Weight Loss

Hypnotherapy for weight loss

Almost everyone who comes here about their weight already knows what they are supposed to eat. Many have known for twenty years. Some could write a better eating plan than the one a clinician would hand them. That is the first thing worth noticing, because it rules out the explanation most people are given, which is that they need to be told again, more firmly.

Eat less and move more is not wrong. It is a description of the outcome rather than a route to it. It tells a person what the finish line looks like and nothing at all about why they cannot walk towards it.

What the eating is usually doing

In practice the eating is rarely spread evenly through the day. It tends to happen in a window. Often the evening, often alone, often after everyone else has been dealt with and the day’s demands have finally stopped. The food is doing something at that hour that nothing else in the person’s life is doing, and until that is understood, removing it is simply a loss.

Some common shapes this takes.

Food was comfort early, at a time when comfort was not reliably available from people. It worked. It is still working, which is the difficulty.

Food is the one pleasure that is never unavailable, never disappointing and never has to be negotiated with anyone. For someone whose life is otherwise full of obligation, that is not a small thing to give up.

Eating happens without any decision having been made. The quantities and the choices run on their own and the person genuinely cannot account for them afterwards.

There is one particular food, and a particular hour, and a craving that arrives on time. The eating continues past the point where it is pleasant into something more driven, and the person watches themselves do it.

None of these were chosen, and none of them respond to being told to stop.

What hypnotherapy actually addresses

Willpower is a conscious resource and it is finite. Most people arrive having spent years of it. Adding more is not a plan.

The hypnotic state makes the automatic part of the pattern briefly available: the link between a cue and the reaching, the association laid down early, the sense that the evening is unbearable without it. That is the level at which the work is done. It is not relaxation with suggestions attached, and it is not a substitute for eating differently. It is an attempt to make eating differently cost less.

Expectations are worth setting plainly. Hypnotherapy does not change physiology. It does not override medication, thyroid disorder or the metabolic effects of poor sleep. For some people the right outcome is not a number at all but a settled relationship with food, and that is a legitimate result rather than a consolation prize.

When this is the wrong treatment

Anorexia, bulimia and binge eating disorder are not weight problems and hypnotherapy alone does not treat them. They have their own course, their own risks and their own treatment, and attempting to manage them through weight work can make them worse by reinforcing exactly the control that drives them.

This matters more here than at most practices, because eating disorders are the specialism rather than an adjacent interest. If what you describe at the first consultation is an eating disorder, you will be told so, and the work offered will be eating disorder treatment rather than this.

The group this page is for sits elsewhere: persistent overeating, weight that returns after every diet, compulsive eating, eating to manage a mood. Difficult, but not an eating disorder, and often very responsive.

The first consultation

The first appointment is a clinical conversation, not a diet audit. What is covered is the history of the person’s relationship with food and weight, what has been tried, what the eating looks like in an ordinary week rather than in principle, and what else was happening in the periods when it got worse.

The purpose is to work out what function the eating serves, because that determines what the hypnotic work has to address. Four to eight sessions is the usual course. A longer course is sometimes right where the pattern sits inside wider psychological history, and in that case the honest answer is that this is psychotherapy with hypnotherapy inside it rather than the other way round.

Why the psychotherapy matters here

Dr Jacquet has worked clinically with eating and appetite for twenty-five years and holds a Professional Doctorate in Analytical Psychology, which, as far as is known, remains the only doctoral research in Europe focused specifically on male eating disorders from an analytical psychology perspective.

The practical consequence is where the work can go when it needs to. If a person’s eating turns out to be bound up with early attachment, an unresolved loss, or years of using food to manage states that were otherwise unmanageable, a practitioner trained only in hypnotherapy will reach the pattern and not its root. The sessions will help for a few months and the pattern will return, usually attributed by the client to their own weakness. Integrating the two means the work does not have to stop at the point where it becomes interesting.

Dr Philippe Jacquet is a UKCP registered psychotherapist, a Jungian analyst and an HCPC registered art psychotherapist, with twenty-five years of clinical practice. His Professional Doctorate in Analytical Psychology at the University of Essex examined male eating disorders from the perspective of analytical psychology. Registration can be checked on either public register.