hypnotherapy can help fussy eating

I have seen many clients with  fussy eating whilst working in my clinics in Bristol and Oxford. Take two members of the same family with more or less the same genes, they may not be identical twins but we would expect them to experience similar health issues in life. But you can guess that there are so many factors to fussy eating that can change this process. We know that certain environmental pressures can switch genes on and off, and diet can boost immunity as well as be totally destructive.

One child may develop a deep dislike of the foods, which can help us maintain a healthy body. Ones that I find most common are tomatoes, brassicas, eggs and fish. These tend to be foods, which have a strong often, bitter flavour. Many parents though don’t necessarily know why their children are so fussy, and so a battle commences and depending on who wins, the child can start to associate different kinds of food with certain behaviour. A client as a child was given sweets when she had been good and went on to develop binge eating sweets when she was feeling low as the only way to cheer her up. Another lived on beef, potatoes, and peas for 6 years and went on to develop heart disease in her 40s.

My mother struggled with Fussy Eating

My mother developed fussy eating, especially around white food as a result of the rationing during the war, my sister stopped eating fish and eggs as a result of spending time in hospital as a child, past clients cite a parent with a food phobia, parents who have a very limited diet due to “father being a meat and potatoes man and nothing fancy!” The anxiety of trying new foods is what drives them to visit me in the first place, and understanding what effects food has on our long term health has driven me to take up a nutritional therapy course.

The long term effects of fussiness are what I am mostly interested in. Jack Sprat could eat no fat his wife could eat no lean, between the two they ate the lot and licked the platter clean. The long-term effect on this couple is that Jack could go on to develop complete blindness, as Vitamin A is fat-soluble. He would start to find his digestion and kidney function declining which could lead to organ failure, and he would likely suffer from many skin problems.

His wife would not become obese because she probably wouldn’t get there, as after 48 hours the lack of fibre passing through the body would mean the fat is excreted and your body thinks it’s fasting. There would be an increase in developing a hairy tongue, lethargy, fatigue, decreased appetite, and orthostatic hypotension.

Different cultures

Even the inuit who eat a large proportion of fat also eat meat and berries and have over evolution processed the food slightly differently to the rest of us.

But fussy eating isn’t just about living off nothing but chips and cheese sandwiches, it can be an obsession with healthy eating. Onorexia is narrowing our diet of healthy foods down so much we cannot eat anything else. It could be that a person only eats fruit for example. It can be related to anxiety, particularly obsession. Fussy eating can be the result of a developed habit as well as many other reasons one might end up developing an eating disorder. It affects both genders as does food phobias. In truth, humans developed as omnivores, and as other primates eat a wide range of nuts, berries, seeds, and roots, they also consume protein in the way of grubs and meat.

If someone in your family is having problems with a consuming a balanced diet, then it’s best to sort it early before it develops into a bigger problem further down the line. Call me to discuss what hypnotherapy can do to help.