How hypnotherapy works.

For years now women have been trying to lose weight by attempting all sorts of weird and wonderful eating regimes, from the egg and grapefruit diet, to the cabbage diet to the latest fashion in dieting such as those that recommend eating only carbohydrates or proteins.  The awful truth is that there is only one way to really lose weight.  That is to eat fewer calories than you burn.  Or to put it another way, burn more calories than you eat.  The problem here is that we all live very sedentary lifestyles.  We have little need to walk anywhere, most of our journeys are done by car or public transport.  Fewer jobs these days require us to expend much in the way of physical energy.    There is plenty of research that suggests that reducing your calorific intake to less that 1200 calories a day will actually throw your body into 'famine' mode, in which it stores any energy that you put into it, because it 'perceives' itself under threat from famine.  Read more about dieting.

Hypnotherapy is a tool that can help alter a person’s behavior patterns. For example it can eliminate (or drastically reduce) dependence on will-power and make following a diet very easy plus make new healthy eating habits the automatic preferencee.

There are two ways that hypnotherapy can help you. 

Suggestion therapy. 

This method can be used where the person wants to kick start their diet into a healthier eating pattern.  The client is induced into hypnosis and is then given suggestions to the effect that they will prefer eating healthier foods and drinking more water.   Of course along with the suggestions for better eating patterns will also be suggestions that this is easy to do and that any cravings previously experienced will simply disappear, and that this will be coupled with a tremendous sense of pride from putting your goals into action.  We can also include suggestions that you find mild exercise more inviting.  Suggestion therapy usually takes no more than one session and can have a lasting  effect.

Analysis. 

This method is used for those people who have a problem more deeply routed in the psyche.  For instance those who suffer with bulimia or anorexia.  Or those people who are aware that they have issues with binge eating or drinking or find that in times of stress they are drawn towards certain kinds of food.  Analysis typically takes between 6 and 10 sessions and is a permanent and lasting solution.

Problems with food

Problems related to food can be complex and varied.  Roughly 75% of women in the UK today are unhappy with the shape and size of their body.  Of course this is greatly encouraged by the diet industry which makes billions of pounds every year.  I've always found it an interesting fact that Weight Watchers, one of the first and most prosperous manufacturers of 'diet foods' is owned by Heinz, one of the largest manufacturers of foods in the world.  The pressures on women (and more lately now men) to be slim, stay young looking, wear fashionable clothes is enormous and can result in rather a lot of dissatisfaction with oneself.  This all gets caught up in the business of eating and before you know it people are suffering with what are described as 'eating disorders'. 

Whilst the majority of people simply indulge in a little too much of this or that, some become seriously involved in unhelpful and self destructive behaviour, like the person who find themselves in the grip of bulimia or anorexia nervosa.  Of course there is plenty of advice available on types of diet and how to diet and it is estimated that by the time she is 20 almost every woman in the UK has been on a diet at least once.  So why is it that anybody who has been a lifetime dieter can confirm, the more often you diet the fatter you become.  Not straight away of course, we have all experienced some success in dieting from losing just a few pounds to several stones, yet it all seems to go back on, plus a few more pounds.  Why would that be.  It is because whether you are just cutting down, or dieting, or just watching what you eat...the truth is you are focussing on food, and nine times out of ten you are also focussing on what you can't have, rather than what you can have.  You are in fact stoking the fires of desire and by doing that you are sabotaging your own good intentions.

Emile Coue

A famous French psychologist and hypnotist, discovered the concept of the law of reversed effect or effort.  The fact is when is comes to the workings of the human mind imagination out strips will every time.  Take this example, you want to go for an interview for a job you know is exactly right for you.  You prepare yourself as much as you can, but you begin to have doubts about how you will perform at the interview.  You tell yourself.  I will not be nervous....I will not be scared.  What happens?  You arrive at the interview and you are so scared you can barely speak.  This is reversed effect working.  Why?  Well two reasons really.  1) You are focussing on what could happen.  i.e. using your imagination to visualise all the pitfalls and 2)  You are using the wrong instructions to your mind.  You see your mind does not pick up on negators. So in the instructions you are telling yourself, I will be nervous...I will be scared.  To put this in another way we could say what you focus on is what you get.

Now lets apply this to food.  I will not each chocolate, becomes I will eat chocolate.  I will not feel guilty about eating, becomes I will feel guilty about eating.  If you wanted to changes these sayings to a better instruction to your unconscious you could say.  I prefer to eat ............because....(insert good feelings)

So lets get back to food and dieting.  Actually there is no real secret about what to eat to lose or maintain weight.  Food is converted into energy and the measure of energy that food converts to is called a Calorie, these days labelled as Kcal on food, which means Kilo Calorie.  However it is the same thing.  What this means is that for the energy (calorie) to be used up (burned) a chemical process takes place.  To put it simply it takes one calorie to heat one cubic centimetre of water to body temperature.   So if you consume less calories than you expend.  You will lose weight.  But which foods contain the largest number of calories.  Well see the table below.

1 gram of Fat contains 9 calories

1 gram of alcohol contains 7 calories

1 gram of protein contains 4 calories

1 gram of carbohydrate/sugar contains 4 calories.

So it follows that if you were to eat mainly non processed carbohydrates and proteins, you would find losing weight easier.  The big question is how do you know how much fat to eat.  The short answer is that as long as you stay within eating no more than 20 percent of your overall intake of calories to fat you will be eating enough fat to stay healthy, but too little to gain weight.  In fact you should lose weight. 

This is how this works.

Take the overall grams of food per portion.                          ie   100 grams

Take the grams of fat per portion                                        ie    4    grams

Multiply the grams of fat by calories                      ie 4 grams of fat X 9 calories = 36 total calories

Divide the total calories into the total food weight ie 100 grams of food per portion divided by 36 calories made up of fat = 27% overall fat content.  This food then would be over the 20% fat content recommended for weight loss, although it would be a food suitable for weight maintenance.  If you were to do this calculation for every bit of food that goes into your mouth you will be taking in no more than 20% of your total food intake per day in fats.  Remember this calculation is only necessary for processed foods.  If you stick to eating just proteins vegetables and fruits you do not need to make these calculations.

Of course, it is not knowing what to eat that is the problem.  It is wanting to eat those kinds of foods,  that causes difficulties.  Many people say they don't like to eat fruit and vegetables, they much prefer to eat all the processed foods that are on the market, and who can blame them.  In today's economic climate processed foods can often be cheaper than fresh foods, and they are of course much more convenient, despite the dangers of hidden fats, salts and sugars.  This is where hypnosis comes in.

With hypnosis we can re-programme the mind.  The first step is to teach the mind to de-focus the importance of food.  After all, there is no shortage of food in our society at present.  By doing this you will find that you will overcome the first obstacle of the yo yo dieter, thinking about food all the time.  The next step is to teach the mind to produce behaviours which enhance you self esteem.  These are the behaviours of taking care of you body by eating those foods which give it the optimum amount of nutrition.  There are two ways we do this.  The first is by suggestion therapy.  The second, for those people with unhelpful eating habits that are more deeply ingrained is analysis