Diet sabotage? It's all in your mind

Therapist's quite often say diets don't work so they can sell you their highly expensive program. However, diets do work otherwise you would never reduce your weight. What happens though is self-sabotage by your sub-conscious mind. As humans, we work in patterns of behaviour and 'yo-yo' dieting is one such pattern that affects many people struggling to manage their weight.

Consciously, you may have found your weight has become a pain, mentally and / or physically. Most people like to move away from pain and so might go on a diet. We drop several pounds but as time goes on we find just maintaining the weight is getting harder and harder and before long, it is no longer our weight that is the pain, but the diet. As soon as we stop, on go the pounds again. Can you see the pattern of this behaviour in yourself?

Why do we do this?

The simple answer is that one of the jobs of our very powerful sub-conscious is our protection. Put simply, our brain is telling us it feels safer when we are large. The different reasons for this probably run into the thousands, since throughout our life we suffer trauma, stress, bullying, anxiety etc and it is as if the brain wants to protect us from the nasty outside world by putting a barrier in the way. Perhaps like wrapping us in a duvet of fat.

Diets work, but they do not sort out your issues that are putting weight on in the first place. Hypnotherapy can change these patterns by addressing the actual cause and changing the resulting pattern. For instance, if someone goes for the chocolate or cakes when they suffer stress, we can change the patterns so they go for something healthy instead of junk; or we can in many cases change the way they react to the stress in the first place, so that they handle it in a calm relaxed manner. Your brain will often have secondary gains as a reason for staying fat. We just need to change its mind.

There are some people who lose weight and maintain the loss by diet alone. There are also people who lose weight just with hypnotherapy. However combine the two and you have something really powerful.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author. All articles published on Hypnotherapy Directory are reviewed by our editorial team.

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Newbury, Berks, RG14 2BA
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Written by John Gotelee, DipHyp
Newbury, Berks, RG14 2BA

I am a hypnotherapist with a nutritional therapy diploma. I regularly run weight management groups in Newbury Berks.

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