Men’s Health Week: Can hypnotherapy cure emotional eating?

In the lead-up to Men’s Health Week, Joanna Wane talks to Richard Kellow about emotional eating and the virtual gastric band Boarding school can leave psychological scars in some unexpected ways. For Ross, an Auckland engineering manager, it may have contributed to his near-fatal heart attack last year. Feeling strangely “uncomfortable” one morning, he drove to his local medical centre and was rushed by ambulance to hospital, where a 95 per cent blockage was found in one of his coronary arteries.

While he’d been dawdling in the shower at home, death was barely a whisker away. Ross, who asked for his surname not to be used for privacy reasons, was discharged with a stent in place and strict instructions to adopt a healthier lifestyle. A series of post-op cardiac rehabilitation sessions helped set him on the right track.

But it wasn’t so much what he was eating but how he was eating, according to his wife, Michele. “He was a hoover!” she says. “I’d make dinner and put his plate on the table; by the time I’d got back to the kitchen with my plate to sit down and eat with him, his plate would be empty.

Then he’d do the dishes and literally lick the pots clean. You couldn’t open a packet of biscuits because before you knew it, they’d all be gone. I was always telling him to slow down and chew his food.

He’d just put it in his mouth and swallow, so his brain never had the chance to register that he was full.” It was Michele who read about hypnotherapist.