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Uses - Weight Management

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:: Eating disorders
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How Hypnosis Helps Eating Disorders - Case Study

The Vicious Cycle of Control/Binge/Purge.

Susie was miserable. At twenty-eight, she was sick and tired of sabotaging her success with weight management. She was stick thin and her clothes hung off her spindly legs, but she thought she was fat.

She was caught up in a self-perpetuating drama of her own misery – starve herself, smoke marijuana every night, get depressed (and feel that she is missing out on the pleasures of life everyone else takes for granted and indulges in whenever they want) build up her anxiety to frantic levels and then binge on food until she was stuffed.

Suddenly the panic shifted its focus from needing to eat food, to needing to get rid of the fat that the food intake would create. Susie raced to the toilet bowel and shoved her fingers down the back of her throat. Disregarding the burning gullet and the sting of the bile on her fingers – scabbed with red, raw blisters from constant throwing up – Susie heaved until she could imagine that all the food had been re-gorged.

Exhausted, she looked at her red and swollen face in the mirror. Not convinced that she had gotten all the food up, and determined that she would rather die than get fat, Susie forced herself to swallow 25 laxatives. That would make sure that she would get rid of the final vestiges of food next morning.

Too bad that she would have to suffer the torture of exploding bowels for several hours the next day. After all, she deserved to suffer pain after eating all that food.

Susie’s mother called and asked me if hypnosis might help her daughter’s battle with her eating disorder. I explained that hypnotherapy can be a valuable tool in helping with weight management. It was no magic wand, but it could possibly make the changes needed a bit easier and less fraught with suffering.

Eating Disorders

High Hypnotisability of Overweight and Eating Disordered Clients
Dr Jan’s Important Note Regarding Implications for Hypnotherapy:

Why might hypnosis help?

There is evidence that sufferers of bulimia and anorexia with the binge/purge typology, and those people with a weight preoccupation, may have higher hypnotisability!

Anorexia Nervosa

The DSM-IV – the diagnostic manual of problematic psychological issues,
highlights two categories of anorexic behaviours: "restrictors" - patients who show a determination not to eat and who use strict dieting and exercise to lose weight, and 'binge eating/purging type' - anorexics who binge eat and then purge, using induced vomiting and/or laxatives.

Anorexia nervosa sufferers typically display:

  • a marked degree of distortion in body image and distorted perception as to how thin one is, or should be;
  • a high external locus of control;
  • high generalised anxiety; and
  • a constant debilitating concern about weight control and determination not to put on weight.

Anorexic patients who binge, then purge, are more extroverted and more likely to be suffering depression, guilt and anxiety than abstaining anorexics.
They arc also known to be more highly hypnotisable than abstaining anorexics.

Bulimia Nervosa

Bulimia is an eating disorder characterised by uncontrolled, recurrent episodes of binge-eating followed by self-induced vomiting or purging. Typical sufferers are females, ranging in age from 15 to 51 years, with the majority in their twenties. Most are within their weight range or slightly overweight for their age and height.

The general description of the bulimic:

  • a perfectionistic personality, obsessively concerned with food and body proportions;
  • excessively preoccupied with pleasing others;
  • suffering from cronic degree of distorted body image;
  • showing high levels of immaturity, both in their understanding of self and in their relationships with others;
  • showing the traits of impulsivity and displaying a tendency to seek immediate gratification of needs, rather than being able to control their behaviour.

Higher hypnotisability may also be a characteristic of women in the normal population who are preoccupied with dieting and obesity concerns.
Why bulimics are higher on hypnotisability may lie in the relationship between hypnotisability and dissociative capacity.
It is possible that an individual's level of hypnotisability reflects that individual's attentional capacity; suggestibility; and ability to dissociate.

Low hypnotisability is reflected in low dissociative capacity, lower suggestibility, and the individual's inability and or unwillingness to focus his/her attention.

High hypnotisability is reflected in higher suggestibility, higher dissociative capacity, and the ability and/or willingness on the part of the individual to focus attention.

In bulimia, in the bingeing behaviour of anorexics, and in the eating preoccupation of so-called normal subjects, their higher hypnotisability reflects their capacity for meeting the needs of the dissociated ego state and their apparent ability and motivation to become absorbed in this focal experience.

Book a session with Dr Jan: Tel: 03 9419 3010 or email