Healing Food Sensitivities: How Hypnotherapy Resets Your Gut-Brain Connection

Imagine the one thing that brings you joy being taken away. For me, that was food. Growing up, food was my main source of comfort during challenging times, and even now, I consider myself a foodie. But at 19, everything changed. I developed gastritis, a painful condition, and my doctor—deeply invested in alternative medicine—diagnosed me with food sensitivities. After taking an IGG test, I was told to eliminate over 50 foods from my diet. My doctor recommended an elimination diet, which I followed strictly for several months. But instead of finding relief, my condition worsened.

If you’ve faced food sensitivities or gastrointestinal (GI) issues, my story might sound all too familiar. We’re often told that the answer lies in restriction—cutting out foods our bodies supposedly can’t handle or avoiding those labeled unhealthy, like gluten. But what if the real issue isn’t the food itself, but the fear we develop around it? What if this cycle of restriction is part of the problem? In this post, I share my personal healing journey and how hypnotherapy offers a powerful alternative to food restrictions.

In the early days of my elimination diet, I felt trapped. What used to be a joy—grocery shopping—became an emotional ordeal. The sight of the foods I could no longer eat often brought me to tears. As I strictly adhered to the diet, my health only worsened. I developed skin lesions and became increasingly isolated, avoiding social outings because managing my dietary restrictions felt too overwhelming. Despite following my doctor’s advice, I found no relief and grew anxious about both my diet and my health.

The Real Cause of My Symptoms

After seeing several doctors and undergoing various tests, I finally took a proper food allergy test. The result? I was allergic to apples. Ironically, apple juice had been my go-to throughout the elimination diet to fill the hunger that restrictive eating left me with. The real takeaway wasn’t just the irony of the situation, but the mental toll that food restrictions had taken on me.

It took another 15 years to recover fully, and during that time, I experienced both highs and lows. I spent thousands on medical treatments, constantly searching for a cause and fearing something was terribly wrong. But in my 30s, I reached a turning point. I decided that I didn’t want food to control my life anymore. Slowly, I reintroduced foods I had been avoiding and developed a more flexible mindset. Setbacks didn’t faze me as much, and I refused to live in fear of food.

How Hypnotherapy Helped Heal My Relationship with Food

Hypnotherapy was instrumental in my recovery. I began using it to manage my Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), and for the first time, everything clicked. My symptoms weren’t caused by disease or a gut imbalance, but rather by years of stress, anxiety, and restrictive dieting. My brain and nervous system had been conditioned to see food as a threat, even when it wasn’t.

This is where the mind-body connection plays a key role. Our nervous system dictates much of how our body responds to food. When we fear food or believe it to be harmful, our body and gut communication is turned up and becomes a sometimes overwhelming chatter of symptoms. Even people with organic conditions like celiac disease or ulcerative colitis experience a heightened nervous system response. Over time, this conditioning leads to a cycle of stress and hypersensitivity, even when there is no physical threat. Hypnotherapy helps to retrain the brain and nervous system to respond calmly to food, which is why it’s recommended for IBS in the UK.

This mind-body healing process was crucial in helping me break free from the cycle of food restriction and anxiety.

Breaking the Cycle: How Food Restrictions Feed Anxiety

Food restrictions don’t just affect our physical health; they take a toll on our mental and emotional well-being as well. The more we restrict our diets, the more we feed into a cycle of fear and anxiety. We become hyper-focused on what we eat, constantly worried about how our body will react. This only worsens the problem: the more anxious we become, the more our body reacts to food.

Health professionals and the supplement industry often promote restrictive diets as the solution to food sensitivities and GI issues. But these approaches rarely address the underlying problem. Instead, they reinforce the idea that our bodies are fragile, broken, and in constant need of control. This leads to an endless cycle of elimination diets, supplements, and new health trends.

The truth is, the body is incredibly resilient. While some people do have   food allergies or intolerances, many so-called sensitivities are the result of a conditioned response between the brain and gut. Hypnotherapy can help break this cycle by deconditioning the nervous system and teaching the body to respond more appropriately to food.