Common Questions

Most talking therapies treat the urge to binge as something to manage. You learn coping strategies, you identify triggers, you build distress tolerance. The urge is still expected to be there — you are simply expected to be better at handling it.

This work treats the urge itself as the problem to be addressed. The mechanism that generates cravings is well understood and, once you can see it operating in real time, it loses most of its power. The aim is not to manage cravings better. It is to no longer have them in the way you do now.

Hypnotherapy works on the subconscious. You are largely passive — something is done to you, and you hope it sticks.

This is the opposite. You are fully awake, fully participating, and at the end of the work you understand exactly what was driving your behaviour and exactly what you are doing differently now. That understanding is what makes the change permanent. There is nothing to top up, no audio to listen to nightly, no risk of it wearing off.

No. You almost certainly know what you should be eating already — the gap was never knowledge. There is no meal plan, no calorie target, no list of forbidden foods.

What I do is give you authority over your own choices, so the food decisions you make from the second session onwards are decisions you make freely, rather than ones you make against an urge.

This is the most common version of the most common question, and the honest answer is that the things you’ve tried were almost certainly aimed at the wrong target. Diets, willpower programmes, apps and most therapy work on behaviour. They don’t address the mechanism underneath that produces the urge to begin with.

If you’ve been at this for years or decades, that history is not evidence that you can’t change. It is evidence that the previous approaches were not designed to address the actual problem. Several of my clients had been binge eating for thirty or forty years before the work landed for them.

Yes. The underlying mechanism is the same whether you eat a whole tub of ice cream alone at night or whether you simply can’t stop at one biscuit. If something is overriding your stated intention around food — regularly, predictably, and against your better judgement — this work applies.

If you’re unsure, the free diagnostic can help you see where you sit.

For binge eating disorder (BED) and the binge-eating side of bulimia, yes — the approach is well suited to both, and a large proportion of clients arrive with one or other diagnosis.

For anorexia or for active purging behaviour, this work is not the right first step. Those situations call for clinical care with appropriate medical oversight, and I will say so on the consultation rather than take the work on.

The programme is not a weight-loss programme and weight is not the metric we work to. That said, when the binge eating stops, weight tends to come down on its own — without the constant restraint and rebound that diets create. Several clients have lost a significant amount as a quiet by-product of the work.

The change you can rely on is the one you came for: the urge stops dominating the day. The weight, if there’s weight to lose, tends to follow.

All sessions are online, by Zoom. Most clients prefer it — you do the work from somewhere private and comfortable, with no travel either side. The intimacy of the conversation is the same.

Yes. Sessions are run in English at a time we agree together. Clients have joined from across Europe, North America and further afield. Time-zone permitting, it makes no difference where you are.

With at least 24 hours’ notice, sessions can be rescheduled without charge. Life happens; the work is more important than the calendar.

Yes. The Core programme can be paid in two instalments, the Intensive in three. We arrange this on the consultation if it’s helpful.

Both programmes include two follow-up calls after the final session — one at three weeks, one at seven. These are part of the original fee, not an upsell, and they exist precisely to catch anything that wobbles in real conditions.

Genuine relapse — in the “back to where I started” sense — is rare. The change is built on understanding, and understanding doesn’t evaporate. Most people don’t need anything further. Those who want a refresher can book individual sessions at any point.