No-Diet Weight Loss

June 2nd, 2011 by Gavin Roberts (Advanced Professional Hypnotherapist)

To become aware of the extent of the obesity problem in the West at the present time, you only have to look at the vast numbers of clubs, organizations, books and so-called miracle diets which abound. With so much information now available about diets, healthy eating and nutrition why should the problem appear to be escalating?

If diets worked, how come more and more people are overweight?

The National Diet and Nutrition Survey shows that in the last 17 years obesity in men has more than trebled and women’s almost doubled and that obesity in children has risen 6%. A recent study showed that Britain is now the fattest nation in Europe.

Recent scientific evidence shows that people who have a weight problem are far more inflexible in their relationships to food and eating and life in general. In other words, many areas of their lives, not just food and eating, are controlled by habitual behaviours. The research showed that by changing other habits, people naturally began to change their eating habits which resulted in weight loss (without actually having to diet).

Habits are controlled by the unconscious mind. The best and fastest way to change them is through the use of hypnosis, which gets to the route of the weight problem and deals with it permanently.

Why more than 90% of diets fail
Advertisements, diet plans and books play upon our natural need for food and our tendency to conform. Our imaginations are filled with promises of wealth, popularity, romance and success which we can only achieve if we are slim and attractive. The diet industry very cleverly plays on our emotional needs and desires but it can never even hope to satisfy them. 

No food or diet will ever be able to resolve emotional issues or meet emotional needs.

If you are 3 stone or more overweight, you are categorised as clinically obese. Obesity is such a horrible word. Despite what people say about ‘gland problems’ and ‘big bones’ the vast majority of obese people are that way because a) there is a deep emotional need that remains unfulfilled or an emotional issue that is unresolved, b) their lives are controlled by inflexible habitual thoughts, feelings and behaviours, and/or c) they have an all-or-nothing attitude to life (which means that the emotional brain is running the show!)

You may have tried diet after diet without success. You may have lost weight and then put it all back on. Like many dieters, you may have been on the ‘weight loss – weight gain roller-coaster’ for years.

Understand that unless you stick to a diet indefinitely (or some derivative of it) you will always slip back into your old eating habits and put all the weight back on, and more besides. This is because fundamental, long term eating habits are not changed through short term dieting. 

The main reason diets fail is that they focus on loss and deprivation.When the body is deprived of food it follows the ancient ‘feast or famine’ syndrome. Famine (going on a diet) means that the body’s metabolism slows down, preserving energy supplies, believing that food is in short supply. When food becomes available again the body stocks up (rather like a camel in the desert) storing more than it needs (this is why you put even more weight back on) against the possibility that you will deprive it (diet) again soon.

Most diets require measuring, calculating or eliminating so unless you have an obsessive personality you’ll soon rebel at having to do this every time you eat, not to mention the feeling of deprivation at having to cut out your favourite foods. If certain foods are ‘forbidden’ or ‘sin’ on your diet guess what foods you tend to think about? If I said to you now, “Don’t think of chocolate cake,” what do you think of? Chocolate cake, sure. This is because the conscious mind first has to think of chocolate cake before it can then think of something that isn’t chocolate cake. And if you are on a deprivation diet what is the thing you try not to think about? The food you are not ‘supposed’ to eat! And the more you try not to think about it the more you are actually filling your mind with thoughts and images of that ’forbidden’ food, causing your mouth to salivate. And if, like many people with weight problems, you are an all-or-nothing thinker, is it any wonder that a spoonful of forbidden chocolate cake leads to total abandonment of your diet?

What happens with a conventional food diet?
After a couple of weeks on a conventional food diet, you’d probably feel tired, depressed and deprived. You would have wasted huge amounts of time counting calories, avoiding carbs and agonising over what you could or couldn’t eat. As a consequence you’d be wracked with uncertainty, cravings and guilt. Virtually every waking moment would have been filled with thoughts of food and a battle of will-power. After a couple of weeks, if you were lucky, you would have lost 6 lb in weight, but most of this would have been water. As the days passed, weight loss would have declined. After a month on a conventional food diet – if you lasted that long – weight loss would be down to 1 lb a week but as the lack of energy began eating into your soul you would begin to fail. The first sign might be an extra biscuit or chocolate bar or sugar slipping back into your tea or coffee. This ‘failure’ will have made you feel guilty and once again set up the vicious cycle of:

GUILT > DIET > DEPRIVE > CRAVE > WEAKEN > BREAK DIET > GUILT

But the psychological impact is only part of the problem. On a typical food diet your body becomes starved of vital nutrients. This makes you insatiably hungry. You may also start to feel light headed and sleepy. In the long run, lack of calories, protein, essential fats and vital nutrients could damage your body’s major organs. The damage could even kill you as repeated dieting reduces the level of cancer destroying killer cells.

Hypnosis - the alternative to dieting and the permanent solution
Thankfully there is a way out of this crazy situation. Even doctors that deal with overweight patients now understand that the most important factor in weight loss is not the diet, but the changes that need to take place in attitude, behaviour and self-esteem.

For many years hypnosis has enabled people to lose weight because it has the power to eliminate bad habits and change old, out-dated and limiting ways of thinking, feeling and behaving.

Through the use of hypnotherapy you can re-programme the negative messages about your weight that are stored in your unconscious mind and eliminate bad eating habits without the feelings of deprivation. You will understand the cause of any ‘emotional eating’ and learn how to meet emotional needs in healthy ways. Cravings can be removed and your motivation to eat healthily increased, enabling you to lose weight at the correct and safe rate for you and maintain your ideal weight, naturally – without the gimmicks of the diet industry.