Mom kicks Irn-Bru habit of £3,000 a year after hypnosis

A woman has finally put an end to a 25-year-old Iru-Bru addiction, using hypnosis to drink 20 cans a day.

That means she consumed 94,000g of sugar and 450,000mg of caffeine and spent £60 a week on 24 packs.

Carole said, “We could have bought several family vacations for the money I spent. My trash was filled with cans of Irn-Bru every week.

‘I would even sneak to the garbage dump to clean up the empty cans. I was like a drug addict trying to hide my problem. I was literally chain drinking it.’

Things took a serious turn for the worse when the mother-of-one was hospitalized in June this year after experiencing dizziness, fainting and palpitations.

Doctors were concerned at first that Carole had suffered a stroke, and she was even sent for CT scans to see if she had a brain tumor.

Carole from Glasgow said: ‘It was the wake-up call I really needed. I knew the amount of Irn-Bru I drank had something to do with it.

‘I’d had periods of dizziness and fainting, and they couldn’t find anything wrong, although they suspected a stroke at first.

“I’ve even had scans for a brain tumor, which is pretty scary, but I knew drinking all that Irn-Bru was to blame.

“When I was a little girl, we always had Irn-Bru in the house because my mother drank it. It is, after all, the Scottish national drink.

‘But when I moved to London for a number of years, you couldn’t get it south, so it never became a problem again until about 25 years ago when I went back.

‘I drank several cans a day, but at the time it wasn’t really an addiction, more a habit. I just loved the taste of it.

“But during the lockdown it just seemed to get out of hand. I cracked a can at 8am, drank them all day and took one before bed.

“I would have about 20 cans a day and it stayed that way throughout the pandemic. I tried to cut down and even went cold turkey, but started experiencing crippling headaches. I showed all the symptoms of an addict.

“I hid cans from my husband in the garage, car, and cupboards that I knew he wouldn’t go in. I would drink one and replace it so it looked like I hadn’t drunk it.

‘I had become dependent on it. I would go to Tesco and buy stacks of 24 can pallets. It was embarrassing for me, but I couldn’t stop.

“It had to be cans instead of bottles, it was everything from the sound of opening the can to the feel of the aluminum and bubbles. It was bizarre to look back.

“I’m only six feet and I weigh seven kilos, so I must have looked good with a boot full of Irn-Bru. It was never about a weight issue, the rest of my diet and exercise always went well, but it quickly became a health issue.”

After doctors told her to cut her habit and get no more than one Irn-Bru a day, Carole enlisted the help of London-based therapist and hypnotist David Kilmurry.

And after a full hypnotherapy session and follow-up meeting four weeks ago, Carole hasn’t gotten anywhere near the stuff.

She said, “I was very skeptical at first because I never really believed in hypnotherapy, but I was willing to try anything, and it worked incredibly well for me.

‘Now I just don’t want to go near Irn-Bru, even the smell scares me and makes me nauseous. I can’t thank David enough.’