Effective weight management - it's not about the food

Lots of people go on diets - you may well be one of them. Lots of people begin well, lose some weight and then some life event gets in the way, or motivation wanes, and they end up regaining the weight they suffered to lose...or, worse still, putting even more weight on. 

Hypnotherapy, and especially cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy, can help you build a healthy mindset that enables you to eat healthily and naturally for the long term. This is because being overweight is not necessarily about the food - it is about the feelings and the thinking that lead to eating and drinking to excess.

Have you ever tried to resist a biscuit or piece of cake that has been offered you? What choice did you make? If you ate it, did you feel guilty afterwards? Did you think, 'well I might as well eat what I want today, I have already blown it!' If you didn't eat it, did you feel that you had missed out? It is thoughts like this that are driven by strong feelings which sabotage our better efforts. Cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy works directly with the thoughts and feelings that sabotage our long term weight and health plans. Hypnotherapy and coaching also help you to build the habits of thought and feeling that will support your healthy eating programme over the long term. 

This kind of programme is not about being 'zapped' by the hypnotherapist to never eat another doughnut. The emphasis in a cognitive approach is to empower you to make the choices you decide are best for you free of the tyranny of habitual cravings, where you know what to do with the thoughts and feelings that come unbidden. This is an important theme in hypnotherapy; it is about giving you more choice, of tapping you on the shoulder and waking you up from habitual responses and conditioned thinking. Some experts in the field even talk in terms of their job being to de-hypnotise people rather than to hypnotise them! 

Hypnotherapy for weight management is part of a wider solution. It is not the remit of a hypnotherapist to give nutritional advice or exercise advice unless they are additionally qualified in those areas. Hypnotherapy is however invaluable in developing the psychological skills and mindset that will aid you in sustaining your healthy eating programme over the long term.