How Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy Speeds up Sustainable Weight Loss
Emotional eating can take many forms – from overeating, constant snacking, and reaching for foods when stressed, angry, or tired to a fully blown binge eating disorder.
In most cases, whilst food helps to soothe emotions momentarily, it often leads to significant weight gain, especially if it becomes a habit and is left unaddressed. If you’ve ever told yourself, “I just need more willpower,” or tried to fix emotional eating with another meal plan or diet and failed, you’re not alone, and you’re not broken. The truth is, emotional eating doesn’t come from a lack of knowledge or discipline. It’s driven by patterns rooted deeply in our beliefs, emotions, and past experiences. That’s why you can’t beat emotional eating with logic, and that is exactly why so many diets eventually fail.
Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy (CBH) offers a powerful & lasting alternative to traditional ways of solving emotional eating & weight gain.
CBH combines two evidence-based approaches: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) — the gold standard in psychological treatment for behaviour change — and clinical hypnotherapy, which helps rewire the subconscious beliefs that keep us stuck. Together, they create a dynamic path forward that not only supports weight loss but also transforms your relationship with food, your body, and your self-worth.
Unlike many weight loss interventions that focus solely on physical symptoms, CBH works at both the emotional and behavioural level. Clients often come to me frustrated: they’ve tried everything, from calorie tracking, fasting apps, and every single trending dietary approach. But none of those methods address why they reach for food in moments of stress, boredom, or loneliness, but CBH does. Your body follows where your mind leads. That’s why emotional eating can’t be solved with another diet.
In a typical programme, we work together over 6–8 sessions. During this time, we:
- Analyse emotional eating patterns, identify and challenge limiting beliefs or thinking traps (“I’ll always struggle with food”, “I have bad genetics”)
- Use hypnotherapy to install healthier automatic responses, strengthen confidence and self efficacy
- Break the emotional-food link at the subconscious level
- Build practical, lasting behavioural changes with no specific diets or meal plans.
This therapeutic process leads to freedom from emotional eating, a return to body acceptance and trust, and often, significant and sustainable weight loss.
Research supports this dual approach. One study found that clients who received hypnotherapy alongside CBT lost more weight and maintained the results significantly longer than those who received CBT alone (Kirsch et al., 1995). A later meta-analysis reaffirmed that hypnosis enhances the effectiveness of behavioural treatments for obesity (Allison et al., 2001). And long-term trials have shown that CBT tailored for weight loss can lead to meaningful, lasting outcomes — especially when it targets emotional and psychological drivers (Cooper et al., 2010).
CBH stands out because it treats both the symptom (weight) and the root cause (emotional eating) together — something that few other interventions manage. Clients often tell me, “This is the first time it actually makes sense.” And they are right because weight loss happens in your head and that’s where emotional eating begins.
If you’re tired of battling your body with diets and blaming yourself, consider therapy instead of another meal plan or exercise program. Lasting weight loss begins in the mind, not the mouth.
CBH offers a hopeful new way forward — one grounded in compassion, science, & deep transformation.
References
- Allison, D. B., Faith, M. S., & Franklin, R. D. (2001). Hypnosis as an adjunct to cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy for obesity: A meta-analytic reappraisal. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 69(4), 570–579.
- Cooper, Z., Doll, H. A., Hawker, D. M., Byrne, S., Bonner, G., Eeley, E., & Fairburn, C. G. (2010). Testing a new cognitive behavioural treatment for obesity: A randomized controlled trial with three-year follow-up. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 48(8), 706–713.
- Kirsch, I., Montgomery, G., & Sapirstein, G. (1995). Hypnosis as an adjunct to cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy: A meta-analysis. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 63(2), 214–220.
Main – Photo by Artem Labunsky on Unsplash
