binge eating & emotional eating
Do you feel like you've no control over your eating?
Long to be free of compulsive overeating or binge eating, and feel you've tried every diet?
Do you feel alone, judged or ashamed?
Are you worried about how your eating habits are impacting on your health?
Does thinking about food consume way too much of your time and thoughts?
If so, please read on about how a blend of coaching and hypnosis can change these patterns, by engaging the conscious and the unconscious mind. We’ll get to the root of this for you, in a 1-to-1 coaching programme. All sessions are tailored to your needs.
Eating disorders can frequently be symptoms of a problem rather than the problem itself.
Emmerson
Attuned
to eating, body & emotion
Overcome emotional overeating or binge eating on this 12-week, 1-to-1 coaching programme that brings lifelong change.
As soon as you’re signed up, even before our first session, we’ll get going. It’s an exciting time!
I’ll send you a hypnotic recording that sets you up for successful change. You’ll experience how relaxing it is to be gently guided into hypnosis by me. And you’ll learn what makes this programme different from anything you’ve tried before.
You’ll learn easy techniques you can use from the get-go if you feel an urge to binge or overeat. These are simple but powerful tools that were developed with an understanding of how the brain works and how you can change your brain.
This is about you starting to take back control of behaviour that has felt automatic. It’s about you taking charge, not needing to feel in control in a rigid way. It’s about having more choice.
When you use these techniques consistently, you’ll find you can manage the problem. The behaviour’s nipped in the bud and doesn’t spiral out of control.
For my part, I’ll do everything I can so that when you stop working with me, you no longer have a problem to manage. This involves change happening at the level of your identity. So you become a healthy eater. It won’t be just something you’re doing; it’ll be who you’re being.
I imagine you’re not consciously deciding to binge eat or overeat. So where is this behaviour coming from?
Often, this behaviour was formed at a young age, to keep you safe or bring you pleasure. It has become habitual, and unconscious processes are now running it automatically; in the same way that you don’t have to consciously think about how to drive a car or ride a bike.
This is what makes hypnosis the crucial ingredient in change-work of this kind. It is only by bringing the part running the unwanted behaviour on board, that you stop the internal tug-of-war.
And sometimes, it’s a habit that has developed as push-back against the deprivation of extreme dieting. We’ve got this covered too.
You’ve probably noticed that the urge to binge on particular foods is linked to something else. Like sitting on a particular chair or sofa in the evening, watching TV. Or you might eat, whether or not you’re hungry, after an upsetting or stressful meeting.
Thanks to neuro-plasticity (the brain’s ability to change), we can put up a road-block each time the brain starts to go down the familiar pathway, and create new neural pathways. We disrupt the old association and rewire the brain, metaphorically speaking, by linking the trigger to a different, beneficial feeling or action that you choose.
It’s more about how to eat than what to eat. You’ll learn to tune into your body’s hunger signals, to be sure you’re eating in response to physical hunger and not because you’re thirsty or trying to numb emotions like sadness, anger or loneliness.
This is a no-diet approach. It’s not helpful to label foods as ‘bad’ or ‘forbidden’. I’ll help you reach a place where foods feel morally neutral, so you’re free to choose what would be a good match for your appetite.
You’ll practise taking time to eat with pleasure, savouring the flavours, textures, colours and smells. Building in a greater variety of foods and trying new things.
If there’s no routine to your eating, we’ll start by putting one in place, so you’re eating regularly and adequately. Getting off the insulin rollercoaster, where insulin highs and lows are triggered throughout the day, will keep your blood sugar and energy levels steadier, and avoid crashes and irritable moods.
If you have particular dietary needs or health conditions, I can recommend a nutritional therapist for you who is aligned with the ethos of this programme and has expertise in binge eating.
Research has shown that sleep deprivation increases overeating. This is because sleep is important in regulating the hormone levels that are involved in hunger and appetite. It also has us reaching for foods with high sugar and saturated fat: foods that only satisfy with a brief energy hit and soon leave us wanting more.
And eating certain foods like these, particularly late in the evening, affects metabolism and impacts negatively on sleep, feeding into a vicious cycle.
If insufficient or poor sleep is a problem for you, we’ll look at strategies to tweak what, how and when you’re eating. And we’ll address with hypnosis any anxiety that might be contributing to restless nights. You’ll also learn self-soothing tools and get my audio recordings for anxiety and sleep.
My approach is weight-inclusive and aligned with the Health at Every Size movement. We all have the right to pursue health in the body we have. I won’t view your body as a problem to be solved.
I believe you deserve to choose clothes that suit your body and your style. To enjoy wearing clothes you like, that fit you well and feel comfortable. To live your life and do things you want to do without feeling judged.
I’ll gently encourage you to build a kind and loving relationship with your body. To stop berating it for its perceived flaws and show it gratitude for all it does for you. If this is a stretch at first, we’ll begin by moving towards body acceptance or neutrality.
There’ll be no boot camps or prescribed exercise! Like me, you might’ve experienced exercise that felt uncomfortable or downright humiliating. I’ll encourage you to find a form of movement that feels good: dancing, walking the dog, wild swimming…
We know getting out in nature is good for us. But you may not know that movement itself increases creativity. A study has shown that, after walking—even indoors on a treadmill—people were 60 per cent more creative than those who’d been sitting down. Creativity is definitely what we want in our sessions while we’re investigating new solutions and ways of doing things.
I like us to move around if I’m coaching in the room with you. Our embodiment holds clues to what’s going on for us, and changing it can have powerful effects. We get different mental perspectives by physically changing our viewpoint.
If you’re local to me, there’s an option to incorporate one or two ‘walk and talk’ sessions in the park, Irish weather permitting!
This is one of the most impactful parts of this programme. Until you begin to gently listen to your quiet inner voice, inner child or signals coming from your body, and give them the attention they’ve not been getting, it’s likely you’ll continue to seek comfort and validation from outside of yourself.
Without this compassionate relationship with yourself, it’s also likely that you’ll succumb to the critical commentary you have running in your mind about being weak, a failure, lacking willpower, being unattractive or undesirable, etc.
While we’re building your self-compassion, self-belief and resilience, we’ll also chip away at the unhelpful story you’ve probably been telling yourself. We’ll gently challenge any negative thoughts and feelings, enquiring if they’re really true. So it’s a two-pronged attack.
If deep down, you believe you’re undeserving and unworthy to live a happy, healthy live and be loved, it follows that improvements you want consciously aren’t going to stick.
If food has been a companion and source of comfort for a long time, you’ll need a healthy alternative in place before you begin to deal with overeating. I’ll help you to find nourishment beyond food.
From your first session, you’ll learn simple techniques to switch off, or considerably turn down, the anxiety response. You’ll learn proven methods that engage the ‘rest and digest’ (para-sympathetic) part of your nervous system. Beginning with your breath because it’s the most direct way to communicate calmness to your body.
And I’ll teach you easy self-hypnosis, so you can guide yourself into hypnosis whenever you want to at home. So you can feel profoundly relaxed. From this place, you create space, a pause, between a desire to binge and acting on it.
schedule a free 20-minute call with me
Ask me any questions about the programme, and let’s see if we might be a good fit to work together.
questions about 'Attuned' programme for binge eating
I’ve blended insights from specialist training in binge eating and emotional eating, with my background in hypnotic coaching and Cognitive-Behavioural Hypnotherapy. Hypnosis and CBT are complementary and operate on different levels. It’s a combination that’s backed by research.
Hypnosis goes deeper more easily. By accessing emotions and getting a felt sense in your body, profound change happens. Hypnosis opens doors to parts of you that might remain unseen within many coaching programmes and talking therapies.
Signing up for a coaching programme with me means you have support for the duration of your journey—you don’t have to work things out on your own. I’ll ask you questions you might not have asked yourself, help you to see things from new perspectives, contribute to motivation and bring accountability.
You get twelve 1-to-1 sessions with me, customised to your needs. And a brief check-in between sessions.
You’ll also have access to your own individual learning area on an online platform, so all your support materials are in one place and easy to find. Here you’ll be able to check off tasks as you do them, return any completed exercises and add any comments. I’ll share my handouts with you here and links to any videos, podcasts or articles I think might be useful for you.
By accessing processes outside of your conscious awareness, we get deep and sustainable change.
You’ll learn practices and exercises, which through repetition, create new neural pathways in your brain. You build new, beneficial habits, and the more you practise them, the more entrenched they’ll become.
I don’t promise you you won’t ever feel the desire to binge or overeat again. Everyone is different and there are so many variables. But you will finish the programme with the information, skills and tools to nip the behaviour in the bud, if it ever arises again.
€950 for the 12-week, 1-to-1 programme.
Please let me know if you’d like a payment plan.
For the first few sessions, we’ll meet every week or fortnight, so we can get off to a good start and build momentum. After that, the rhythm will be more flexible, according to what works best for you. So, we might meet over 3 months, or we might meet over 6 months.
I don’t offer a quick fix. Binge eating is often a problem someone has had for a long time. It’s likely to have become entangled with many areas of your life, including family relationships. By taking time to work through related areas in a holistic way, you’re set up for sustainable change.
why I created this programme for binge eating
With my weight-loss programme, I noticed that when clients were eating for emotional reasons, the goal of weight loss kept them stuck. While they were still wedded to the goals of being lighter and thinner, the cycle of deprivation and binging had too strong a pull.
For these women, staying focused on numbers on scales, ‘forbidden’ foods, burning off calories, and gaining acceptance, was incompatible with self-compassion and letting go of guilt and shame.
This led me to training in a programme called Eating Freely™, for practitioners who support people who are binge eating or emotional eating. I learned alongside health coaches, psychotherapists and nutritional therapists who had a wealth of experience. It was a fabulous melting pot of expertise and varied perspectives.
I learned that to resolve binge eating, weight loss needs to be taken off the table, perhaps temporarily. At least until any underlying reasons for the disordered eating are worked through. One of the first questions I’ll ask you if you’re interested in working with me is, ‘Are you prepared to put weight loss to one side for now?’
Weight loss may occur naturally as a result of following the programme. And it may not. Either way, it isn’t our goal. The outcome we’re aiming for is more profound, more life changing: to be free of obsessive thoughts about food, to develop a healthy, sustainable way of eating and a loving, compassionate relationship with yourself and your body. And for you to stabilise, at a natural weight for you.
Attuned means to bring into harmony. I want to help you experience harmony among all parts of you, conscious and unconscious, mind and body. And to experience greater harmony with the world and others around you.
you're not a hopeless case
I’m not going to judge you. I’m in your corner.
I see so many amazing women down on themselves over their eating, body shape or weight. Perhaps, like them, you’ve started to believe you’re lazy or greedy, or have no willpower.
What if it isn’t your fault? What if you haven’t had accurate, trustworthy information about eating? Or even worse, you’ve been hoodwinked by unscrupulous representatives of industries that don’t have your best interests at heart. Or you’ve not found the support you needed to work out how to normalise your eating?
Please don’t give up. You’re not out of options. Even if it feels like you’ve tried every diet, gym and therapy under the sun.
I get that you might be frightened that hypnosis is yet another thing that won’t work. It’s only natural after everything you’ve tried.
Spend a little time reading about how I work. Schedule a free call with me, no obligation attached.
We can discuss any concerns you may have. You can learn more about why a blend of hypnosis and coaching is different. And why they’re such a great combination to get to the bottom of binge eating.
questions about binge eating
Binge eating involves regularly feeling compelled to eat large amounts of food in a short time, often alone and in secret. People often binge when they’re not physically hungry and eat very quickly until they feel uncomfortably full.
Afterwards they tend to feel guilty, frustrated, ashamed, anxious or disgusted. It can be very isolating, which can contribute to the binge eating cycle.
Binge eating occurs on a spectrum, from disordered eating to Binge Eating Disorder (BED), which was recognised and listed in the DSM V in 2013. People with BED often compensate by dieting or restricting what they eat, but don’t engage in purging (getting rid of food) after a binge.
It is often a form of emotional eating: using food to reduce stress, or to numb against feeling difficult emotions, like sadness, jealousy or loneliness. Food is used for comfort when people aren’t used to practising other ways to soothe themselves.
Restrictive dieting leads to considering some foods as ‘bad’ or ‘forbidden’. Dieters feel deprived and sooner or later succumb to eating the forbidden foods they desire. This leads to low self-esteem, and so the deprivation/binge cycle repeats.
It can be a learned behaviour, picked up from those around when you were growing up.
Sometimes people eat out of boredom or something to do, and it becomes a habit.
It is absolutely possible to be healthy in a larger body, but excessive weight gain or obesity arising from binge eating or overeating can lead to health problems. These include digestive problems, breathlessness, Diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and gallbladder disease.
Regular overeating can also disrupt the circadian rhythm or body clock. When the circadian rhythm is disrupted, so too is sleep. Poor sleep is linked to the body holding onto fat. There’s also a tendency to reach for foods that give a quick hit of energy when we’re tired, rather than foods that release energy sustainably throughout the day.
The secrecy, shame and isolation that goes together with binge eating, takes its toll on mental health and morale.
Diets are not designed to be sustainable. The majority of dieters gain back the weight they lost, and more.
Restricting certain foods cultivates a deprivation mindset—a risk for developing binge eating. Deprivation also creates a physiological response, where the body believes it’s being starved, triggering a compulsion to eat and a lowering of metabolism.
Diet programmes are designed to work for short-term weight loss, with repeat customers in mind. They don’t address a person’s underlying reasons for overeating or desire to lose weight.
Yes, people who binge eat tend to be:
- ‘All or nothing’ or ‘black and white’ thinkers.
- ‘People pleasers’, who put everyone else’s needs before their own and fear rejection if they say no.
- Perfectionist and high achieving. Often with a strong need for routine or control.
- Strong inner critics, running a negative commentary about themselves.
- People who find it difficult to ask for help or support.
- People who feel unworthy or undeserving.
- Poor at self-care and self-compassion.
Usually foods that give an instant feeling of gratification. So foods that are high in sugar, salt, junk food and processed foods are favourites. These foods are hunger-inducing and so drive people to eat more of them.
Highly-processed foods (or ‘food-like products’) are not only engineered to be addictive, but cannot be healthily processed by the body.
My relationship with food
It’s rare to come across a woman who doesn’t have a disordered relationship with eating and food. I’m no exception.
I remember first feeling self-conscious about my body when I was 13 years old. I’ll never forget the shame when my sports teacher shrieked, in front of my classmates, ‘Goodness, Helen, you’ve started to pile the weight on!’
Around age 15, I began dieting. I didn’t need to hide it from my mum—she’d been a yoyo dieter all her life. At school, for lunch I’d have an apple with a can of Diet Coke.
Away at university and lonely, I binged on biscuits. Baggy black clothes became my uniform. They artfully concealed the parts of my body I thought too fat. I look at photos now of me in the 80s and feel sad that I didn’t recognise my loveliness.
In 2000, I had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS/ME) following a virus. A doctor said it was due to food intolerances and put me on a highly restrictive diet. It made no difference to my symptoms, but somehow the restricted diet remained in place. It had taken hold.
I was on a slippery slope. My weight plummeted; eating with friends became impossible. I fell into a deep depression, mentally and physically depleted.
In 2001, recovering from CFS, I started to see food as a source of healing and a fuel to keep my energy steady. I got interested in nutrition. Without trying, I fell into a weight and shape that felt healthy and natural.
Fast forward twenty years, my training to work as a specialist in Binge Eating Disorder took me on a personal journey. I came to understand how my comfort foods stem from my childhood. And I saw how I’d absorbed cultural messages about food, eating and body shape, without even realising it.
I take more time now to tune into the taste and texture of what I’m eating. I enjoy chocolate and other sweet foods (usually in moderation!).
I’ve become more compassionate towards my body. I enjoy growing fruit and vegetables and encourage everyone, who possibly can, to do the same.
Are you interested and wondering if this is right for you?
I’d love to help you find out, with no pressure.
