Weight loss surgery is often described as a life-saving, life-changing intervention. And in many ways, it is.
It can dramatically improve physical health, mobility, and quality of life.
But there’s a part of the story that doesn’t get talked about enough.
For some people, when food is taken away as a coping mechanism, something else quietly takes its place.
Very often, that something is alcohol.
This is called transfer addiction, and it is not a character flaw, a lack of discipline, or a failure of surgery. It is a predictable response when the body and nervous system lose their primary source of regulation without being given a replacement.
To understand why this happens — and why alcohol is especially dangerous after weight loss surgery — we need to look at two intertwined components:

1. What happens physically
   
2. What happens emotionally and neurologically
   

​I’ve been sober for 29 years.
That sentence still gives me pause—not because it isn’t true, but because of how much life, struggle, and growth live inside it.
When I was younger, I struggled with alcoholism. Sobriety quite literally saved my life. It gave me stability, clarity, and the opportunity to build a future I couldn’t see at the time. What I didn’t understand then was that stopping drinking didn’t mean I was finished with coping—it just meant one coping strategy was removed.
Over time, food quietly stepped in.

​People go in and out of trance many times every day.  All those times you've found yourself daydreaming or "lost in thought," you were actually in trance.  Remember those times you pull into work and don't remember the drive?  You were in a trance.  Hypnosis happens when the conscious mind is bypassed, and you access the subconscious mind.
 
Hypnotherapy uses trance to access the subconscious mind and explore the  

​Have you ever had a discussion with someone that leaves you feeling dumbfounded and rattled? I spent a lot of my childhood feeling like I was crazy because my Dad would always want me to change my thoughts and opinions. It was to the point where I just stopped having any ideas or thoughts of my own. I felt like everything I did and thought was wrong. This pattern repeated again in my marriage. It was very familiar and I didn’t like it. I would walk away from arguments not knowing what had just happened. I only knew I had given in again.

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​Enabling is one of those things we do and we don’t even know we are doing it.  It is a behaviour that we learned, probably as a child, that is motivated by a craving to be loved.   Enabling is often associated with growing up in a home with an addicted or alcoholic parent, but it can also be associated with growing up in a family where there was one or several traumas; a death of a parent, sibling or love one, emotional, physical or sexual abuse, an absent parent, divorce or any other situation that could impact a child in a negative manner.