Wanna Go Vegetarian? Call a Hypnotist

The young woman in my hypnosis office had a burning question that needed answering
before she would sit down: "Ever hypnotize someone to be a vegetarian?"

"No," I said. I had told her a month earlier by phone, but she was optimistic.

I wished a troop of vegetarian hopefuls had flocked to my office recently, but it hadn't happened.

"You've helped smokers become nonsmokers, right?" she asked.

"Many," I admitted.

"It's pretty much the same, I think," she said, looking me straight in the eye with her clear blue ones.

"Why do you say so?" I asked.

What followed was an insightful, well-thought-out answer crystallizing in "For me it's not just eating differently. It's a change of thinking and living, and taking on a new identity all at once, a new way of being."

Bull's-eye, I thought.

"It's what happens when a smoker becomes a nonsmoker," she said. Then "will you help?"

The smoking comparison seemed apt, but this was bigger, deeper, more global, and possibly even more strongly linked to identity.

I thought for a moment. "Tell me more."

She talked about her growing horror of eating flesh, being an agent in killing, about how the taste of meat had changed in her mouth, but how she still loved chicken.

"Do you really need to give up chicken, too, right now?" I asked, thinking of gradual vegetarians I have encountered. But I knew her answer.

"Yes!" she barked.

It made her life as a good person a lie, she explained. It was unethical-worse than stealing, or adultery. It was murder.

But while her morals abhorred it, her mouth, tongue, tastebuds, and physical being craved it.

Ok, I told her, we would set an appointment for the next week.

"Can you make me want tofu?" she asked.

"Would you be willing to find a recipe that makes it taste like chicken?"

She laughed. "Great idea!"

Changing one's tastes and natural attractions is an element of becoming vegetarian, and of dieting, and those who master it fare much better than others.

In this case, the change had a powerful ethical element-which could both strengthen a client's resolve and also cause her distress if she failed or mis-stepped.

A new concern arose: If she did flavor tofu and seitan to resemble the taste of chicken dishes, would that ultimately interfere with abstinence from real chicken dishes?

"What do you think?" I asked.

She didn't answer immediately. Her eyes moved upward for a moment and then traveled downward, a sign that she had first seen first seen something, perhaps a food item, in her mind's eye and then sensed it in her belly.

Then she said thoughtfully, "No, it's not that taste I need to stop liking, it's that particular food source." Her eyes moved to the side. In NLP theory, this usually signals tapping into the auditory sense, listening to one's own thoughts or recalling something one had heard.

"Who told you that?"

"I think I heard it in an old Adele Davis lecture," she said, "I guess it really stuck."

We proceeded with a hypnosis session followed by a couple of neuro-linguistic techniques, and that was that.

She tells me she has not eaten meat or chicken since, but has become a whiz at vegetarian cooking and is looking at becoming vegan in a year.

The funny thing is I haven't eaten much meat or poultry since that session either. ©2009 by Wendy Lapidus-Saltz. All right reserved.