Stop being tempted by sugary snacks
Do you find yourself constantly drawn to sweets, chocolate, crisps, cakes and biscuits? If you find them hard to resist, is it starting to show up around your waistline, hips or other parts of your body and making it difficult for you to lose weight?
Never before have we been given such a large quantity of sugary food to choose from. Advertising and marketing for snack food items is everywhere you look, and racks of them sit temptingly at supermarket tills to catch you out on the last part of your shopping trip. These treats might be simple to ignore for people with a strong will, but for many they trigger a difficult emotional conflict.
Addicted to sugar?
It’s widely understood that smokers or alcoholics are coping with real addictions, and they are given some level of sympathy; yet those who binge or overindulge aren’t generally given such patience or understanding. This judgement from others can make problems much worse, increasing feelings of low self-esteem or thoughts of self-loathing, which overweight people often have already when they look in the mirror. Yet, people can become obsessed with snacks, most notably sweets, biscuits, crisps and cakes, in a similar way a person might become addicted to smoking cigarettes or alcohol. I’ve worked with several people, who have described their strong pull towards chocolate as a real addiction. That’s why people often fail to overcome their habits by willpower alone.
What attracts us to sugar so much?
Addictions and habits come from the unconscious mind. When we journey through life, we store the results of the experiences we’ve been through, and when we’re inevitably faced with difficult scenarios, our mind creates methods for us to deal with them. In the event the mind has related a specific strategy with the sense of delight or stress reduction, it makes us think that we’ve got to use this same method each and every time we feel bad. You might be one of the many people, who turn to sugar when they comfort eat.
Children are often treated for good conduct with junk treats or snacks. Maybe your parents used ‘treats’ like biscuits and cakes to make you feel better when you were upset (“Stop crying. Let’s go for a McDonald’s”). One of my clients often called in to see her granny on the way home from school, knowing that there would be a chocolate bar waiting for her. This set up a life-long habit that eventually got out of hand. As with this client, for so many people, sugary food becomes linked to reward, to pleasure and happy times, or to comfort. It means that when you are feeling unhappy or discouraged, your first instinct is not to consider the situation or speak to someone about it, but to search for the biscuit tin.
Taking care of the unconscious mind
By taking care of the root of the problem in the unconscious mind, hypnotherapy can get rid of your desire to have crisps, cakes, chocolate, sweets and biscuits. I also use cognitive-behavioural therapy to enable people to change their whole thinking about sugary snacks and to change their eating habits and behaviour. Cognitive-behavioural therapy on its own is very effective. When combined with hypnosis, it becomes even more powerful. Hypnosis resolves the underlying cause of your eating habits and boosts your willpower, by replacing your usual thinking and behaviour patterns with new healthier ones, releasing you from the grip of your dependency. You learn to separate your emotions from your eating. No longer will you need to work at avoiding the snacks that once seemed so attractive. Bypassing them can become second nature, making it so much easier for you to lose weight.
Please contact Anne at Transforming Health to find out hypnotherapy can help you stop snacking and lose weight. E-mail or phone 0208 546 2122.
