Overcoming comfort eating and reprogramming dieting thinking

The challenge

She had been through significant challenges and traumas in her life, both physical and emotional, and this had led to loss of confidence and weight gain.She had worked with a counsellor to process her feelings. Also, from years of dieting, she had lost sight of what would help her lose weight and what wouldn’t.

 

The effect

She had been a confident and successful business woman and now found herself comfort eating and eating whlle watching TV, which meant she hadn’t enjoyed what she had eaten and didn’t feel full so she continued eating. She was often tired because she got up to eat after she had gone to bed. She was struggling to let go of foods that she wanted to eat as she enjoyed them. She was struggling to assert herself in her present living situation and felt she did not have boundaries and could not say no. 

Solution

We worked together virtually for 12 1:1 sessions with access to NLP training videos and other mindset resources.

We first looked at her eating strategies and her triggers to look for small changes to make, for example eating at the table. She identified a belief: ‘I know if I eat, I will sleep’. Through chunking down, we created a new sleep routine that interrupted her old habit. Not only did she eat less and sleep soundly, she was less hungry the following day.

We examined ways to choose her foods that would help her rewire her dieting rules. She chose categories that gave her more choice and that helped her stop feeling like she was cheating. 

Looking at where she was at cause and where she was at effect allowed her to reframe her thoughts about the past and present and to shift out of victim mode. Importantly, it helped her realise she no longer needed food as a crutch; that she could lose weight and she could find alternative soothers. 

Learning the agreement framework, reframing ‘sorry’ as ‘thank you’ and using clean rather than judgemental language, allowed her to communicate her needs clearly, with compassion and with assertion.

Result

She was able to make more empowered choices. Our work allowed her to recognise her resilience and build more of it. It also gave her the confidence to start building a new business. She was able to let go of worrying about what others were thinking or doing and stay focused on her own journey. She has gone from strength to strength and has been able to navigate further traumas and challenges without needing food to comfort and without hiding away.