For many of us, food has been our best friend and our worst enemy. It’s like that best friend we’ve all had at some point in our lives: the gorgeous, successful and nice one. The one that you love, but also love to hate. Why did they get the pick of the gene pool? They’re great, and yet they make you feel terrible. That’s what food is like: delicious yet devious. It can remind us of celebration, of home, of our grandmother’s house. But it can also make us feel guilty and out of control.

So what’s the solution? Well, there’s the diet route. But even dieting can be a frenemy, an exhausting metronome swinging back and forth between soy protein smoothies and butt-kicking cardio, and the fallen-from-the-bandwagon overindulgence in Hostess Snack Cakes and Ben & Jerry's. It's maddening. It's frustrating. Mostly because it's not that we don't know how to lose the weight and keep it off—exercise and eating right, duh—it’s because it just doesn't seem that we have the willpower and self-control to follow through and maintain. Would it make you feel better if I told you that it's that kind of mindset that's the root of your dieting delinquency?

Lauren Grant has some of the best news you’ve ever heard. Fourteen years ago, she started a weight program unlike any other called The Hungry Heart. Its unique approach lies in the fact that it doesn’t target weight loss from a calorie intake or calorie burning standpoint, but rather from a heart standpoint. And when I say heart, I’m refering to the hub of your emotions.

“I remember back to when I was dealing with issues with food in high school and college,” says Lauren in her voice that still has shades of her East Coast upbringing. “I would be eating healthy, and then something stressful or difficult would happen in my life and it would throw me into emotional overeating and binging. I went to the doctor and he would look at me and say, ‘You’re not that overweight. That’s nothing to worry about.’ They were looking at 10 pounds and thinking it’s not that big of a deal, but they weren’t seeing the emotional insanity that was going on behind it or where this overeating pattern would eventually take my weight.”

What Lauren is talking about is something that many people experience; something that can’t be seen by the number on the scale. Gaining and losing weight over and over can be very unhealthy physically and emotionally, constantly throwing the body into shock and putting one’s mind into either a congratulatory or condemning attitude towards one’s self. “What I understand now, which the doctors and I didn’t know then, is that the root of my problem with food was that I didn’t know how to handle stress and anxiety. Once I realized that it was an emotional issue, not a food issue, I realized I was trying to solve the wrong problem.”

So Lauren did. This local Orange Countian has triumphed over the scale, regained respect for her once-nemesis, chocolate cake, and is now making a living teaching people how to naturally and permanently lose weight and break bad eating habits. “Our program is unique and lasting because we deal with the underlying issues of why we turn to food to deal with life. The reasons behind why we turn to food are oftentimes issues that we’ve been dealing with all our lives, or issues caused by daily stresses that we feel are unavoidable. But we want to—we need to—deal with them,” says Lauren. “The subconscious knows no time. The emotions associated with these issues feel so fresh, like it happened yesterday. The problem is usually some facet of not feeling good enough. People who have problems with food are usually very successful people because they overcompensate for not feeling good enough by mastering an area of their life that they can control.”

Lauren calls it a “driver personality.” Driver personalities are very motivated. The problem is, when it comes to food, they’ve just been going in the wrong direction. The Hungry Heart hinges on redirecting people’s energy, emotions and approach to food. The result is an almost immediate change that will last a lifetime. “Most clients stop overeating within the first few sessions,” says Lauren. “People come in because they want to get the weight off their body but they end up getting a weight off their chest. They end up gaining back a quality of life. And that’s all because we’re dealing with the internal reasons behind why we turn to food,” Lauren tells me as we sit in her office that has a therapist-worthy tranquility.

Lauren has taken her extensive education in Nutritional Counseling and Clinical Hypnotherapy and set up the format of The Hungry Heart program as an 8-session course of one-on-one sessions set in a confidential and comfortable atmosphere. That’s another great thing about how Lauren does business. Everything is discreet, everything is personal. You’re not entering a building façade that further accentuates your insecurities about your weight. People don’t see you walking into a building with the signage “Butt Burners” at the top. You don’t have to wear unforgiving spandex workout gear or sweat bands to your meetings. When you meet with Lauren, for all anyone knows, you’re meeting your lawyer or accountant.

According to Lauren’s game-plan, in each 75-minute session, “you’ll learn how to approach food in a manner that will set you up for lifelong success, you’ll adopt permanent approaches to out of control eating so you can lose weight naturally and permanently, and you’ll get help to work through your personal issues that are causing your unhealthy relationship with food.”

Oh, and then there’s the hypnosis. Yes, hypnosis. Don’t think of the OC Fair brand of hypnosis. According to Lauren, hypnosis is merely the state of being open to suggestion. “I grew up pretty conservative. I’m from back East. So I was as skeptical as anyone about hypnosis. The name just has a sensationalized connotation attached to it. Once you learn what it really is, it makes sense. What most people don’t know is that we’re in a state of hypnosis every day. When we drive home on autopilot we’re not thinking about the route, we’re thinking about other things. But if a child ran out into the road, we’d stop and break our train of thought immediately. Same thing at the movies. We’re so engrossed in this presentation, our mind is so open to it, that we forget where we are. Our minds are open and focused on something else. You’re always in complete control.”

To better understand how hypnosis can guide eating habits, it’s helpful to understand the mind and how it operates. Lauren shows me a diagram of  The Theory of Mind. The theory is based on the fact that about 88% of our mind is subconscious. This is where we store all of our belief systems about life. These beliefs are usually established by the time we’re eight years old. For example, by this time perhaps we’ve established that we like chocolate cake, it tastes good and reminds us of home and celebration. Our conscious mind represents the other 12% of our total function. This is where we use our logic, our reasoning and our will power. When we go on a diet, these analytical skills are what cause us to tell ourselves, “I shouldn’t eat this chocolate cake. If I take one bite, I’ll end up eating the whole thing and then my diet will be ruined!” But when your 88% subconscious goes fist to fist with your 12% conscious willpower, guess who’s going to win?

“When dieting, we are relying on only 12% of our mind's function. No wonder diets fail us,” says Lauren. “Hypnosis can help to change those beliefs that aren't serving us well. Hypnosis is used at the end of each session to reinforce the new behaviors we've just learned during the session. It’s a matter of not pitting our subconscious against our conscious. We teach people to deal with these conflicting attitudes they’ve come to associate with food so that people can start approaching food in a healthy manner without associating it with either success or failure. You’ll learn to treat food as fuel, not a fix-it to your problems. You’ll learn to stop beating yourself up over carbs and fats. You’ll learn to appreciate yourself again, and to finally feel at peace with your body.”

And the world breathed a collective sigh of relief.

“Clients learn to lose the insatiable appetite for food, come to peace with their body, and make healthy choices naturally,” says Lauren. “Clients learn what healthy eating truly is and how to approach food and physical activity in a way that will set them up for long-term success, not temporary weight loss. They make slow, steady shifts in behavior that become part of their lifestyle. This is a program that will produce positive and permanent results! I’ve experienced it first hand.”