5 ways weight loss hypnotherapy can help you achieve your goals

Before speaking about how hypnotherapy can help you achieve your goals, it’s important to talk about what hypnotherapy is not. Most importantly, hypnotherapy is neither a tool to change your personality nor a tool to make you do something you do not want to do.

Hypnotherapy is a form of therapy that uses hypnosis to draw out your strengths, so you can be the best version of yourself in situations where you struggle. If you find you’re at a dead end with weight loss, you feel uncomfortable and unhealthy, hypnotherapy may help you achieve your goal, providing it’s realistic.

Hypnosis will not help you lose weight without changing anything. However, if you’re open to a different approach to life and willing to work with your therapist, you can achieve what you set out to achieve with the help of hypnosis. Five ways hypnotherapy for weight loss can help you achieve your goals are as follows.

1. Mindfulness

Mindfulness is a style of living in which you remain in the present moment with no judgment of your feelings. The aim is to sit with feelings, giving them permission to be there. The lack of judgement means you have less need to fix or change any feeling that presents itself. Instead of reacting to every thought or feeling, you’ll take time for consideration.

Rather than eating food before you’ve even noticed you reached for it, with consistent practice of mindfulness techniques, you’ll think about whether it’s hunger you feel and have the means to satiate it with nutritious foods your body needs. When you take time to consider your feelings using mindfulness techniques, you’ll have the ability to consider what you need in each moment, rather than meeting every need with food.

2. Aversion

Your brain cannot differentiate between reality and imagination. You can use this fact as a hack for many of life’s problems. When you activate your imagination, your brain will react as if that thing is really happening, and store it for future reference. By using your imagination to form a connection between a food you crave and something you despise, you’ll feel less drawn towards the food. This is a great technique when an addiction to a specific food type prevents you from achieving your goals.

3. Exercise motivation

Exercise is a key player in mental well-being. However, it’s overestimated as a weight loss tool. Your body needs to move, you evolved to spend your day hunting and gathering. You can search for natural materials to make shelter and the muscles to build it. When you spend your day sat in front of a screen or at the wheel of a car, you restrict your body from functions it needs to perform.

Financial obligations and time restraints make this way of life necessary. Formal exercise mitigates some negative effects of this lifestyle. Exercise will help you feel good about yourself. When you feel love for yourself, you’re more likely to nurture yourself, in many ways including food choices. Your hypnotherapist will help you find the motivation to exercise by drawing out the innate parts of you that feel empowered through exercise.

4. Therapy

Sometimes the reason for weight gain is simple. You enjoy good food, you regularly eat in restaurants or choose fast food options because you don’t prioritise time to make your own meals, or your lifestyle dictates this. Maybe you don’t really know what your body needs. Perhaps social occasions with finger food or a cake table at work disguise how much you eat.

Discussions in therapy will help you fully acknowledge this, and you’ll have time with your therapist to discuss and plan how you can change this. However, some people eat in a dysfunctional way because of other reasons. Reasons that might require a deeper therapeutic approach.

5. Introspection interoception

Introspection and interception; two words so connected and easily muddled. Introspection refers to the act of examining your own thoughts, feelings, and mental processes. It involves turning your attention inward, reflecting on your experiences, to gain insight into your own mental and emotional states.

Introspection is a useful tool for self-awareness and personal growth. By examining your thoughts and emotions, you better understand your own motivations, values, and beliefs. This helps you make more informed decisions, and improves your relationships with others, so you can lead a more fulfilling life.

Interoception refers to the ability to perceive and interpret the internal sensations of your body, such as hunger, thirst, heartbeat, breathing, and emotional states. It involves the processing of sensory information from your body's internal organs and tissues and is used to generate subjective experiences of bodily sensations.

Interoception is a crucial aspect of your ability to regulate your physiological and emotional states. For example, the perception of hunger can trigger the desire to eat, while the perception of pain can signal the need to rest or seek medical attention.

Research shows that interoception is closely linked to emotional awareness and regulation, as well as mental health and well-being. Impaired interoception has been associated with various psychiatric disorders, such as anxiety, depression, and eating disorders.

Improved introspection will help you understand why you may eat when your body doesn’t need food, and why you make certain choices. Improved interoception will help you know when you’re hungry and when you need something else. Your hypnotherapist will help you improve your introspection and interoception, so you use food as fuel and fulfil your other needs adequately.