Weight awareness workshop: Feel body confident for Christmas

Are you worried about staying slim and healthy over the holiday season? Is your motivation for dieting at an all time low as the days get shorter and colder? Do you want to look and feel your best in a party dress? Read on to find out how hypnotherapy can help you enjoy healthy eating for Christmas.

Christmas is of course something most of us look forward to, what with the presents, delicious foods and time with family. For many though, the everyday struggle with food takes on overwhelming proportions and any attempts to remain healthy are simply abandoned. To understand why this happens we can look at how ‘dieting’ typically works. 

Diets tell us to reduce our calories, limit the kinds of foods we eat, minimise our portion sizes. They work on the principle of restriction, which naturally creates a certain inner resentment. Nobody likes to be told what to do! Even if we do comply, we need to know that the benefits outweigh the losses, and this certainly does not seem to be the case at the holiday season. So we use excuses like “Everyone puts on weight at this time of year”, “An extra layer will keep me warm during winter”, or “I’ll be more motivated in spring”. And while these sound plausible when facing cakes, chocolates and that extra helping of stuffing, come January there may be disappointment and guilt.

So how could a person enjoy Christmas food to the full and still maintain a healthy eating pattern? One way of doing this is by looking at our thoughts and behaviours. For example, if you consider chocolate to be a luxury and Christmas a time for indulgence in luxuries, it is natural that you will want to eat chocolates. While this may seem an obvious statement, it is surprising how many people don’t make the connection. There is just a ‘rightness’ about eating chocolate without a conscious recognition of the connection. However, if you can identify other kinds of non-food luxuries to indulge in, you will automatically reduce the need to eat chocolate. It really does work like that.

Another interesting food fact is that most of us do not pay any attention to what we are eating. Perhaps we snack in front of the TV or while reading a book. Maybe we eat on the run. Then there are the ‘had too much to drink’ food binges that may be too common at this time of year. If instead we learn to appreciate our food, attentively noticing every sensation associated with it, our mind is satisfied with a smaller amount. This is an automatic response and we don’t need to make it happen. Our job is to simply enjoy our food more fully.

Additionally, by taking the time to enjoy our food we eat more slowly. The brain releases the hormone that reduces appetite after about 20 minutes of eating. By eating slower we get to feel that signal after eating less. Now this is not about making yourself eat less. As we have seen, this approach causes resentment and abandonment of diet plans. The emphasis here is on enjoying your food and removing any sense of hardship. By working with our automatic responses we can use the mind to support us in a peasant and healthy approach to the holiday season.

Hypnotherapy can help you to embed these attitudes and behaviours ahead of the festive season. Inner Joy Hypnotherapy is offering a weight awareness workshop at The Apothecary Shop on Wednesday 25th November 7:30 - 9pm. Here you will harness the power of your own unconscious mind to make staying healthy automatic, easy and pleasant. This group experience will cover the following areas:

• Enhance the sensations of eating.
• Enjoy and be satisfied with less
• Increase your motivation to be slim.
• Recognise the importance of self-acceptance.

In contrast to the critical voice of the diet manual, Inner Joy Hypnotherapy encourages you to be gentle with yourself. A successful hypnotherapy programme for weight loss is based on accepting that we all have desires and sometimes we behave in ways that we don’t always understand. This is normal and rather than fighting inner impulses they can be welcomed and used to create new more supportive behaviours that help us live the life we want.

Why not get in touch with Emma today, and discuss how this one-off workshop can help you.