If you ever tried to lose weight, keep a diet or increase the amount of physical exercise with the goal of shaping your body, then you must have felt how frustrating this process is. I know people who put a lot of effort into those 2-3 weeks of intense dieting and juicing only to gain the weight back in the fourth week. If you are not a gym addict, you must equip yourself with lots of discipline and patience until you see changes in your body image, only through eating healthy and practicing sport two or three times a week. And in truth, not all of us are made to be so disciplined, therefore losing weight can be a challenging journey. Feelings of boredom, low self-esteem, stress, and guilt can build up. It's not unusual for people to get into a cycle of dieting, overeating, feeling guilty and dieting again. This is known as 'yo-yo dieting' and makes weight loss difficult to sustain.
And what is dwelling behind this relationship we have with food? Why can't we just eat the proper amount and only the healthy stuff?... The answers to these questions are the target of the therapy session and the tool to help the client achieve its goals is a well-kept weight loss secret: hypnotherapy.
While diets and nutrition plans focus on what you eat and how often, hypnotherapy for weight loss changes how you feel about what you eat and helps you access your internal resources for change. By targeting the unconscious mind with powerful suggestion techniques, the hypnotherapist will help you develop a positive relationship with food and exercise. The aim of hypnotherapy for weight loss is to make you feel confident about your ability to lose weight, change any negative thoughts about eating and help you lose weight responsibly without impacting your emotional well-being. And very important, hypnotherapy helps you to keep the weight off because it's not about losing the pounds but changing your habits.
Most of the factors that prevent you from losing weight and keeping healthy habits are psychological - hidden, unconscious and reactive responses to emotional problems. If you resonate with the following habits, maybe you need to change your strategy in losing weight and include a few sessions of hypnosis into your bag of tools. Do you comfort eating? Meaning that food is a dependable means of gratification and self-nurturing and during stressful times, eating can soothe us. Craving chocolate or ice cream after a hard day? As a comfort eater you will find it more difficult to lose weight because you've let food become your coping mechanism and without it, you might not know how to deal with your emotions.
Do you eat mindlessly? For example buying what is available and readily there in the supermarket even if does not nourish you? Or always eating snacks while watching a movie, while on your phone or laptop? Grabbing a snack while driving or on the go somewhere? Although small in portion these snacks pile up if they are mindlessly transformed in a daily habit, so even if you try to eat salad twice a day, the snacks will sabotage your weight loss attempts. Therefore, focus and control can be enhanced with a simple hypnotic exercise.
What happens during a hypnotherapy session? The client will learn ways to relax and feel comfortable, and different techniques will be used to re-frame the psychological reasons for over-eating. Although every session differs, with the scope of serving the client, most hypnotic scripts will either focus on directive suggestions for avoiding specific foods and altering unhealthy habits or will target an enhancement of confidence and the use of transferable skills. Hypnotherapy uses many interesting tools, like anecdotes, storytelling, metaphors, and with a daily practice of listening to the recording of trance (provided by the therapist), shifts happen effortlessly and nicely. By tackling those deep feelings that form the foundations of your eating habits, hypnosis for weight loss can help you adopt a healthier lifestyle and a happier mindset.
For more specific details or a personalized treatment plan, contact me. Hypnotherapy is brief therapy, it requires a limited number of sessions and it will offer you long-term changes in your eating habits.
​