From The Rainbow Machine: Tales from a Neurolinguist’s Journal by Andrew T. Austin.
Food choices are made in an environment that is constantly making suggestions. Pictures invite appetite, offers encourage larger portions and familiar brands connect eating with pleasure, reward or belonging. A conversation about weight that notices only the individual’s willpower leaves that environment largely unexamined.
My interest in this grew out of early hypnotherapy work. Observations in a small practice led me to wonder about the relationship between responsiveness to suggestion and responsiveness to advertising. That remains a hypothesis to examine, not an established explanation of body weight. It nevertheless opens a useful question: what happens when a person is expected to resist a system designed to encourage consumption?
Learning that communication could be studied
I entered hypnotherapy training with much less knowledge than I later acquired. The course was taught by Stephen Brooks at the Royal Masonic Hospital. The venue attracted me, and I had not properly understood what Ericksonian meant. I initially confused Milton Erickson with the psychologist Erik Erikson.
What excited me, once the training was under way, was discovering that communication could be observed, categorised and practised. Language was not merely something one happened to be good or bad at. There were patterns to study and skills to improve.
I worked at Southampton General Hospital and placed notices around the hospital asking for volunteers so that I could practise. Many people were willing to help. The invitation created a different relationship from advertising myself as an expert with a solution. I was openly learning, and the volunteers were contributing to that learning.
Helping a beginner can feel different from needing help
There can be an identity difference between becoming somebody’s client and volunteering to help a trainee. A person who is hesitant to announce that they have a problem may feel more comfortable helping somebody else develop a skill. The same conversation can acquire a different meaning from the role in which it begins.
That possibility should not be used to disguise treatment or recruit people into work they do not understand. The role needs to be stated honestly. A trainee still needs appropriate supervision, clear limits and an agreement about what will happen. Openness about being a beginner is useful because it reduces misleading expectations, not because it removes responsibility.
One of my strongest learning experiences was recording my own side of sessions. I had assumed that others experienced the friendly or useful intention behind my communication. Watching my expressions and hearing my voice showed me how much intention and delivery could differ.
A recording intended to review the practitioner’s behaviour still requires the other person’s informed agreement, since their voice or personal material may be captured. A role-play with consenting colleagues can serve the same purpose. The useful question is specific: what did I actually communicate, and how does that compare with what I thought I communicated?
The apparently simple problems
At first I looked for what I considered straightforward hypnotherapy requests, particularly smoking and weight loss. Experience corrected that assumption. Familiarity with a problem category does not make an individual case simple. Eating and smoking can be connected with routines, relationships, health, emotion and the environments in which a person lives.
It would be misleading to regard these as areas in which a beginner cannot do harm. Eating difficulties may involve medical or mental health concerns, and an unsuitable intervention can add shame or delay appropriate help. The practitioner needs to understand the particular request and remain within their competence.
In my early group of volunteers, some of the people seeking help with weight appeared particularly responsive to hypnotic suggestions. That caught my attention. It did not tell me whether the observation would recur in a wider group, whether my expectations influenced what I noticed, or what the relationship meant.
A memorable clinical impression is a starting point for a question. It is not sufficient evidence that people with a particular body size are more hypnotisable. Nor does it demonstrate that hypnotic responsiveness causes weight gain. The distinction between an observation and an explanation needs to remain visible.
Advertising as an invitation to experience
Food advertising often works through more than information about a product. Close-up imagery, texture, sound, anticipation and the performance of enjoyment invite the viewer to imagine an experience. The product is presented as a reward, an indulgence or a route to a feeling.
My comparison with hypnosis concerns this arrangement of attention and expectation. A message can invite a response without presenting itself as an instruction. Repetition and familiarity may make a product easy to recognise and easy to picture in a particular situation. Calling that a hypnotic suggestion is an analogy, not proof that an advertisement induces a clinical hypnotic state.
Food also differs from an optional purchase that can simply be abandoned. Eating is necessary. People must repeatedly enter food environments and make choices within them. The task is not to become immune to appetite but to understand how appetite is being addressed and what options are readily available.
The small upgrade and the larger meal
An offer to increase a portion for a small additional price changes the question from “How much do I want?” to “Why would I refuse better value?” The extra amount can feel negligible at the point of purchase. Repeated across many transactions, the offer also serves a commercial purpose.
The person may not experience the decision as persuasion. They may simply feel sensible for accepting the bargain. That is why it helps to distinguish value for money from value for the purpose of the meal. A larger portion can be a good price without being the quantity someone intended to eat.
This example does not require exact claims about profit margins or production costs. Its significance lies in the framing of the choice. Portion size, price and the presentation of the default can all become part of the decision before the person has reflected on hunger or preference.
What the evidence supports
The World Health Organization describes obesity as arising from complex interactions involving biology, behaviour, access to food, market forces and the wider environment. That supports looking beyond individual blame. It does not support attributing every case to advertising or treating the food industry as the sole cause.
WHO also recommends action to reduce the impact of unhealthy food marketing on children. A child’s environment and the commercial messages surrounding food are legitimate public health concerns. Recognising that does not require predicting a child’s future from their appearance or making disparaging assumptions about their family.
Listening to the language of inevitability
In conversation, I notice shifts from a personal observation to a general rule: “I get hungry” becomes “You cannot help buying things in a supermarket.” The second form can make an experience sound inevitable and shared by everyone. That is worth exploring.
The pronoun alone proves nothing about hypnosis. People use a general “you” for many ordinary reasons. A useful response is to ask what happens for this person, in this setting, rather than diagnosing a hidden suggestion from a grammatical feature.
Ask when the urge appears, what precedes it, which offers catch attention and whether the same thing happens elsewhere. Explore both the person’s room for choice and the pressures around that choice. Practical support becomes more precise when it addresses a real pattern in a real environment, rather than demanding that somebody demonstrate stronger character.