It’s 5:40 on a Tuesday morning, and Mary already has a nine-by-thirteen pan going. Cream of chicken soup, sour cream, frozen hash browns, cornflakes on top. Sister Whitaker’s husband died Saturday, and somebody has to feed that family.
Mary is thirty-nine. She lives along the Wasatch Front and she’s active in her ward. She’s the one who shows up early with the casserole dish. She knows which family needs meals this week. Her funeral potatoes have a reputation.
Her kids eat Cheerios behind her. She pinches a corner off the casserole before the foil goes on. Doesn’t count it. Barely a bite. That’s Tuesday.
Wednesday is Mutual. There will be cookies. There are always cookies. Thursday is the ward dinner group. It’s been running since before her oldest was born. Jenna’s bringing garlic bread. If Mary shows up without dessert, people will ask if she’s okay. Friday her ministering sister drops off banana bread. Mary had mentioned a rough week. She eats two slices at the counter while the kids do homework. That bread is an act of love. You don’t throw love in the trash.
Sunday she’s in sacrament meeting. Her skirt feels tight. She thinks about the diet she started Monday and has already broken four times. Except she didn’t break it, exactly. She just lived her life. And her life runs on food. Food at every gathering. Food on every doorstep. Food is how her whole community says “I care about you.”
Mary doesn’t have an eating problem. She doesn’t know how to deal with love when it shows up as a loaf of banana bread delivered by the Relief Society.
A BYU psychology professor named Ben Hill put it bluntly: “Our whole culture revolves around food. It’s very easy for it to become a go-to coping skill, especially if you’re Mormon and you don’t drink.”
He’s right. But it’s deeper than coping. It’s belonging. Mary can’t turn down the food without turning down the people. And the people are her whole life. I’ve sat across from a version of Mary a couple hundred times. The details change. The pattern doesn’t.
Source: Ben Hill, BYU psychology professor, quoted in The Daily Universe (Brigham Young University), June 5, 2018.
The Exit That’s Always Open
Now Tyler. He’s thirty-four, married, two kids, works in Layton. Temple recommend current. The kind of guy who says yes when the bishopric needs help with the youth campout. Even though he hasn’t slept right in three weeks.
It’s 9:40 at night. Kids asleep. Wife asleep. The house is finally quiet. Tyler stands at the open freezer with a pint of ice cream and a spoon. He’s three bites in before he notices he’s doing it again. He didn’t decide to eat ice cream. He decided to sit on the couch. The ice cream just… happened. The way it happens every night.
The Word of Wisdom takes alcohol, tobacco, and coffee off the table. For Tyler, that’s settled. He doesn’t miss what he never had. But he still needs somewhere to go at the end of a hard day. He still needs to unwind. And when the first three exits are closed — the beer, the cigarette, the coffee — he takes the fourth. The kitchen. The freezer. The pint with the spoon standing in it.
This isn’t weakness. It’s wiring. After stress, the body wants relief, and it grabs the easiest option it’s allowed. In a place that closes the usual exits and loads every table with comfort food, the easiest option is the kitchen. Every time.
Tyler has gained twenty-two pounds since his second kid was born. He doesn’t link the stress, the lost sleep, the yes to every calling, and the ice cream at 9:40. They feel separate. They’re not.
Nobody in the ward talks about this. Everyone in the ward is doing it.
You know these people. You might be one of them. And here’s the thing about losing weight in Utah: it was never really about willpower, and it was never about knowing what to eat. You live in a place with its own rules. Food is how your people say they love you. The mountains are the best gym in America six months of the year, and a gray prison the other six. And the thin mountain air is quietly working in your favor the whole time — even when nothing else is. Generic diet advice doesn’t know about any of it.
Hypnosis and hypnotherapy are not meant to diagnose or treat any disease. The information here is educational and intended to support you in making positive changes.
The Mountains Give and the Inversion Takes
In July, David is a different person.
He’s forty-three, lives in Millcreek, writes software. On a Tuesday evening in July he’s on the Bonneville Shoreline Trail by six fifteen. The light slants across the valley and turns the dry grass gold. His legs are warm. His lungs are working. Out past the lake, Antelope Island floats in the haze. He does this three, four nights a week. He doesn’t call it exercise. It’s just what Tuesday looks like.
He’s 195 pounds in July. Feels strong. Sleeps hard.
Now picture January.
He stands at the window over the kitchen sink. The sky is the color of wet concrete. It’s been this color for nine days. The mountains are out there somewhere. He knows it like he knows there’s a floor under the carpet. But the inversion has sealed the valley shut. The air quality app shows red. He checked at lunch too. Red.
It’s 5:47 and already dark. His running shoes sit by the door where they’ve been since Thanksgiving. He opens the pantry instead. Goldfish crackers. Then a handful of chocolate chips from his wife’s baking bag. Then four more handfuls while he scrolls something on his phone he won’t remember in the morning.
That’s not a Tuesday evening. That’s every evening from November through February.
The inversion does something to people along the Wasatch Front. It doesn’t just foul the air. It shrinks the world. The mountains vanish. The sky drops to a ceiling forty feet over your roof. Real sunlight goes missing for weeks, and sunlight is what keeps your mood steady. So the body goes hunting for a lift the fast way: sugar and starch. Bread. Crackers. Chocolate. They give you a quick bump and leave you back in the pantry twenty minutes later.
David gains twelve to fifteen pounds every winter. Every March he thinks, how did this happen again?
The Spring That Never Quite Fixes It
Jen has started over eleven times. She knows because she keeps a note in her phone. “Jan 2016. Keto.” “April 2017. Orange Theory.” “Jan 2018. Whole30.” “March 2019. Noom.” The list goes on.
She’s forty-one, lives in Kaysville, teaches third grade. She can tell you the calorie count of a Chick-fil-A sandwich without looking. She’s looked it up two hundred times. She’s not clueless. She might know more about food than anyone you’ve met. She’s read the books. She’s done the math. She can explain how sugar spikes your blood while eating a bag of peanut M&Ms in the school parking lot at 3:15. The afternoon was hard. The drive home is the only fifteen minutes she gets alone.
Utah’s seasons write her script.
January: new year, new Jen. She joins a gym and goes four times the first week. Three the second. Once the third. It’s dark by five, the air is gray, and the couch pulls at her like gravity.
April: panic. Her sister-in-law’s hiking trip is six weeks out. She drops to 1,200 calories and hits the gym hard. But her body remembers last time, and the time before. It hoards every calorie like a squirrel that’s seen too many winters. The scale barely moves.
May: something tears. This year it’s her foot. Last year it was her back. She takes a week off. It turns into a month.
Summer: she goes on the hike. She’s the slowest one. Everyone is kind about it. The kindness is worse than cruelty. At least cruelty would be honest.
October: something lets go. She stops counting. She stops pretending. She buys the Halloween candy early. Every night after the kids are down, she eats a Reese’s cup. It feels like setting down something heavy she’s carried since January.
Eleven starts. Each round leaves her body a little more stubborn and the next spring’s panic a little sharper. She doesn’t lack effort. She might be the hardest worker you’ll ever meet. What she lacks is a plan that doesn’t blow itself up every four months.
Ten Minutes from the Mountains, a Lifetime from the Trailhead
Rachel moved to Utah from Ohio four years ago. Partly for a job, partly for the mountains. She’d seen the pictures. She pictured herself as the kind of person who says “I did Timp this weekend” at Monday meetings, trail dirt still under her nails.
She bought hiking boots at REI her second week here. Merrell Moabs, $130. A woman next to her was trying on trail runners. Tanned, lean, calves like carved wood. Rachel turned her body away so the woman wouldn’t catch her in the mirror. She bought the boots. Took them home. Put them in the closet.
That was four years ago. She’s worn them twice.
The first time was a trail in Millcreek Canyon. AllTrails rated it “easy.” It took her forty-five minutes to do what the app said would take twenty. Two couples passed her going up. Matching Patagonia shells, moving so fast she felt like she was standing still. One of them smiled. A kind smile. She knew what it meant. Good for you, getting out there. Like she was a toddler learning to walk.
The second time she got as far as the parking lot at Donut Falls. She sat in her car ten minutes and watched people unload. A family with three kids and a golden retriever. A group of women in their twenties, ponytails swinging. She turned the key and drove home.
Utah has a $9.75 billion outdoor recreation industry. It runs on pictures of bodies that don’t look like hers. One blogger wrote about walking into a gear shop and finding the biggest base layer they stocked was a large. Not a size. A message.
Here’s the cruel part. The thing that could change Rachel’s weight is the mountains. And the mountains are the very thing that makes her feel she hasn’t earned the right to start.
She still lives ten minutes from the trailhead. Last Saturday she opened Instagram. A woman stood on the Angels Landing chains, arms out, sunrise behind her. The caption read “Utah is my gym.” Rachel tapped the heart. Closed the app. Made eggs. Didn’t go outside. The boots are still in the closet. The mountains are still right there.
What Utah’s Weight Numbers Actually Say
Maybe you saw yourself in one of them. Maybe in all of them. Here’s what matters: it isn’t only you, and it isn’t in your head. The numbers say so.
Two families push carts through the same Costco on a Saturday. One lives up by Park City, in Summit County, where 13% of adults carry excess weight. The other lives in San Juan County, where it’s 41%. Same state, same mountain air, three times the gap. Statewide, Utah sits at 31% — about ninth lowest in the country. Sounds like a win, until you notice it’s climbing. Between 2013 and 2018, Utah was one of just six states where obesity jumped 15% or more.
And averages hide the real story. Among Pacific Islander adults in Utah the rate is 70.6%. Among Asian adults, 17.5%. Same grocery stores, different worlds. Then there’s the thing nobody in the pews talks about. A BYU study found members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were 14% more likely to carry excess weight than other Utahns — and this is a group with famously low rates of smoking and drinking. The people who skip alcohol and tobacco gain more weight than the people who don’t. When the usual exits are closed, the kitchen door stays open.
Here’s the twist that makes all of it stranger. The altitude is on your side. Live more than a mile up, and your body burns fuel a little differently all day long — a tailwind you never feel. One study of more than 98,000 soldiers found the ones stationed up high were 41% less likely to become obese. Another followed 9,365 people for a decade and found that living higher cut the risk of gaining excess weight by 14%. So Utah is the rare place where your own body is quietly working for you. And people gain weight anyway. That’s how strong the other forces are.
Sources: America’s Health Rankings/CDC BRFSS 2024; Utah IBIS/BRFSS 2023; Trust for America’s Health 2019; Merrill, R.M., BYU, Utah Health Status Survey analysis; Voss et al. (2014), PLOS ONE; Díaz-Gutiérrez et al. (2016), PLOS ONE (N=9,365).
What a Generic Diet Plan Doesn’t Know About Your Life
Most weight-loss programs are built for a generic American. Count calories. Add exercise. Assume the rest is willpower. That works fine in San Diego, where it’s 72 degrees all year and nobody drops a pan of funeral potatoes on your porch on a Tuesday.
It doesn’t work here.
The question isn’t “which diet should I try?” It’s “what keeps beating every diet I try?” No calorie app, no gym membership, no January resolution is built to answer that.
A calorie app has never been to a potluck. It has opinions anyway. It blinks red on Mary’s phone while she stands in the cultural hall holding a plate of lasagna someone made for her. That red dot feels like an accusation. From a machine that can’t tell a meal from a relationship.
David had a gym membership. He also had an inversion that sealed his valley shut for nine weeks. The gym was open. His motivation wasn’t. Nobody’s built a treadmill that fixes a sky that’s been gray since Thanksgiving.
Jen has tried eleven programs. She knows more about food than the program that sold her the last one. Her problem was never information. It was the cycle. Sprint, crash, quit, repeat. Utah’s seasons feed that cycle like clockwork.
What does an outdoor fitness program do for Rachel, when the trail itself is what makes her feel unwelcome? And what does any standard plan say to Tyler at 9:40 at night, three bites into a pint, doing exactly what a body does when every other exit is closed?
These aren’t edge cases. In Utah, they’re Tuesday.
Changing the Pattern, Not Just the Menu
Diets change what you eat. I help you change your relationship with yourself, with food, and with your body. Hypnosis makes those changes more automatic — part of who you are.
One research review looked at people on a structured weight-loss program. The ones who added hypnosis lost more than twice as much weight over time. And here’s the part that matters. The gap showed up after the program ended. When the rules were gone and people were on their own, the hypnosis group kept losing. The other group stopped. It’s one study, and researchers still argue over the exact numbers. But the direction is clear. Change things below the surface, and the change outlasts willpower.
A diet hands you rules. Hypnotherapy changes the patterns underneath the eating. The stress eating. The social eating. The winter shutdown. The habit that runs on autopilot. Change the pattern, and the food choices change on their own.
Mary still goes to ward dinners. She still brings the casserole. But the second plate doesn’t happen. Not because she’s fighting it. The link between “good neighbor” and “clean plate” just isn’t there anymore. She enjoys the table. She skips the seconds.
The inversion still comes for David. The sky still turns gray. But the pantry at 5:47 isn’t the automatic next move. He found another way to end the day, one that doesn’t run through the kitchen. The twelve pounds don’t pile on.
Rachel’s back on the Millcreek Canyon trail. People pass her. The smile from the couple in Patagonia shells is just a smile now. The boots come out of the closet. Tyler’s spoon stays in the drawer. Not because he decided to skip the ice cream, but because the pull is gone. The pint sits in the freezer a week later.
And Jen. There is no twelfth start. There’s a Tuesday in February when she eats lunch, takes a walk, and never checks the calorie count. That Tuesday becomes Wednesday. Wednesday becomes a month. And somewhere in there the cycle just… stops.
Nobody makes a movie about this kind of change. You notice it in the rearview mirror. Just small and simple changes that have worked all the way into your automatic thoughts and behavior — you feel it in your guts.
What Happens When You Come In
The first session isn’t hypnosis. It’s a conversation. (If you’re wondering what hypnosis actually is, I answer the questions I hear most over here.)
You sit down. Front porch, not doctor’s office. You tell me what’s going on. Not your diet history, not your calorie targets, not the last program you tried. What’s actually happening in your life. The ward dinners. The inversion. The freezer at 9:40. The boots in the closet. Whatever it is.
I listen. I ask questions. I’m after the pattern, not the symptoms. The thing that makes the weight stick. The thing you can’t see because you’ve lived inside it so long it feels like gravity.
I’ll be straight with you. I turn people away. If what you need is a nutritionist, a doctor, or a licensed therapist, I’ll say so and point you the right way. I’ve been a hypnotherapist for over 17 years and more than 20,000 one-on-one sessions. I’m not a doctor, a psychologist, or a licensed mental health provider. I know my lane. If hypnotherapy fits, I’ll tell you why and what the work looks like. If it doesn’t, I’ll tell you that too.
If we move forward, sessions run about 50 minutes. Most people working on weight loss see me for 10 to 15 sessions over a few months. Early changes often start to show up by session four. Not weight loss, exactly. Something quieter. The casserole corner you don’t pinch. The pantry door you walk past. The spring that doesn’t open with panic.
I’ve worked with more than 3,000 people since 2008. A lot of them live right here and face exactly what’s on this page. The ward dinners. The inversion. The seasonal cycles. The boots in the closet. Utah isn’t generic. The work I do here isn’t either.
If you’ve read this far, you’re past the “does this apply to me” question. You already know it does.
The next step is a 15-minute consultation. No pressure. You tell me what’s going on. The patterns, the frustration, the thing you’ve tried eleven times. I’ll give you an honest answer about whether I can help.
That’s it. A conversation.
Disclaimer: Individual results vary. Hypnosis and hypnotherapy are not meant to diagnose or treat any disease; they are intended to provide information, education, and motivation to support you in making positive changes in your own life. The stories on this page are composite illustrations drawn from publicly available accounts — they do not represent specific individuals or guarantee particular outcomes.
Written by Will Wood · Northern Utah Hypnosis
