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NLP and Hypnotherapy can achieve rapid and long term change with eating disorders and weight loss. Read success stories at www.abbyeagle.com
An NLP Hypnotherapy Approach to Healing Eating Disorders
There are many types of eating disorders but they all share some similar characteristics. In Anorexia Nervosa the person has a fear of getting fat and may go to extreme efforts to educate themselves about the calorie content of foods. In some cases of anorexia the person may have associated a negative emotion with the sight of food. For example, I had a client who told me that she was sitting at a café eating a meal when a family member walked up to the table and told her that her father had just killed himself. She looked at the meal and thought to herself, “I am never going to eat again”. From that point on she had a difficulty in eating food and lost an extreme amount of weight. Once I had identified the problem event it was just a matter of helping her heal the memory and clear the negative emotion which she had associated with food. I did that using NLP techniques. What I learned from working with that client was to ask the question, “When did you make the decision to eat the way that you do?”
Anorexia typically affects women more than men and usually starts in the teenage years when the teenager becomes self conscious about their sexual attractiveness. Teenagers, both boys and girls, are competitive in nature and are programmed by their DNA to seek out the best possible mate. As the teenager begins to consider that their diet is affecting their physical attractive they may change their diet in order to lose weight or to put on muscle. If a girl loses a bit of weight she may receive a lot of positive attention from both boys and other girls. Reflecting back on when an eating disorder started, women have told me how they felt trapped by the praise given to them by their teenage girl friends – and how their friends almost coerced them to maintain a negative eating pattern. The solution is to go back and change the thought processes using NLP and Hypnotherapy.
Bulimia is an eating disorder in which the person purges and vomits a meal. As with anorexia, bulimia affects more women than men. In some cases the woman may eat a normal meal and then immediately go the bathroom and vomit up the food. Typically it is driven by negative emotions. If you clear the negative emotions and the thoughts that kick of the strategy (the trigger) using NLP techniques then this virtually solves the purging problem. One woman I worked with in the Middle East felt a lot of anger towards her father – which culturally she was not allowed to express. Purging was her way of vomiting up the anger.
Typically though in the West, women who purge eat a low fat diet which is part of the problem. There is a switch in the brain which makes you lose interest in consuming too much fat – that is unless it contains a lot of carbohydrates, as in chocolate and ice cream. There is no switch for carbohydrates and if the first meal of the day is based on carbohydrates then it will set you up for binging and eating more carbohydrates throughout the day. Meals high in carbs and low in good quality fats and good quality proteins means the person will be nutrient depleted. That means the person is hungry, so the body says, “Give me more food”. But the person thinks to themselves that they just had an amazing meal of politically correct ‘junk food’ – so they think they must have a food craving. No, they don’t have a food craving – they are hungry but they misinterpret the hunger sensations as a craving because they have an incorrect belief about what constitutes healthy food. (If you binge eat then the first thing you should check is to see if you are on a low fat, nutrient depleted diet.)
So by identifying the trigger and the thoughts that precede the action of eating a problem food – and by changing those thoughts using a combination of NLP and Hypnotherapy we instruct the unconscious mind – “not this problem behaviour but rather this positive behaviour”.
Part of the problem has been the demonisation of saturated fats and the proliferation of convenience foods. Some years ago a young Tibetan man got a job at our local petrol station. He was handsome and well proportioned but two years later he had put on a lot of weight and had lost his good looks. If he brought up his children on his new diet they would all be over weight and not so well proportioned – which would create the possibility that they would embark on extreme efforts to lose weight and improve their physique.
If you want to see the difference that diet makes on physical appearance then I suggest you go to Malaysia. In Malaysia they have a number of distinct ethnic groups. So the Chinese eat Chinese food; the Malays eat a Malay Indian diet; those from the Middle East eat a Middle Eastern diet; those from India eat an Indian diet. When those same people come to Australia you can see the difference that the Australian convenience food diet makes in the physical appearance of their children.
The best way to deal with the eating disorder issue on a national level is to educate people about the research of Dr Weston A Price, a Dentist who travelled the world to study isolated groups of people living on a traditional diet. His research is compelling and you can read it in his book titled, “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration”.
If you are interested in learning more about how you can lose weight or deal with an eating disorder then contact Abby Eagle from www.abbyeagle.com (Neuro Linguistic Programming and Hypnotherapy Gold Coast Australia)
