Weight Loss and Weight Management
Fed up of calorie counting? Avoiding specific food groups? Starving yourself a couple of days each week? The keto diet? The paleo diet? The low carb diet? Weight loss shakes, and meal replacements. And, the constant yo-yo-ing weight of a serial dieter. Sound familiar?
The good news is, this is not a diet!
If you’ve tried several different diets over the years, you’ll be pleased to know you can say goodbye to all that. There is another way, using modern, solution focused, clinical hypnosis.
Solution focused hypnotherapy is an evidence-based approach to weight management, supported by many years of neuroscience research.
The diet industry is a huge money-making machine. It has a vested interest in people appearing to have success so that they can recommend it to their friends. It’s also got a vested interest in you failing so you can go and spend some more. They’ll sell you all kinds of frozen meals and even meal replacement drinks. There are weekly paid for clubs for weight watchers, where dieters join and rejoin as they lose and regain weight. So why are 64% of adults in England still considered overweight?
Dieting doesn’t work!
Diets only deal only with the symptom; they don’t deal with the problem of why we are overweight. Weight loss and weight control are not about diet; it’s about our thought patterns, how our minds think about food on a subconscious level. What we eat, when we eat and why we eat are all down to our thought patterns.
It goes back to prehistoric times, long before supermarkets and the abundance of readily available food. We have a natural ability to overeat to prepare for famine (we can also eat less to preserve supplies).
So what’s going wrong?
Food isn’t scarce, we know this – So why do we eat as if we’re preparing for a famine?
The big news is – Part of our brain is still prehistoric, and it acts on emotion, and it doesn’t understand diets. So, when we diet or reduce our calorie intake, it becomes scared, thinking, “food is scarce, there’s a famine!” It doesn’t understand the concept of Sainsbury’s, so it’s trying to protect us. It prepares us by releasing stress hormones from the part of our brain that controls our appetite, encouraging us to eat more and it makes us crave specific food groups that create and store a long term source of energy… FAT!
There’s more problems with diets and dieting. While we start to attach labels like bad, forbidden or naughty to food, we create guilt when we slip up. This food guilt trip creates more stress and anxiety, which in turn triggers the release of even more ‘let’s eat cake’ hormones. You’re now in the grip of a vicious cycle, because you’re craving even more of those ‘forbidden foods’… triggering more guilt fuelled anxiety eating… releasing still more stress hormones – and on it goes!
There’s a reason you don’t just have a couple of spoonfuls of Ben and Jerry’s!
It can be subtle too, and you may not always recognise when your emotional, prehistoric part of the brain is in control of your appetite. If you find yourself snacking, despite knowing you are not hungry. Have the compulsion to empty a plate when you’re full. Do you find yourself halfway through a packet of biscuits or large bar of chocolate without realising? Or, finishing off a family size bag of crisps so as not to waste them. These and any other reason that doesn’t stand up to logic are all signs, your primitive, and emotional brain is in the driving seat.
How to lose weight
The good news is, it’s surprisingly straightforward to return control to the sensible and rational part of the brain by using clinical hypnosis. Modern, solution focused hypnotherapy methods are able to redress the balance, ending the need for diet for good. I’m not a nutritionist or ‘diet doctor’ yet my own weight is totally under control and healthy. This solution-focused therapy will have your emotional, high calorie munching part of the brain under your control in a relatively short time.
Don’t worry, you’ll still get to enjoy the ice cream (sticky toffee pudding in my case) but your natural balance will have returned and your weight will naturally come under control.
How does weight management hypnotherapy work?
Clinical hypnosis creates the perfect environment needed for the two minds to come together and focus on the same thing. While we are in this trance state, we have access to and able to communicate with the powerful subconscious. This is extremely effective, completely natural and easy to induce. This form of clinical hypnosis and its effectiveness with weight control is documented in many years of neurological research.
Get in touch if you’d like to know more, or make an appointment
Rob Sanderson HPD DSFH SF Sup (Hyp)
Clinical Hypnotherapist
SFTA Chester Senior Lecturer
NCH Approved Supervisor