Five ways hypnotherapy helps for weight loss

Are you absolutely fed up with trying diet after diet and none of them work? Nothing seems to stick. You might do well on a new diet for a few days or a few weeks and then you fall off the wagon and go back to eating rubbish again.

This can be infuriating. What I often see with my clients is that they start seeing this as their fault. That something is wrong with them. That they are the problem why they cannot stick to something.

We often then internalise this to mean, we are sabotaging ourselves. We are useless. It makes us feel even worse when we read stories of people’s miraculous weight loss in magazines. We naturally then think, if other people can do it, why cannot I? And it reinforces that there must be something wrong with us.

I will tell you now, there is nothing wrong with you. You can lose weight. Even if you have a lot of weight to lose, you can do it. Diets are not meant to be stuck to in the long term. Diets are a short-term fix, so stop beating yourself up because you did not last. Someone else has designed that diet and it may not fit in with your lifestyle or emotional needs so, of course, you are not going to stick to it.

Though, what you may need to work on is your mindset around food, your weight, and how you feel about yourself. If you find yourself repeating the same patterns with eating and food, that points to something in your psyche that is driving these behaviours. It is not obvious what needs changing. You might not know what is directly causing you to eat more or irregularly which is why it is hard to put right. You can see how a diet is never going to fix your disordered eating. This is where hypnotherapy can help.

A hypnotherapist will talk with you initially to find out what your eating patterns are. They will ask you questions about your thoughts and feelings about food. More importantly, they will let you talk, and give you the space to talk about whatever is frustrating you. From my experience, your eating issues are rarely to do with food. They are an entanglement of beliefs you hold now, perceptions you made when you were younger, and experiences from your childhood. This all can take time to untangle. Though with each little step made forwards you start to change how you eat and you feel better and better about yourself.

How can hypnotherapy help with weight loss?

Here are five ways in which hypnotherapy plays a part in weight loss.

1. Relaxes the mind

One of the reasons we can end up overeating is because we are stressed and or anxious. When we are stressed, food makes us feel better and gives us energy. It can feel like we are on this hamster wheel of life and do not know how to get off it.

When we are busy, rushed, and stressed we tend to eat quickly and easy food and this means processed food such as sandwiches, cakes, and crisps. All are easy to eat but fatty and have extraordinarily little nutrition. When we start to relax our minds and find peace within, we start to choose better and healthier foods to eat.

2. Finds your purpose

On a deeper level, if we do not have a purpose or our lives are not full of things that we love and enjoy, food will fill that gap. Food can often fill the void that we feel emotionally. It can give us something to do when we are bored. It can fill up the excitement for the day. When we fill ourselves up with love, joy, and happiness, we no longer turn to food to fill us up.

3. Builds awareness

We often eat unconsciously and do not know what we are eating which causes us to put on weight. When we sit in front of the tv and eat, we are not aware of how much we are eating. We may not be aware of our eating patterns, like all the times we eat a little biscuit or a small piece of chocolate. We forget about what we have eaten when we are not aware of what we are doing.

Hypnotherapy helps you become more aware of what you are eating and when. It makes you think if you really want or need the food. It also helps you to have better control over your eating so you can abstain more easily.

4. Feel more confident

When we hear positive words and positive suggestions, we start to feel better within ourselves. We start to focus on the good things about us and the things that we can do rather than cannot do. This in turn enables us to feel much more confident within ourselves and it raises our self-esteem. When we feel good, we want to eat healthier food because that also makes us feel better about ourselves.

5. Naturally want to eat healthier food

With all the other points, hypnotherapy then helps us to stop our cravings. We stop enjoying the sugary, fatty food and we want healthier foods. We start to find joy in eating lighter, more natural foods.

The points above combined lead to a naturally healthier lifestyle, one that is enjoyable and one where we feel content and happy within ourselves. This in turn leads to continued and sustainable weight loss.