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If you feel you often lose control of your eating and your hunger, if you feel anxious or even afraid to enter your kitchen or go out to eat with friends. If you feel you can’t stop eating once you start, or you no longer want to be controlled by food and the emotions that surround it, lean in my friend and get inspired.

This is your wake up call to a life where food doesn’t control you. Where you’re comfortable with what you eat and where you can easily stop whenever you want to. This isn’t science fiction and it’s not another empty weight loss promise. This is hypnosis. And if you like this show, you’ll love my powerful hypnosis audio.

The binge blocker protocol. This hypnosis helps you stop out of control eating the moment you feel that urge. It’s a 15 minute audio that deals with the emotions behind compulsive eating. Once those emotions are out of the way, the urge to overeat [00:01:00] goes away with it. Once you get your binge blocker protocol, you can download it to your phone to carry with you whenever you might feel that urge. Whether in a restaurant, in your home or even at your workplace when those breakroom donuts are calling your name. Whether you call it a binge, overeating or simply losing control for a moment, this audio will help you resolve it. You can get your binge blocker protocol by going to anywherehypnosis.com.

That’s anywherehypnosis.com. Right on the homepage, you’ll see where you can get your copy of the binge blocker protocol right now. And I’m serious about that, right now. Pause this podcast to go get your hypnosis today. Don’t worry. I’ll still be here when you get back. Go to anywherehypnosis.com and sign up.

It’s completely free. And if you’re even thinking about getting this hypnosis, trust me, get this hypnosis today. Try it out because you’ll never [00:02:00] know just how effective this can be until you test it out in your own life. Again, that’s anywherehypnosis.com. One more time, anywherehypnosis.com. Now on with the show. 

 This is the weight loss with hypnosis podcast, where we share the why and the how of losing weight, eating right, and overcoming compulsive eating. Even better, we’re doing it with the minimum of lost time and wasted effort. My name is Doug sands and I’m your weight loss and compulsive eating hypnotist. On this show you’re going to learn about more than hypnosis alone. You’re also going to get cutting edge interviews with industry leading health experts from dieticians and nutritionists to fitness experts, psychologists, and more. We’re also diving deep into the emotions that cause us to overeat and retain extra weight, or even explore the unconscious patterns that cause compulsive eating, body image issues and even eating [00:03:00] disorders. Get ready my friend, because this show may change your life forever. Let’s get started.

Welcome back to the weight loss with hypnosis podcast. I’m Doug Sands and I’m the hypnotist and the host behind this show. This week we’re talking about how this podcast is not just about weight loss. I’ve been talking with a lot of nutritionist recently about weight loss versus eating disorders, versus compulsive eating and body image.

And I want you to know right off the bat that this podcast is not just about weight loss. I did name it The Weight Loss With Hypnosis Podcast to help people find the show. This is what a lot of people come to me for. They often think of weight loss when looking for a hypnotist for the first time. But I also work extensively with body image and disordered eating using some very similar programs. This episode is about how hypnosis can help with both of those areas. [00:04:00] So before we dive in, if you haven’t listened to the show before, my name is Doug Sands and I help compulsive and emotional eaters to end the obsession with food and make peace with it.

I do this by working with hypnosis. I’ve been specializing in weight loss and compulsive eating for quite some time now. And if you’ve been listening in for a while, welcome back. So with that, let’s dive right into it. Talking first about how hypnosis can help with a body image.

Body image is one of the biggest issues in our weight and our health. Oftentimes it might seem like a small addition to the overall puzzle, but our body image tends to decide how we feel about ourselves and thus how we feel about our weight and our health. Lots of times people come to me simply because they do not like the way they look. Even if they are fit and even if they have a fairly good health overall, they might still feel that their body needs to be changed. And that’s not a problem with our mirror. That’s a problem with our [00:05:00] perception of ourselves. This is often because media has taught us not to like our bodies.

And this problem has been around since mass media first started. After about world war II here in the US and in other Western countries, that’s when media started portraying the ideal person, the person who is rather thin, rather healthy, rather fits. And we had something new to compare ourselves to in the mass media.

This is why we saw rising numbers of people with body image issues in post-World war II America. Around that time, we started seeing ads for diet pills for stay at home wives. We started seeing ads for swimwear and ads for cigarettes to help you lose weight. All of these things slowly, but continuously build up an image that we may not be enough, then an image that we possibly might not be able to attain. And this only got worse as media became ever more pervasive. Everything from TV ads to the Dawn of the [00:06:00] computer, to now we have social media with us every single day, living in our pockets. We literally have a computer feeding us these things each and every day. The hours that the average person in Western cultures spends staring at a screen each day has gone up.

I think it’s somewhere between six and eight hours for the average person nowadays. And most of this learning that we do when comparing ourselves to other people, of their body image, is done unconsciously. A study done on billboard advertising found that ads were actually more effective when people weren’t really paying attention.

That message that the billboard was trying to get across, tends to slip into the unconscious without us even realizing it. And this can be terrifying if you really think about this. Ads really do work because a lot of the time we’re not paying attention to it. We’re paying attention to something else as we drive by, or as we scroll through our social media and that ad pops up, and our unconscious is drawing messages in all the time.

Our unconscious is [00:07:00] always learning, because the unconscious’ one goal is to keep us alive. And the one way it can do that most effectively is by being adaptable. To be adaptable, it needs the most information it can access. And so the unconscious has been trained over the centuries to soak in information every single waking moment. This is really interesting because the conscious mind tends to focus on between five and nine things. The magic number seven plus or minus two, if you’re familiar with the study. But the conscious mind is not really that great at absorbing all of the flood of information that we are constantly inundated with.

If you’re watching this episode on YouTube, you can see that I am sitting in a room and my mind is not currently conscious of the color of the walls or the light playing off of my reflection or the sound of the bubbles coming from the drink that I’ve got sitting right next to here.

But the unconscious is soaking up all this stuff all the time to form a comprehensive picture of the world around us and it [00:08:00] is doing the same thing with media. And this can be especially dangerous when we’re talking about social media. When we’re scrolling through our social media, we’re only half paying attention, just like those billboards and our mind is picking up messages on what your body should look like.

This is completely unfair to your unconscious and here’s why, because of photoshop. There are so many ways that people can manipulate pictures to look better or to look thinner or to look healthier. I recently saw a behind the scenes video about a fitness clothing photo-shoot that was tampered with, without Photoshop at all. I saw the video of a model wearing leggings and a sports bra warming up to get ready for this shoot. And then someone, an assistant maybe brought out what looks kinda like a pair of Brock cups, but it was actually a mold for butt cheeks. The assistant actually helped the models slide these molds into the back of her leggings to make her look like she had quote and quote, the perfect butt, whatever that might be. I [00:09:00] really stress this because what you see in media, especially social media is not always real. If it’s not photoshopped on a computer, they’re often faked in other ways. The issue here is that the brain is always picking up on these messages and this creates impossible standards.

There’s no way that anyone can possibly have that perfect butt that this model was trying to replicate without, you know, winning the genetic lottery. Oftentimes, those things it’s not about exercise or weight, it’s simply about the way our body is shaped. and the reason that our brain absorbs these so readily, is that the brain cannot tell the difference between reality and a vividly pictured fiction.

This is why we still jump at horror movies. Logically, we still know that it’s just pixels on a screen, but we jump as if Freddy Krueger is actually there in the living room with us. It’s also why we tear up at sad movies or exciting movies or emotional movies, whatever they may be. [00:10:00] We know that Brad Pitt is not actually dating this woman, but it still breaks our heart. And our brain’s ability to believe things that aren’t actually real is in fact, one of the powerful ways that we have adapted. It allows us to imagine the future and to plan, but this can be really insidious when talking about our weight. Even if logically, we know that those images and those videos are not actually real, the unconscious does not. The unconscious assumes that everything it sees, if it looks vivid enough, is real. And this is dangerous, especially as Photoshop tools become more and more realistic and more and more available to the general public. Since we are only seeing highly fit thin models on the media, our brain now thinks that everyone is this way, and this is even more prevalent as social media influencers pick up on the trend of showing only the highlights of their life.

Only the images where they look perfect, where they don’t have a [00:11:00] double chin or where their stomach looks extremely flat. I watched another video recently of a woman in a bikini showing how just by positioning her body, she could effectively take off about 10 to 15 pounds in the camera’s eyes. She simply raised the straps for bikini up, pointed her hips back a little bit, and it looked like she was completely different person.

Simply the angle and the lighting can change this perception without even using Photoshop. And we only see the perfect Instagram photos. Nevermind the 200 photos that they took to get that shot. Nevermind the two hours of hiking or posing or photo editing that it took to get it to look perfect. Now the brain wants to be like everyone else.

And this is because back in primal times, this was about survival. our ancestors were herd minded creatures. We wanted to be in a tribe so that we could get protection. And being like everyone else meant that you were more likely to be accepted. In primal times, this was critical because if you were [00:12:00] ostracized from the tribe, you might literally die. You might miss out on food gathering and food sharing across the tribe. You might miss out on protection from stronger members of that tribe. You might miss out on a watch or protection while you were sleeping or getting help if you get sick or are injured. Now, the brain was developed in times like these, when there wasn’t a lot of safety, when there was a lot of lack and a lot of danger in our lives. And the brain still believes that this is life or death. That’s why we see kids in high school who are so drawn to being in groups, who are so afraid to strike out on their own. The brain believes that being part of the group is critical. And it also believes that we might not be able to find a mate if we are not perfect. It believes that if there are all of these perfect people that we’re seeing on social media and all across magazines and TV ads. If all these people look perfect, then we need to reach their level if we are ever going to compete with them, if we are ever [00:13:00] going to find that love. And this is to explain why body image issues are so prevalent in our society. This also explains the rising number of people with body dysmorphic disorder and what this is, is an extreme focus on real or perceived flaws, to the point that it interferes with daily life.

And I want you to know that this is not a diagnosis. This is only information that you might use to learn a little bit more about this and see maybe if you want to do some more research or get a diagnosis yourself. Those with body dysmorphic disorder or BDD may spend hours in front of a mirror trying to get their appearance completely perfect. And this is more than just vanity. This is fear based. Their mind believes that this is life or death, or this is equally critical to their success or to their love life or whatever might be most important to them. They feel that at some level, they won’t be loved if they are not perfect. Those with [00:14:00] BDD, may feel intensely anxious about their appearance. They may check and recheck their appearance multiple times every single hour. Meaning they also devote a ton of mental energy to worrying about how they look. And they also may avoid social situations. I’ve heard of people with BDD, literally backing out of a party while sitting in a car in the parking lot, because they saw a flaw that they perceived in their appearance.

And the tricky thing with this is that the flaws may not even be real. A brain with BDD tends to enlarge flaws, or it may even imagine flaws where none actually exists. And this has been tracked and studied by science. This has been tested by putting people with and without BDD in an MRI machine.

When shown pictures of their face, those without BDD had brain activity and areas that sees image as a whole, as a comprehensive thing. It’s kind of like seeing the entire forest. And those [00:15:00] with BDD, we’re literally only seeing the flaws. Their brains were focused on the details, especially the details that they did not feel were quite up to snuff.

They weren’t really seeing the whole person. It’s kind of like seeing the trees and losing the forest, not actually seeing the whole picture. It’s kind of like looking in a fun house mirror. This is actually a quite common way of describing body dysmorphic disorder. The image is distorted so much so that it kind of takes up everything else.

You may know logically that this isn’t real, but there it is right in front of you. This image that seems so vivid, so real that your mind might not be able to tell the difference. Now, BDD is rising in all Western cultures. It is estimated that one in five people in Western countries now face this issue. This is only getting worse as social media becomes more and more prevalent in our lives. And body dysmorphic disorder is often [00:16:00] one of those things that is hidden for many, many people. It’s one of those things that doesn’t have a clear definition like anorexia or bulemia. It doesn’t have a cutoff point that defines what is and what isn’t BDD. Body dysmorphia is also a big image for those who appear healthy.

This is very common for bodybuilders, and it’s also common in highly athletic people. This is growing, especially in Western cultures. This can become Anorexia Athletica or what’s known as exercise bulemia. It’s simply where a person controls the calories their bodies consuming by excessive exercise. Meaning that someone can look very healthy, but they may not be very healthy with their relationship with their body and with what they eat. Even though they look great on the outside, they may be facing a lot of struggles with their food relationship. All of these issues can eventually lead to eating disorders, and eating disorders aren’t just [00:17:00] about food. They’re about the beliefs that we hold about what our weights and our body actually means. And the key here is to remember that the brain cannot tell if a belief is false or true. When the brain believes something, it believes it. Meaning, it believes that it is true and that becomes the reality that we see life through. We’re all experiencing the world through our own set of beliefs. Our past experiences tend to color how we see that world.

When those, with an eating disorder or disordered eating in general, believe that they’re too fat or that no one will love them if they’re not a size zero, or that everyone can see that tiny scar on their cheek that they completely blow out of proportion, they believe it. It becomes their reality. Their brain does not know any other way.

And they often don’t question it because to them it’s real. If you’ve ever seen the matrix, it’s like a being in the matrix and not realizing that this isn’t real, that this isn’t reality. The [00:18:00] brain convinces themselves that it’s real because that’s what it’s supposed to do. This isn’t done out of malice. The brain has to do this.

Oftentimes when we are faced with a traumatic event or a buildup of stress in our lives or something else that shakes up the status quo, the brain has two basic options. It can either rationalize it as something that was supposed to happen, or it can accept that the world is an unpredictable, dangerous place and that anything terrible could happen at any moment. for a very sanity, our brains may often rationalize terrible terrible things. It’s why victims of abuse may come to believe they invited the abuse, or they were the cause of this abuse. It’s why those with disordered eating may rationalize behaviors that logically make no sense. And again, this is not to diagnose. If you’re looking for a diagnosis, I encourage you to see a doctor.

This is simply to give you some information on why your brain might be holding some things that might [00:19:00] not actually help you. And if you’re looking to learn more about solving these issues, I encourage you to subscribe to this podcast. You’ll learn more about how I help clients work with their unconscious habits and mental programs rapidly to break down those false realities and build up new ones.

You’ll also learn how other health professionals that I work with, are helping people with nutrition and fitness plans to overcome these issues and recover from these mental injuries that we are often carrying around without even realizing it.

And remember, you’re only going to get that if you subscribe. So this episode was all about talking about the other areas of this podcast and of what I do. It’s not all about weight loss, and there are many different areas of our weight and our mental view of our weights that we can work with using hypnosis and other tools that you can get on this podcast. 

Again, this has been the weight loss with hypnosis podcast. My name is Doug Sands, and I really thank you for joining me on this episode. Next week, we’re going to have some awesome information and I encourage [00:20:00] you to be around for it. Click that subscribe button wherever you’re listening to this podcast.

And I will see you soon.

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Like what you heard in this episode? Remember to Subscribe! Click the + button on your favorite podcasting app, because there are plenty of resources here to help you on your journey.

Want to watch the interviews happen? Check out the Weight Loss with Hypnosis podcast on YouTube! Whether on a solo show or a guest interview, you can view everything that’s happening behind the scenes.

Want to know more about weight loss and Hypnosis? Check out Doug’s website! Here, you can learn more about how Doug helps people with losing weight, changing their body image, and overcoming compulsive eating. You can also get your Binge Blocker Hypnosis, to help you overcome uncontrollable eating whenever it strikes!

Finally, if you’d like even more of the Weight Loss with Hypnosis podcast, check out the show on Instagram and TikTok!

To your journey towards better health,

Doug

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P.S. If you’d like to see what Doug’s better half is up to, check out her travel site here!

Links:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgp0ylxhJsL2QXsU8IdmQVQ

https://anywherehypnosis.com/

https://www.instagram.com/anywherehypnosis/

https://www.tiktok.com/@weightlosshypnosis?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1&lang=en

https://www.bonvoyagebrittany.org/