Why the shortcuts don't hold up here
Nobody woke up one morning and was suddenly heavier. It crept in, over years, and like everything that creeps in, you don't quite know the reasons. That more went in than went out isn't an insight — you don't need a physicist or a hypnotherapist for that. The interesting question is a different one: what was it good for?
Food is doing a job
A client once told me about her evenings. Kids in bed, kitchen cleaned up, finally quiet — and then she'd sit on the sofa with the chocolate, honestly content for the first time all day. She didn't have an eating problem. She had a problem with the fact that nothing else was hers.
That's usually what it looks like. Food is responsible for something: for comfort, for reward, for the one moment when nobody wants anything from you. And because it does that job reliably, it gets called on again. That it only sends the bill later doesn't matter to the part of you doing the calling.
Why rules backfire
That's why diets work so badly. Not because you're too weak for them, but because they attack the wrong spot. They take away the comfort and give nothing back for it. What rises instead is tension, plain stress — and that's exactly what triggered this in the first place.
On top of that, strict control makes you think about food more, not less. Deprivation makes the forbidden thing more interesting, until eventually a bad day comes along and everything tips over. Shame follows, and shame is once again a feeling that food is responsible for handling. The circle closes.
A diet negotiates with your head over something your head was never deciding in the first place.
Why I don't believe in the hypnotic gastric band
There are colleagues out there who'll offer you a virtual gastric band, a hypnotic weight-loss injection, or suggestions aimed straight at your fat cells. I don't do that, for two reasons.
The first is the thing itself: the only proper study of the gastric band found no advantage over ordinary relaxation hypnosis. The second is more fundamental. Methods like that fight the symptom and leave the job undone. The part of you that needs comfort in the evening doesn't stop needing it just because your stomach is supposed to feel smaller. It finds another way in. And talking to fat cells is about as promising as emailing your liver.
What happens instead
We look for what the eating is responsible for, and hand that responsibility back to something better suited to carry it. Sometimes that's rest, sometimes self-respect, sometimes an old grief nobody ever talked about. Often it's simply habits that nobody ever consciously decided on.
What comes after that surprises most people. Not iron willpower, but a kind of indifference toward what used to pull at them. The packet sits there and stays quiet. One client told me after his third session that he hadn't even noticed he was losing weight — he'd just been puzzled why he no longer got up in the evening.
That's exactly how it should be. Not a fight that's won, but a fight that's stopped.
