As many people struggling with weight often discover, the healthiest, and most long-lasting way to lose weight is not the quickest way to lose weight. Crash diet is a bad term these days, but hundreds of these diets emerge every year as the new miracle weight loss program, masquerading as genuine and using scientific jargon.
The best way to lose weight is to change your lifestyle with a few, sometimes small, changes that will have a gradual effect. However, planning changes is often far easier than implementing them, and if you have had a long-term struggle with your weight, the lack of immediate effect will make it hard for you to stick to your new regime.
The difficulty comes from the mental component of weight loss. How many people were taught as children not to leave food on the plate? How many were given a sweet as a reward for good behavior? The emotional associations of eating are deeply ingrained in each of us, and permanent weight loss requires the changing of a lot of old habits.
Therapy is a powerful aid when changing these eating habits, and hypnotherapy can prove useful when approaching weight loss. Hypnosis can help you change the way you think, making changing your habits a little easier. Hypnotherapy, like many therapies, also can confront the core of the problem in helping to deal with the emotional issues behind a weight problem, such as self image, stress, and need for outside emotional support.
Hypnosis practitioners attempt to deal with weight problems by treating underlying emotional issues. This can be useful in helping break the vicious cycle of weight loss. Feeling overweight can be devastating to self esteem. Embarking on difficult diets and failing lose weight, or failing to keep weight off when the effects of the diet wear off, often reinforces these negative feelings, making it harder to stay motivated. Good self-esteem is an essential component for successful weight loss, but can be impossible to maintain without keeping your mental health on track alongside your physical health.
Another problem hypnotherapy is useful in treating is emotional eating. Emotion-driven hunger is an urge to eat that comes from a need for comfort, a need to please others (such as in leaving a clean plate), and many other complex emotional needs. For many people, years of emotional eating have made it difficult to distinguish between emotion-driven and physical hunger. Emotional hunger is insistent and specific, and therefore hard to resist. Unlike physical hunger, which comes on gradually, emotional hunger feels like it can’t be ignored. Emotional hunger also usually involves a need for a specific food, unlike physical hunger, which involves the body sending out signals for nutrients of any kind – this is a good way to tell the difference between the two, but unfortunately yet another reason that emotion-driven cravings are hard to resist. Hypnotherapy, in dealing with the underlying, subconscious, emotional issues behind weight gain, can help delineate between these two, making it easier to distinguish your body’s physical need and develop tools to resist the emotional one.
Hypnotherapy can prove a useful tool for weight loss, but it is important to bear in mind the fact that there is no miracle cure. Weight loss is a gradual process, just as weight gain is, and hypnotherapy for weight loss can help you through this process successfully. The human body revolts when too much weight is lost at one time, shutting down systems and changing chemistry – essentially fighting you and your efforts. Making weight loss part of your long-term plan is a healthy and realistic way to confront this issue, using tools like hypnotherapy to support your journey.
