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After smoking cessation, weight loss is probably the most common reason why people to visit a hypnotist. However, it’s likely to be a disappointing visit if an overnight miracle is expected. Weight loss is a sustained, physical process – there really isn’t a magic button you can press to get around that!
That said, hypnosis has freed countless people from the treadmill of dieting and helped them to become the size and shape they want to be. So how does hypnotic weight control actually work? A lot will depend on the individual client and hypnotist, but a typical session is likely to include at least some elements of the following.
Developing Good Habits
People eat for all sorts of reasons, and hunger is often the least of them. We eat to alleviate boredom, we eat to cheer ourselves up, or we eat out of sheer habit. Sometimes we even eat in a trance-like state, shovelling food into our mouths whilst watching TV and scarcely even tasting it.
This is unconscious behaviour – and changing unconscious behaviour is what hypnosis is all about! Hypnosis is a way of communicating with the part of the mind that keeps unhelpful habits in place. It’s a way of updating the unconscious mind with new information and suggesting more helpful ways of going about things. So somebody who snacks on ice cream when they have a bad day, for example, can be directed towards a more useful response, such as relaxing in a bath, calling a friend or going for a walk.
Generally speaking, good eating habits mean eating to satisfy hunger, rather than emotional needs; eating slowly and enjoying each mouthful; and recognising when you’ve had enough to eat.
Understanding Hunger
People who are struggling with weight loss often say that they don’t know when they feel hungry – and likewise, don’t recognise when they feel full.
This can happen for several reasons. They may have been on a series of diets over the years, and diets involve suppressing or ignoring the natural hunger responses. Or it might be that they’re confusing other bodily signals, such as thirst, for hunger.
True hunger is a gradually accumulating sensation – it doesn’t come on all of a sudden. It also tends to be located in the stomach, like a hollow feeling. It doesn’t disappear if you drink a glass of water. It also doesn’t disappear if you do something, such as phoning a friend or going for a walk.
A useful tool that hypnotists often teach their weight loss clients is scaling. If 1 is absolutely ravenous and 10 is absolutely stuffed, at what point on the scale does your hunger lie at this moment? Sustainable weight loss means never being too hungry nor too full, so the aim is to keep yourself somewhere in the middle of the scale.
As you eat, continue to scale yourself from 1 to 10. As soon as you begin to creep above the midway point, stop eating, even if you haven’t finished your food. You can always go back and finish your food later if you start to dip back down again.
This requires some initial effort, but after a while, it becomes automatic. Hypnotic rehearsal helps it to become automatic much faster.
Hypnosis is therefore an effective way of putting yourself back in touch with your body’s signals and learning to trust what it’s telling you. It knows when it wants to eat, it knows what it wants to eat, and it knows when it’s had enough.
Dealing With Cravings
There are two types of food craving. One is the urge for a quick fix of something sugary or high energy, which usually occurs if blood sugar levels are allowed to dip too low. This can be easily dealt with by not allowing yourself to get too hungry in the first place.
The second type has a more psychological component. A craving can be anchored to a particular time, place or activity, through sheer repetition and the power of association. A craving for biscuits, for example, might be associated with an afternoon coffee. These can often be dealt with by altering the sequence of events that lead up to the craving – going for a walk instead of sitting down for a coffee, or having coffee at a different time or in a different place.
A craving can also be an attempt to solve an emotional problem. For example, a sugary snack might work as a temporary fix by distracting you from an uncomfortable thought, situation or task.
Of course, this is only temporary. The tendency is for a vicious circle to develop, whereby the thing you turn to for comfort actually produces discomfort, which sends you right back to the beginning of the cycle.
All of this has consequences for weight gain and weight loss, since it’s invariably, sugary, fatty or high carbohydrate foods that people develop cravings for, simply because the effect is so quick.
It’s as if the unconscious has latched onto something that takes the pain away, even for a while, and decided that this is the best and only medicine for any future pain. Hypnosis works to change expectations around those foods, so that they’re no longer seen as a universal cure-all, but rather as a source of discomfort in themselves.
Dealing With Background Noise
Hypnosis tends to be holistic in its approach. In other words, it doesn’t look at weight in isolation, but looks at the whole picture of a person’s life. Is the client stressed at work? Are they experiencing difficulties in their relationship? Are they sleeping poorly at night? All of these things can have major implications for weight gain.
Hypnosis can be used to calm the mind, allowing it to cope more effectively with the demands of everyday life.
Boosting Motivation
This is especially important when it comes to exercise. When it comes to weight loss, physical exercise is actually more significant than what you eat. If you use every single calorie that you consume, then you won’t put on weight. If you use more than you consume, then you will lose weight.
Unfortunately, it can be difficult to get enthusiastic about exercise, which just sounds dull and cheerless. The first thing to recognise is that exercise doesn’t have to mean going to the gym or taking up a sport. Anything that raises the heart rate or gets the lungs breathing more deeply than normal for a little while. If you’ve ever walked around the block, you’ve exercised. Weight loss just depends on doing a little more of it, a little bit faster.
Here’s a hypnotic technique that you can use to boost your motivation to exercise. It can also be used to boost motivation to stick to a traditional diet plan, if that’s what you’ve chosen to do.
* Find somewhere where you can sit or lie quietly with your eyes closed, and just pay attention to your breathing.
* Think about a time when you’ve felt very motivated, even if it’s for something as simple as being on time for a date. Relive that time in as much detail as possible, seeing what you see and feeling what you feel at that time.
* Keep that motivated feeling and imagine yourself doing what you need to do to get exercising. Watch yourself, as if on a cinema screen, exercising purposefully and with focus and enjoyment.
* Drift up into that cinema screen and feel it from the inside.
Improving Self-Image
The hypnotist is also likely to work with a weight loss client to get them feeling better about themselves generally. Often, weight loss is seen as a means to an end, and a condition of happiness – “when I’m fourteen pounds lighter I’ll be more confident.”
Using hypnosis to imagine those positive feelings and bringing them into the present day can be very effective. When you feel better about yourself, you’re more likely to take care of yourself, by eating the right foods in the right way and by exercising appropriately. You’re also less likely to care what you actually weigh, in terms of numbers on a set of scales!
Summary
Traditional diets don’t work in the long term, for two reasons. First of all, they don’t take account of the psychological or emotional reasons for over-eating. Secondly, they demand a conscious effort, with every single mouthful of food being checked to see if it fits in with the diet’s rules. That’s impossible to maintain over the course of your entire life, and you wouldn’t want to, even if you could!
Hypnotic weight control is effective, because it addresses both of those reasons, establishing good habits and forming a healthy relationship with food and exercise that’s entirely unconscious. Once that pattern’s in place, you don’t have to think about it. You simply trust the process of weight loss to take care of itself.
If you’ve enjoyed these hypnosis tips for weight loss, you may also want to check out our hypnosis tips for sports improvement.
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