How does the virtual gastric band work for weight reduction?

Virtual gastric band hypnotherapy is a great technique to help you reduce weight and sustain the results in the long-term. To understand how hypnotherapy can help you to reach your weight reduction goals, its useful to first look at the aspects of diets that don’t work in the long-term. If you follow a specific food plan or diet strictly, you will normally lose some weight. However, it’s often tricky to keep the pounds off after the diet has finished.

Why?

There are several reasons:

Diets don’t tend to deal with the permanent lifestyle changes required, such as a sustainable long-term change in our eating habits and attitude to food. Many diet plans are temporary and can be difficult to maintain on an ongoing basis, often because they are too restrictive or they totally deprive us of our favourite foods.

These regimes can be adhered to short-term but don’t work so well in the long run. By causing us to count calories or consciously measure portion size or even totally omit types of foods, many diets can make us more obsessed with food and our eating. This can take the pleasure out of eating and can lead us to crave more of certain foods and a diet-overeat/binge cycle can start.

Also, many diet regimes do not deal with the emotional aspect of overeating. They rely on willpower and ignore the automatic unconscious emotions/beliefs/behaviours that cause many to overeat. Chronic overeating or bingeing can sometimes be linked to early life trauma, emotional upset or low self-esteem and these issues need to be addressed to change the habit of overeating permanently.

Worse for us still, is constant yo-yo dieting. The cycle of losing, then regaining weight can totally imbalance our metabolism. It confuses our bodies and they begin to hold onto fat, which when we reduce our calorie intake, causes the body to burn muscle or lean tissue instead of the fat.

So what does a hypnotherapy program for weight control offer that dieting does not?

• The virtual gastric band (VGB) is a non-surgical technique using advanced hypnosis to retrain you to be satisfied with smaller amounts of food. The treatment works by helping you to permanently change your eating and lifestyle habits, by communicating with the subconscious mind. This part of the mind is where all our habits and unconscious thought patterns are stored - by communicating directly here during hypnosis we can change habits at a deeper level.
  
  
• It aims to change your eating habits and attitudes to food, giving safe, predictable results. It trains the subconscious mind to believe that the stomach is smaller than it actually is (the band having been ‘placed’ virtually around the top part of the stomach during hypnosis). Because of this we naturally begin to serve up smaller portions and become fuller quicker on smaller amounts of food.
  
  
• It trains the subconscious mind to be more aware of when we are actually satisfied and don’t need to finish everything on our plates. The programme also supports the individual to make important lifestyle changes such as including some exercise in each day, drinking more water and consciously chewing whilst eating to connect to the body’s natural feeling of having had enough to eat.
  
  
• We use a food diary to identify any problem times or situations and teach a fabulous ‘urge zapper’ breathing tool to stop any snacking urge in its tracks.
  
  
• Any habit change requires some repetition of thoughts supporting new behaviours, and over a period of time until the new habit becomes automatic. The VGB program utilises the power of repetition by providing two audio support recordings that the client will take home to listen to, and will have for life. One to enhance the VGB message of the tummy being smaller and one personalised recording to support each individual with anything they’re struggling with. This could be focusing on motivation to exercise, reducing alcohol, dealing with snacking or a sweet tooth, increasing confidence and/or reducing stress and anxiety. 

The program is not a short-term fix, it allows you to eat what you want but in smaller portion intakes. This means that you won’t feel deprived and therefore gives you a long-term solution to weight control. An actual surgical gastric band reduces the size of the stomach and may achieve the same results but the virtual gastric band can be undertaken quickly, privately and without any risks or huge financial costs.

As well as the virtual gastric band techniques, a good hypnotherapy program for weight control will also include:

• Teaching tools to increase confidence generally and in connection with weight reduction goals. 
• Helping the individual to make an inspiring goal around their weight.
• Techniques that harness the power of positive expectation. Teaching the client to visualise how good life will be, being able to wear the clothes they want to wear, feeling fitter and having more energy, will greatly increase and sustain motivation. 
• Teaching ways to deal with any limiting beliefs the person may have to do with their weight, body and life in general. 
• A focus on emotional eating and teaching ways to cope with and change this habit. 
• Tools and techniques to use to deal with stressful situations. 
• If there is any childhood trauma or unresolved issues causing overeating, techniques to identify the root cause, re-frame and let these issues go, would be used.
• Considerably discounted top-up support sessions via Skype to support the client long-term. These follow up sessions should be available to anyone who has gone through the VGB program and needs some ongoing support to get to where they want to be with their weight. 

By combining the VGB techniques with the above additional tools we can achieve some really great results… results that are long lasting!