How to stop self-sabotaging your weight loss with hypnotherapy

You know how it goes. You are doing well on your diet, you've lost a significant amount of weight, and reached your goal weight. You are happy with yourself. You can finally relax. Then, for some reason, you start eating crap again. Slowly, the weight creeps back on, and before you know it, you now weigh more than when you first went on your diet. "Why do I do this to myself?" you ask. How can you stop self-sabotaging your weight loss efforts?

What is self-sabotage in weight loss?

To sabotage means to deliberately destroy, destruct, or damage something. When we self-sabotage, it means in some way we are damaging or deliberately destroying our progress. This is usually an unconscious behaviour. We often don't know we are doing it whilst we are doing it, and only realise when we get to a point we don't like. For example, you lost weight, you were happy, but within a short time, you put the weight back on again, but you don't know the psychological reasons why you did it.

When there is no obvious reason for your reversal of good habits, you might conclude that you are the one jeopardising your success. If you are continuously repeating the same patterns, there is a good chance that you are sabotaging your weight loss.

Signs you are self-sabotaging your weight loss

How do you know if you are self-sabotaging your weight loss efforts?

Here are some examples of self-sabotaging tendencies with weight loss:

• You get to where you want to be with your body/weight loss, and it all goes down south from there.
• You eat well for a while, something happens, and then you find you can't stop eating junk food.
• You think negatively about yourself e.g. I'll never be able to lose the weight. You only see the negative in what you do and nothing is ever good enough.
• You have an all-or-nothing mindset. You go all in on your diet, or you're thinking sod it and fall right out of your diet. You go all out with exercise routines, or you don't do any at all.
• You have a strong inner critic, who criticises every effort you make. You don't celebrate any wins.
• You have not done any inner work and therefore have not built any emotional resilience to be able to deal with life's stresses. Therefore, food often fills in that gap. 

Why do we self-sabotage our weight loss efforts?

This is such a good question. Why would you deliberately destroy your efforts after going to all the trouble of getting to where you want to be? It can feel like a hard, long slog to get to where you strive to be, only for it to be taken down with one day of bad eating. Afterwards, we often feel guilt and shame for what we have done. Why do we do that to ourselves? 

The answer - before I hear you say, "lack of willpower, lack of strength, or lack of resolve," as these have nothing to do with it - runs a bit deeper than that. That is why it can be hard to spot whilst we are in the middle of doing it. 

We are all programmed in certain ways from birth. This programming is the brain's way of developing, and it is in response to our environment, our upbringing, caregivers, teachers, peers, family and many more. We are responsive creatures who have to make sense of things. 

As children, we have not developed the ability to make sense of the world, so we make our own beliefs. This is the same in adulthood. These beliefs may not be helpful, but the brain has made them up as a way of protecting us. They are protection mechanisms. 

An example of that is, as a child, you had a hard time at school. You came home from school and ate biscuits. These made you feel good. You unconsciously develop a belief that biscuits will make everything better. After doing this every day for many years, you develop automatic thoughts, meaning you do not even have to think about eating biscuits, you just do it but are not aware of the psychological reasons as to why you do it. 

When you are on a weight loss journey, you focus on what, when and how much you eat. You might follow a diet plan. This can take a lot of mental effort. Once you reach your goal weight, you feel you can relax. Yet, if you have not done the inner work, then your old thought and behaviour patterns will still exist. So when an upsetting event happens, or you are tired from thinking about your diet plan so much, you find yourself reaching for biscuits.

Here are some reasons why you might be self-sabotaging your weight loss:

1. Fear of success

If you succeed, what will that mean? Will life change in ways you do not want? Success could be an unfamiliar feeling and could bring up lots of fear and unprocessed emotions from the past. If any time you experienced success it came with negative attention, you are not going to want to succeed.

2. Fear of unwanted attention

When our bodies change, for some reason, it seems to give people a green light to comment on our bodies. Those comments may be positive, but for some of us, we do not want the attention. It means people are noticing our bodies, which can be uncomfortable. 

3. Stress and emotional eating

It does not matter how many diets you go on; if you do not build up your emotional resilience to be able to deal with your emotions, you will still eat during times of stress. This can include when our mental health is low or any emotion where you have made an association that eating helps you to cope. 

4. Perfectionism

Some of us place an unrealistically high level of expectation on ourselves. Only as we are setting this expectation, it does not feel high at the time. It feels like if we want to achieve the result we want, then we will need to follow the rules we have set. Unfortunately, these rules can be inflexible and unsustainable. Life gets in the way sometimes, and when it does, it completely throws us off. If we can't do it properly, then why bother? This thought can stop us from moving forward. 

5. Lack of self-worth

Have you heard of imposter syndrome? It will feel like, on some level, you do not deserve to be the weight you want. You might feel you will not be able to sustain it because of a lack of ability. The feelings of not being good enough creep in here and stop you from moving forward. 

How to stop self-sabotaging your weight loss with hypnotherapy

Hypnotherapy can be a great tool to help you increase your awareness of what is going on and help you to stop your unwanted self-sabotaging tendencies. 

Here's how you can use it at home and with the help of a hypnotherapist:

1. Self-hypnosis

You can induce a state of self-hypnosis, so you teach your mind and body to relax. 

1. Find a comfortable place to relax.
2. Focus on each body part, starting from your head down to your feet, relaxing each part as you go.
3. Visualise a calming, relaxing place that feels calm to you.
4. When relaxed, you can say prepared positive affirmations to yourself. For example, I am good enough.
5. When you have had enough, just open your eyes and familiarise yourself with your own space. 

Self-hypnosis can help you to better manage any stress and anxiety. It can help you to become more mindful of your behaviours. If you are not sure, find out more about self-hypnosis here. 

2. Make notes

Start to track your patterns of eating, along with your thoughts and emotions that go with each pattern. This will help you to start noticing in more detail the thoughts and emotions that could be stopping you from moving forward.

3. Flip those thoughts

Once you identify the thoughts and emotions holding you back, work on flipping those to more positive ones. It may take a bit of practice as you have to learn to identify them first. 

For example:

• "I am not good enough" to "I am good enough."
• "I can't stick to a diet" to "I could stick to a diet, but I am going to make it more flexible so that it is more sustainable."
• "I am not motivated enough to lose weight" to "What would motivate me to lose weight?"

This is where a hypnotherapist can help you. 

4. Understanding

Some understanding and being kinder to yourself will go a long way to escape your patterns. Some people may be worried that being kinder will let them off the hook. It will mean they will allow themselves to go mad and eat what they want. I suppose a question to ask yourself is, is what you are doing now working? Chances are, it's not. Understanding and being kinder helps you to see how you are sabotaging yourself and helps you to escape a thought pattern. 

5. Blind spots

We are all human, therefore, we cannot see our own blind spots and into our unconscious. That is because our own unconscious is clever in keeping these patterns hidden from us. A hypnotherapist can help you to see and challenge your own blind spots. 

Hypnotherapy is a great tool to help you escape from your own self-sabotaging tendencies and move past all of your unconscious blocks.