Is Hypnotherapy effective for weight loss?So the big question - Hypnosis for weight loss, does it work? Or phrased another way, can I lose weight with hypnosis or hypnotherapy? The simple and quick answer to this question is Yes, hypnosis is effective for weight loss but the reasons why may be surprising. To help cut to the chase as to why hypnosis is effective for weight loss this is a blog I've made in a buzzfeed style list article entitled the 7 reasons why hypnosis is effective to help you lose weight. The 7 reasons why hypnosis is effective to help you lose weightAlthough I'm about to cover the 7 reasons why hypnotherapy is effective for weight loss this list is certainly not exhaustive. There are hundreds of reasons why hypnosis and hypnotherapy works to help people lose weight. This list of seven should start to whet your appetite and sow a few seeds to get you thinking about weight loss in a different way. 1. Diets alone don't work!Notice the key word there - alone. Almost every diet around is effective if we take out those meddlesome people with their freedom of choice. If you gave an overweight robot any diet and asked it to follow the instructions then so long as the diet is valid from the sense of consuming less calories than is used then 100% of the time the robot would lose weight. Here's the thing, humans aren't robots and they have these things that mess up the diet program. Things like beliefs, doubts and contradictory behavior. For example some beliefs that can through a spanner in the works are "diets don't work on me", or "I have a genetic predisposition to put on weight", or the ever common "I have a slow metabolism". Robots don't have beliefs and could follow a diet by the book, humans with their BS - 'belief systems', are a different matter altogether. They will ensure a diet wont work simply by doing behaviours that completely contradicts the motive for following the diet. Why else would someone make a decision to lose weight, chose a diet, start the diet and then weeks (or sometimes days later) start binging on chocolate, ice cream or doughnuts? Hypnosis however is incredibly effective at changing existing beliefs or installing new ones. How easy would it be to lose weight if you believed with every fibre on your being the following beliefs: "I am 100% responsible for my weight." "If I'm overweight it's because I've consumed more calories than I've used." "Losing weight is easy, simple and fun." "When I lose weight I will be an inspiration to my friends and family." "Food is fuel, if I have too much fuel my body will save it for later." Now you may not believe these things now and you may have existing beliefs that prevent you from accepting these beliefs. But trust me, if you have 7 or so core beliefs that empower you to lose weight then weight loss really is easy, simple and fun. What's more a belief can be difficult to change consciously and yet effortless when changed through hypnosis. 2. Discipline is too much hard work.Yes I said it. The reason why every diet you've tried has failed is your lack of discipline. And while that may be true, discipline is the hard way to lose weight. I'm willing to be that when you saw the word discipline you're body shuddered - you experienced a negative reaction. If discipline is not fun or positive then you wont do it for very long. Think about this, if you forced yourself every morning to jog for an hour, and resisted every sweet treat and fatty food in front of you then of course you would lose weight. But let's be realistic here! You may struggle to do that for a few days or even a few weeks but can you struggle for a lifetime? Here's the thing, how much effort does it take NOT to go to the gym? How much effort does it take to drink a few glasses of wine in front of the TV? How much effort is it to eat a whole bowl of ice cream when you're feeling anxious or depressed? When push comes to shove you will do what's pleasurable and easy not what's unpleasant and difficult. Hypnosis can help by making the difficult things easy and making it so that you don't want to do the things that make you put on weight. Discipline is doing what you must do even if you don't want to do it. HypnoSlimming can make you actually want to do those things, meaning it requires very little if any discipline. 3. Cravings don't make sense.Well cravings don't make sense logically and rationally but they feel like they make sense in the moment. Think of one January shortly after you've made a resolution to lose weight and get healthy. It's been a few days or weeks and you've been brilliant! You've gone to the gym a few times, stopped drinking fizzy drinks and even had a few salads. And that's when the cravings come! They have been patiently waiting for the right moment and now they are here. You might be craving for chocolate, or chips, bread or a biscuit. Your cravings will always be unique to you and yet they are relentless. Discipline alone may keep the cravings away for a while yet they still come back, again and again and again. And what happens when you justify to yourself that "just one won't hurt!" Ever notice that just one becomes the start of a pattern and you end up consuming more and more, sometimes even more than before your diet to "make up for lost time". Cravings are an emotional and psychological association and can exist with foods, drink, drugs and even sex. Rarely is it the chemical dependency, it's most often a conditioned response where seeing the food or thinking about the food creates an intense desire (a craving) to eat it. Hypnosis can take cravings that have been there for years and make them disappear in an hour. That's why hypnosis is an effective tool to lose weight and this is what we specialise in at HypnoSlimming. 4. Anxiety is the major cause of over eating.Can you think of a time when you felt really hungry? Not peckish but really hungry - like you absolutely needed to eat? Where did you feel it? My guess would be your stomach if you're like most people. Rarely do you have an intellectual concept of hunger, you feel it in your gut! Now can you think of a time when you felt really anxious? A time when you were really worried and unsettled. A time when the anxiety just wouldn't go away? Chances are you also feel this in your stomach (some feel it in their lower chest - mainly due to fast breathing). In a strange way when you eat it changes the way you breath and it also changes the way things feel in your stomach. Eating food can make both hunger and anxiety go away. Here's the problem: when the food has digested whatever caused your anxiety will come back and you have a choice to make - ignore the horrible sensation in your gut or eat something else. Now most people aren't even aware of this consciously they just know when they feel anxious and what makes them feel better. And while it's food for one person it may be drink, cigarettes, drugs or mindless TV for someone else. Let me ask you this question though. If the major reason for overeating is anxiety and not hunger then why do all diets deal with food and not anxiety? Hypnosis is one of the most effective ways of dealing with anxiety, and when you don't feel anxious you eat less. This is another reason why hypnosis is so good at helping people lose weight and at HypnoSlimming we can tackle the anxieties that reduce your emotional dependency on food. 5. Do you have a phobia of exercise?Can you think of the most popular phobias? Spiders, heights, confined spaces, public speaking! Let me add another to the list gymophobia! Now this doesn't officially exist yet (don't be surprised if you see this everywhere soon though and remember you saw it here first) but how many people are terrified of going into a gym or doing any kind of exercise? You may remember at school the lengths that some people would go to to avoid P.E! Mention the idea of going to the gym or for a run to some people and their reaction would be the equivalent to people that are afraid of snakes or flying. For some people it is the fear of being judged, or compared to fit athletic people, it may be the fear of embarrassment, that they will be laughed at or talked about. Make no mistake though the fear is real and if the door of exercise is closed then it means that the only way to lose weight is to diet or eat less. Even moderate exercise can speed up your metabolism and fast track your journey to weight loss. Now hypnosis can remove phobias that have lasted a lifetime in under an hour. If you lost your gymophobia would it make a difference to you? What if you wanted to go to the gym as much as you crave chocolate or Haribo sweets? Phobias are not changed consciously that's why they are called an irrational fear, unconsciously through hypnosis is a different matter. Here at HypnoSlimming we can change thought patterns that have lasted years in a single session. 6. Habits are difficult to break. What is a habit? A habit in its initial stage was just something you did once. Then you did it a few times until it became so frequent that a habit was formed. A habit has been described as a cable - each day we weave a thread until we reach the day that it is unbreakable. So does the cabbage soup diet deal with your habit of a morning Starbucks? Does your 5:2 diet help you deal with the habit of drinking socially with friends? Does the high protein diet low carb diet address your habit of eating cereal or toast every morning? Of course they don't! Diets deal with food without addressing habits that have become unbreakable. What may be unbreakable chains consciously may be as brittle as glass under hypnosis. Hypnosis is one of the most effective ways to deal with habits such as smoking or even drug addictions. Do you think hypnosis can help with your food or drink habits? Put it this way, let's say you have a habit of drinking two cans of Coke each day (that's 278 calories and no nutrition per day). Over a year that will be 101,470 calories. That's the equivalent of over 13kg of body fat in a year. If you have habits like this then hypnosis could help you lose weight by changing simple habits. HypnoSlimming can mean that losing weight and becoming slim and toned is effortless. 7. Learned helplessness explains a lot. If you're reading this then I'm willing to bet that you've tried at least one or two diets before. Not only that but if you reflect the average person you probably weigh more now than you did before you started the diet. This is the problem with diets. They don't work because the psychological and emotional issues have not been dealt with. The beliefs, cravings and habits were still all there while the diet was happening. For many it simply made the existing beliefs, cravings and habits stronger for the simple reason that most diets mean you end up thinking about food more not less.
In 1967 a psychologist called Seligman did an unethical experiment using dogs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness. He put dogs onto a metal floor and electrified the floor. Unsurprisingly the dogs jumped off the painful floor. He then put them in a box with a small hurdle and electrified the floor and the dogs jumped over to the other side. He then put them in a box where they couldn't escape being electrocuted. To begin with the dogs yelped, and jumped and struggled to get free before they gave up. The dogs accepted their fate and stood or lay in the box getting electrocuted. Even when he took the partition away meaning the dogs could simply jump to the other side they still stood there getting electrocuted. They only had to look up and jump across to stop the excruciating pain but they had learned to be helpless. What if a human had learned that diets don't work and only make things worse? What if the first time they went on a diet they told everyone and then experienced the pain of embarrassment when they stopped the diet and put the weight back on again? What if the overweight human only had to look upward to see an escape from their pain but never did? Hypnosis is effective for weight loss and HypnoSlimming is the leading specialists for helping people lose weight. Our mission is to help people get the body they want and to love the body they have. Our philosophy is change your mind, change your body. HypnoSlimming can free your mind from learned helplessness and make losing weight easy, fun and fast.
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AuthorAdam Michael Cox: Leading Expert & Authoritative Voice on Hypnosis for Weight Loss ArchivesCategories |