Hypnosis for Weight Control
This Hypnosis for Weight Control information is for you if you need;
- To lose plenty of weight
- To lose those last 10 pounds
- Motivation to stick to your particular weight-loss program
- Help to maintain your weight-loss
- Motivation to stick to your exercise program
If you want to:
- Create healthy eating patterns,
- Avoid excess calories without relying on willpower or having to count them,
- Automatically stick to your exercise plan,
- Choose your own eating plan and follow it with ease,
- Keep the weight off,
- Find the best weight-loss program,
then the Hypnosis for Weight Loss information on this page is also for you.
"With weight loss the evidence is
conclusive...hypnosis does help people reduce."
Smithsonian Magazine, 3/99
Most of us know the story all too well of trying to control our weight with on again/off again dieting. No sooner have we just lost some weight with the latest diet than we start putting it back on. A year later (or less) we are back to where we started or worse.
Diets Don't Work
The fact is diets don't work to permanently maintain your ideal body weight. I learned this from personal experience, let alone all the research results that show it!
Why don't diets work? There are several very good reasons:
- Diets focus all your attention on food and eating just when you are trying to not to think about food;
- Diets create stress and as we shall see later, stress creates the compulsion to eat;
- It's easy to get bored of a diet;
- Your body is naturally designed to protect you from starvation by storing fat when it’s being restricted from food; and
- Diets lower your metabolism, enabling you to store fat more easily.
Diets can be the cause of a long-term weight control problem rather that a solution to it. In fact, it is quite normal not to be able to lose weight permanently by going on yet another diet.
Some of us never even make it to the stage of losing much weight while we're on a diet. Sometimes it just seems that we have no control over how much, how often and what we eat as chocoholics will attest.
You Can Succeed
Take heart! Hypnosis will help you with what sometimes can seem the impossible challenge of weight loss. Here you will learn how you can use Hypnosis to finally lose the weight you want and to keep it off permanently.
First, it is helpful to first understand why so many people have succeeded using hypnosis for weight loss when everything else has failed them. As noted, I speak from personal experience being comfortably four waist sizes off my largest for several years and someone who exercises at least five times a week now thanks to hypnosis.
"Hypnosis can actually help you lose
weight."
Harvard Medical School psychotherapist Jean Fain
-Oprah Magazine, 8/04
Why Hypnosis Works
We all know how to lose weight right?
Eat less and exercise more! This may be factually correct but
why do we have so much trouble doing it? As rational beings all we should have to
do is make the decision in our Conscious Mind to eat less and
exercise more and all would be well. Of course we also all know
that it is not quite so straight forward as that. There is a lot
more going on in our minds when it comes to weight loss than
just what we are consciously aware of. The "what else" that is going on is the
negative programming stored in our Subconscious Mind that works
against our conscious efforts to lose the weight and keep it
off. (Learn more about
negative mind programming here). The Emotional Trap Most people who are naturally slim see
food only as fuel for the body, which in essence is all it is.
Most overweight people react to food differently. They almost
all eat for reasons other than in response to hunger sensations.
Many have an “emotional response” to
food. This can be experienced in two ways: These are two key reasons as we shall
see, why hypnosis is so powerful when it comes to weight loss. Food as a coping
mechanism Sometimes we can find ourselves doing
"too much" of something e.g. too much work, shopping, smoking,
gambling, or eating, etc. When this this happens it's a good bet
that it 's an attempt to distract ourselves from an emotional
feeling we have but don't want to think about. What might these emotional feelings be?
We could be feeling bored, angry, sad, stressed, or frustrated
for example. We typically might not even be consciously aware of
the feeling that we're distracting ourselves from or know what
to do about it if we are Never-the-less, for many, eating is a
common way of temporarily distracting ourselves from something
we may be feeling.
"When you are overweight, there is a conflict between
the Conscious Mind and the Subconscious Mind. The
Conscious Mind says, "I know I want to lose weight,'" He said.
However, the Subconscious Mind tosses up roadblocks such as
emotional eating. Hypnosis can help get the two parts of
the mind together."
Philip Shenefelt Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of South
Florida
Tampa Tribune, 8/04
Only Temporary
The word "temporarily" is emphasized,
because of course the only feeling that eating can really
satisfy is that of physical hunger. It will not, can not,
permanently take away any other feeling that we may be
experiencing. Once the over-eating is finished, you are still
left with the emotional feeling that your were distracting
yourself from before you started eating. You can go on all the fad diets you
like, but if you are using eating as a way to distract yourself
from your emotions, you will never achieve and maintain your
ideal body weight. You will be condemned to experiencing your
relationship to food as a perpetual struggle. A struggle that
you are doomed to loose armed only with the will power of your
Conscious Mind.
How Do You Know? How might you know if you are using food
as an emotional coping mechanism? Well, as noted, eating can
remove only one feeling – the physical awareness of hunger. How
do you know when you are truly hungry? As strange as it may
sound, most people reading this in N. America or Europe will
typically not often have known real hunger sensations. Take this test next time you start to
think you are feeling hungry. Ask yourself where the hunger
sensation is coming from in your body? Most people will point to
the area around their tummy button or lower if asked this
question. The feeling of hunger comes of course
from our stomach. However, this is located much higher up in our
body than most people realize; under the lower left rib cage. If
the feeling is not from there then it is not hunger that you are
really feeling. Using Hypnosis for weight loss allows us to
start responding only to real hunger signals, not the false
ones.
"Imagine that when you eat, you feel satisfied sooner
and therefore lose weight more rapidly."
Consumer Reports on Health, 2/04
Emotional attachment
to food There is another aspect of our emotional
life that can cause us to overeat and wreck any long term result
of going on a diet. This is when we form an emotional attachment
to food. A simple but all too common example of
this is the person who, as a child, was always urged to “clean
her plate” to please Mom. You do not have to have a Ph.D. in
Psychology to see how a child’s mind soon links cleaning her
plate to the pleasing feeling of gaining Mom’s love and
approval. And so in this case the child is
conditioned to eat to gain a feeling of love and/or approval and
not because she or he is hungry. As an adult this plays out as a
mis-programmed Subconscious Mind driving us to eat to experience
the feeling of being loved and approved off, not to satisfy
hunger. Of course, we know that eating can not
really satisfy any other need than hunger. Thus, when we have
finished eating - the need we were trying to satisfy, say the
need for love, is still there loud and strong. Guess what our
response is? You've got it - start eating again!
"Studies reported in 1986 in the
Journal of Clinical Psychology and the Journal of Consulting and
Clinical Psychology showed hypnosis to be an effective tool in
losing weight and keeping it off."
- Cox News Service, 1/02
Other Emotional Attachments
Common attachments that Hypnotherapists often see their weight loss clients associating with food include the need for a reward, love or company. In our culture we typically celebrate a success by going out to dinner, express love by giving a box of chocolates, meet our need for company by having people over to dinner etc.
I am not suggesting any of this is wrong – I love cooking and having family and friends over! But rewarding ourselves on a daily basis (or more often) with food treats, or trips to the refrigerator when we feel lonely or unloved only leads to real trouble at the scales.
The mis-programmed emotional attachments
we may have made with food are created and stored in our
Subconscious Mind. Hypnosis is the most effective tool we have
to re-program our Subconscious Mind. It can address the
emotional attachment problem in an effective and quick way.
Under Daily Attack Anyone who watches television or reads a
magazine realizes the daily bombardment our Subconscious Minds
are under to establish a link between a food product and our
emotions. Food manufactures are very aware of how
powerful an influence it is to link a product to an emotional
response in our mind in order to get us to buy their products.
That's why they spend billions of dollars to do it each year!
To maintain our ideal body weight we
need a mental vaccination to protect us from the effect of the
non-stop flow of messages. Fight fire with fire. In Hypnosis we
communicate directly with our Subconscious Mind. Through
Hypnosis we can build an automatic protection against the
"stealth" messages of the advertising industry that can so
easily wreck our weight loss plans. This is much better than
having an advertiser shape your response or a childhood
experience.
"Can hypnosis help you lose
weight? I'm 32 pounds lighter."
Ira
Allen, Center for the Advancement of Health
Washingtonian, 3/02
Revelation
The role of emotional factors in over-eating is often a revelation to many people. People experience a wonderful sense of deep relief and sense of control once they empower themselves to take charge of their emotional response to food through Hypnotherapy.
There are two other things to note:
- Hypnotherapy is not Psychotherapy ("talk" therapy, using the Conscious Mind). Changing your emotional response to food will require initial action on your part. However, it will not take years of effort or pain to get at the issue.
- Correcting the emotional reasons why we are overweight will not be achieved by going on another diet or just applying another ounce of will power.
The Habit Trap
Another common reason some people are overweight is that they are unaware that they have unhealthy or bad eating habits. For example these could include any of the following:
- Being unaware that their helping sizes are way bigger than what their body really needs;
- Eating so fast that the “full” message from the stomach to the brain does not have time to kick in until they have already eaten too much;
- Continuing to eat as much as they did when they were younger and more active; or
- Not realizing so much of what they are eating and drinking are just empty calories.
Stored Subconsciously
Habits, like emotions, are also created
and stored in our Subconscious Mind. Deciding to go on a diet by
decision of our Conscious Mind alone is not going to change any
subconsciously created and stored bad eating habits. Through Hypnotherapy you can address
your Subconscious Mind directly and change the unhealthy habit
and establish positive ones. In Hypnotherapy you are doing the work
where it is really needed; at the subconscious level. As much as
you may now automatically pile the food on your plate or gulp it
down, you can just as easily train your Subconscious Mind to
automatically take the smaller portion or eat slowly with just
as much satisfaction and as a matter of habit. Summary So, in summary; Overweight is usually
caused by one or more of the following: Putting Hypnosis to
work for you There are several paths that can all
lead you to successfully achieve and maintain your ideal body
weight. Your Hypnosis for weight loss options include:
If not now -when?
If not here - where?
If not now -when?
If not here - where?