take a moment. To imagine a food or a meal that you know does not feel good to you, but you sometimes still eat Anyways,

and as you imagine this food in front of you, we're gonna start by taking your first bite. And as you put this food in your mouth, I want you to notice for a second if there's anything about this food that you don't enjoy, whether it's a part of the taste,

a certain texture about it,

a certain flavor that you might have not noticed before. That might not be enjoyable,

and as you chew and swallow that food imagining as it turns to mush, as it goes down your throat

falling into your stomach.

And notice how does it feel in your stomach as your stomach tries to break apart this food that you know doesn't feel good to you

as your stomach adds in acids. And moves around to try to break it apart. What's that experience like for your stomach?

And as that food is breaking apart further goes into your small intestine where it can be made into smaller particles. That can go through your bloodstream notice as these small particles get breaking apart and go through your bloodstream, how it feels in your body for that to happen.

Noticing how it might feel initially right after you eat this food that you know does not feel good to you.

And also as it continues to go on throughout your day, continue to be processed through your body,

what impact it might have on your energy levels throughout the day. As this food is circulated throughout your body, what is your focus like as you go through your day trying to work or get the things done you wanna get done? How that food impacts your focus levels.

Noticing your mood as that food is going through your bloodstream. Any negative impacts happen on your mood and how you show up and feel throughout the day.

And as you go to sleep at night, noticing how that food impacts your ability to fall asleep.

And now I want you to imagine a white energy washing all that away, clearing it out so we have a fresh slate

as we imagine a new experience. Where we imagine eating a meal or a food that you know feels really good in your body that you love and that your body also loves you back for,

and as you imagine eating this meal that you know feels really good in your body, I want you to notice as you put it in your mouth and you're chewing it. Anything you really love about this flavor or texture of food,

and as it goes down your throat into your stomach, notice how it feels to be your stomach. Trying to break apart these foods

and as the food continues breaking apart into smaller particles going through your small intestine, I. As it goes through your bloodstream, noticing how it feels to have the food that you know feels good in your body, that's full of nutrition in life as it courses throughout your body, how your body gets to feel,

observing any positive impacts on your energy levels throughout the day.

Noticing what it's like as you try to focus at work and as you're getting your to-do list done, to have this food that feels good going throughout your body.

Seeing how your mood feels when you have this nutritious food in the right amounts for you going throughout your body.

I.

And as you fall asleep at night, seeing how your experience might be different when you have food that you know nourishes your body as you try to fall asleep now, taking any insights you have gained from this experience, imagining filing them, filing them away in a place that feels useful and accessible in your brain.

Knowing that as you go throughout your day to day and your week, at any time, you can access this wisdom from your body on what would feel really good for you

and the positive impacts you wanna create in your life.

And as you file this wisdom away and you feel ready to come out of this space, taking as long as you need can slowly start to bring some motion into your body, wiggling your toes and your fingers, maybe bringing some butt movement into your chest as you flutter your eyes open. Blinking some light back into your eyes,

allowing any motion that wants to come up happen.

Beautiful.

Adam: That took me to a deep place. That was nice. I like that. And the food that I was thinking of was changing each time as well. It was what? What are all these foods that I crave but really aren't good for me? But it's sometimes you use so on autopilot that you just think, oh, I like this food, but.

Might be years and you don't even really like it. You just, you're just doing it. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for that. Amber. You're gonna have a download for people to get in the show notes. Tell us about what they can expect from that.

Amber: Yeah, so one thing I'll say that you mentioned about the reason I include seeing what you don't like about that food, that has been a really powerful experience for me.

Where. I've noticed that like a Hershey's bar tastes like plastic, that gummy candy tastes really artificial, and I can almost feel the stomach ache happening if I eat a gummy bear. And so sometimes we don't even pay attention to notice these things because we're just such on autopilot. And if you'll notice, a lot of these processed foods don't actually taste as good as our imagined brained experience is saying It does.

Yeah. And it's a really beautiful things that I've had a lot of clients come back to me and say, oh my gosh, I don't like Oreos. It's crazy. I thought I was obsessed with Oreos, but actually they taste really dry and stale, and I'd much rather have a really high quality piece of chocolate, or I'd rather have a fresh, ripe peach that is really juicy and really nourishing and also tastes really delicious.

So something that's fun to pay attention to is just seeing that first initial taste too. If there's anything that you don't like about it. So as far as where they can find me and the free download, I have my free audio to stop a binge, and it's tracked. It's a seven minute audio as I told you. It's helping you visualize the, both, the positive effects of sitting with the urge and then the negative effects of when we eat.

So kind of a variation of this exercise as well. And if you wanna find more about me, you can visit me at my website, the confident eater.org, and that's where you can find my podcast as well, the audio and my Instagram and Facebook account.

Adam: Amazing. Amber, thank you so much for joining me on the show today.

And everyone listening, Amber has been your guest hypnotist and definitely check out her podcast. It's gonna be a link in the show notes. Listen, subscribe if you wanna have any tips, advice, and experiences on becoming a more confident eater. Thank you again, Amber.

Amber: Thank you Adam.