You think you're the one this won't work for.
You've tried too many things, spent too many years, and been let down too many times to believe that anything is going to be different. Your situation feels too deep and too complicated for someone to actually fix.
I hear this a lot. A woman will describe her history and then say something like "but I don't think I'm like your other clients." She means it as a warning. She's telling me, before I even start, that I shouldn't get my hopes up about her.
Jennifer listed everything she'd tried over fifty years and called it "a veritable graveyard of overeating fixes." Every diet, every hypnotherapy course, every program that promised this time would be different. And then she said: "I'm not sure I could take another failed experiment."
That's not scepticism, it's self-protection. She's not really asking "does this work?" She's asking "is it safe to try again?"
I understand that, and I'm not going to argue with it.
Your history is real. So is every penny you've spent and every time you've started over and felt like a fool for believing it would be different. If someone told me they'd tried to fix something 30 times and it never worked, I'd be sceptical too.
But here's what I'd want to know. Did all 30 attempts work at the same level? Because if they did, then the problem isn't how many times you tried. The problem is that you tried the same kind of thing 30 times.
Every approach you've used has worked at the level of your conscious mind.
Diets give you conscious rules to follow. Therapy helps you consciously understand why you eat. Willpower asks your conscious mind to resist. All of them are asking the 5% of your brain that you control to overpower the 95% that runs on autopilot.
The program lives in your nervous system. It was installed there, probably when you were very young, in response to something your brain registered as a threat. It built the eating pattern as a way to cope, and then it kept running for decades.
Being "the exception" would mean your nervous system works differently from everyone else's.
It doesn't. Your story is unique and the shame you carry is real. But the mechanism underneath works the same way in everyone. It works the same way in a doctor who tells patients how to eat and then goes home and can't do it herself. It works the same way in a woman who had surgery, lost twelve stone, got down to eleven, and put three stone back on because nobody dealt with what was actually driving it.
The program doesn't care how smart you are or how long you've had it. It runs below all of that.
Your evidence for being the exception is that nothing has worked. But nothing has worked because every approach targeted your conscious mind, and the program doesn't live there. Remove the wrong tool from the equation and the evidence collapses. You didn't fail 30 times. You used the wrong tool 30 times.
I know that's hard to sit with when you've been let down as many times as you have. But the alternative is to keep believing you're uniquely broken, and I don't think you believe that. Not really. Something brought you here and something made you keep reading.
That part of you already knows the tools were wrong, not you.
Anna