We met by chance in North London more than 15 years ago and instantly became good friends as well as growing to become enduring professional colleagues.
Although when we met we were already busy building up our own general therapy practices, we decided to work together as co-facilitators delivering a series of weekly group-therapy weight-loss workshops in London. Working in this way allowed us the chance to originate, design and create a therapeutic course of our own, based on our shared interest.
Central to our work, now as then, is the discovery and releasing of the underlying reasons for emotional eating and emotional obesity, which we continue to believe are the key to successful long-term weight loss.
We are qualified to work in this field for several reasons. First, of course, there are our many years of therapeutic training (see below), and our professional qualifications, often to trainer, or advanced level, in several modalities, including hypnotherapy, emotional freedom technique (EFT) and, in more recent years, Master Practitioner level in percussive suggestion technique (PSTEC).
We are also empathetically qualified for this work as we have both watched with dismay our own waistlines expand in our late 40s and 50s. We have both been married and divorced, and one of us (Sally) has happily married again in recent years. We have both raised children, now grown up, of whom we are very proud, and spent years keeping our homes together, mostly on our own, while often doing two jobs. We too have faced the prospect of feeling invisible in a youth-obsessed world. We have felt hot and cold in quick succession, and come out the other side, feeling able, finally and fully, to step into our own power, and it feels wonderful!
We are the sum of everything that has ever happened to us and everything we have ever done – the positive and the negative. It informs and enriches who we are, and our work. We too are works in progress.
Over the years we have continued to learn, and refine, the therapy tools we use by working one-to-one with clients to allow them to end emotional eating and achieve their weight-loss goals.
This book is a distillation of how we work with clients in our own private practices. Thank goodness for modern technology as we are now living on different sides of the globe.
We hope, and trust, that by following our Seven Simple Steps to Stop Emotional Eating you will be able to learn, and use for yourself, the therapy tools we have found to be most effective, so that you too can free yourself, gently and non-judgementally, from your entanglements with food to lose excess weight, and step into your power too.
All we ask is that you treat yourself always with kindness and forgiveness while you do the work. If you question and doubt your own past behaviour – if you focus on times when you wish you had behaved differently – know that you were only ever doing the best you could at that time.
Breathe, and let go.
Sally and Liz
Sally Baker is a full-time therapist and writer who has been working for over a decade in private practice in London. She sees clients, both face-to-face and the world over via Skype, for a wide range of presenting issues. Her professional specialism and passion is the development and application of effective therapeutic approaches to help clients resolve and release the reasons for emotional eating so that they can achieve and maintain successful weight loss. As well as being a hypnotherapist, she is a Master Practitioner of PSTEC (percussive suggestion technique), and she is an Advanced Practitioner of EFT (emotional freedom technique).
Born in Birmingham in 1956, Sally came to London for a weekend when she was 21, and has stayed ever since. Her first job was as a trainee journalist based in Soho, writing about television and film. After 10 years of magazine publishing and editing, she made the move from theory to practice, working in visual effects production for top-end commercials, music videos and feature films.
Sally married for the first time in 1984. The marriage ended in divorce seven years later, leaving her a single parent to their five-year-old son. She continued to work in the media while juggling the demands of raising her son with those of doing a full-time job. In 2000 she met her second husband, the painter Arnold Dobbs, who welcomed both Sally and her son into his life. Two years later he offered her an invaluable opportunity when he suggested she take a break from working to discover what she would really like to do with her life.
She turned her attention to formal study and graduated with an Advanced Certificate in Post-Compulsory Education from Canterbury University. She went on to be employed as a tutor teaching young adults with severe learning difficulties at an inner-city college for over five years.
Sally has a long-term interest in the mind-body connection and its vital role in wellbeing and mental health. Around this time she qualified in holistic (Swedish) massage and was drawn to working with women survivors of sexual and physical abuse. She soon came to realise she needed more resources to enable her to hold a safe space for their emotional distress. Liz Hogon, her friend, co-writer and fellow therapist, whom she had met in the same week as she had met her second husband, introduced her to EFT. It proved to be an effective therapeutic approach to enable her clients to release their traumatic experiences and to feel more accepting of themselves.
The therapy element of her work became her main focus. Reducing her teaching hours, she undertook more advanced therapeutic training and research until this work became her sole occupation.
The experience of working in her own private practice, and the close collaboration she enjoys with Liz, have formed the basis and inspiration for The Seven Simple Steps to Stop Emotional Eating.
A qualified, full-time therapist since 2001, Liz Hogon has helped thousands of people overcome issues surrounding emotional eating, smoking, phobias and chronic anxiety. She became interested in alternative therapies when she failed to recover from a severe bout of Ross River fever in her native Australia. This debilitating mosquito-borne virus attacks the immune system and left her exhausted, with no medical resolution. Of all the therapeutic approaches she explored, it was emotional freedom technique (EFT) that proved to be the most effective in increasing her energy levels and reducing her neurological symptoms.
As a therapist, Liz became frustrated for clients who were battling emotional eating and arrived with arm-long lists of interventions they had unsuccessfully tried: expensive diet programmes, traditional therapies and even surgical procedures. She also realised that hypnotherapy was often a short-term fix, and that suggestions could wear off, leaving people to revert without having resolved the psychological issues that caused the emotional eating in the first place.
Liz sought lasting solutions to these problems and was the first to use PSTEC for emotional eating. It had previously only been used for negative feelings, with which it had enjoyed enormous success. Liz, along with Sally, has developed the specialist approach recommended in this book, which successfully addresses at a very deep level the psychological factors that create emotional eating, and uses these tools daily in her successful clinic in Melbourne, Australia.
Prior to her return to Australia, Liz worked full-time in her busy private practice in London. She initially trained there in hypnotherapy before becoming an advanced therapist and trainer in EFT. More recently, she was invited to become a Master Practitioner of PSTEC (percussive suggestion technique).
Liz’s children are all grown now and she moved back to Australia in 2010 to allow herself time with her growing brood of grandchildren. She settled in Melbourne where she has established a cutting-edge therapeutic practice. Liz is committed to Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and has also qualified in several other modalities.
NOTE: In writing this book, we have changed the names of our personal clients and not revealed their geographical locations in order to maintain their anonymity. It should be noted, however, that each of us has our own private practice and we do not see clients together as a team.