Hypnosis Training Blog

First, the bad news. Self hypnosis isn’t magic, and there is no mental technique that will help you to shed 28lbs overnight (if we discover it, we’ll let you know!). Weight loss is a continual process, which involves eating better and moving around more to burn off the calories you consume.

The good news – self hypnosis can help you to eat better and move around more!

Step 1 – Know Where You’re Going And How You Will Get There

As we all know, if you set yourself a vague goal, that’s exactly where you’ll end up – somewhere vague. Losing 0.01% of a pound is still weight loss, after all. So the first question to ask yourself is – if I never got on another set of scales again, how would I know that I’m the size and shape I want to be? The second question to ask is – what does being a different size and shape give me that I don’t already have? In other words, what will I feel? More confident? More relaxed? More socially at ease?

Use the following self hypnosis exercise to establish your weight loss goal.

1. Relax into trance, using your preferred self hypnotic method.

2. Imagine yourself sat in a cinema, looking up at the screen.

3. Picture yourself, like an actor in a movie, being the size and shape you want to be. Notice what it is about yourself up there that lets you know that you’ve achieved your goal. Build up as vivid and as detailed a sensory picture as you possibly can – what are you wearing? What are you doing? Who are you doing it with? How do you stand? How do you speak? If there are other people up there, what are they saying to you?

4. When you like what you see up there on the cinema screen of the mind, you can drift up into it and join in the action from the inside. See what you will see, hear what you will hear, and most importantly, feel what you will feel.

5. In your imagination, look back over all the things you did and all the changes you made to get you to your preferred body size, almost as if you were remembering them from a date in the future. Perhaps the first step was to start practising self-hypnosis! After that, perhaps you started getting off the bus a stop early and walking the rest of the way home, and so on. Make this as vivid and as detailed as you can.

6. Come back to everyday awareness, ready to put the first of your “remembered” steps into practice.

Step 2 – Overcoming Obstacles

What stops you being the size and shape you want to be? Chances are you’ve developed unhelpful eating habits over time – emotional or comfort eating; craving sugary or fatty foods; continuing to eat even when you feel full, and so on.

The following self hypnosis exercise will help you to eliminate unhelpful habits and put more helpful habits in their place.

1. Relax into trance, using your preferred self hypnotic method.

2. In your imagination, get a sense of a time when it would be useful to have control over the way you eat – for instance, a time when you habitually reach for a sugary snack.

3. Run a little mental movie of that time. In your imagination, drift out to one side of yourself and watch yourself, in your mind, reaching for that sugary snack.

4. Mentally rewind the movie and run it again, this time in very slow motion. Notice that there comes a “tipping point”, after which putting that unwanted or unnecessary food in your mouth becomes inevitable. For example, opening the cookie jar to get that sugary snack.

5. When you get a sense of that tipping point, run the movie again at normal speed, and freeze it, right at the tipping point. What would happen if you did something else, right at that tipping point? Run the movie again, and notice yourself doing something different – perhaps putting the cookie jar back in the cupboard and going outside for a short walk instead.

6. Do this three times watching yourself, and three times feeling the different behaviour from the inside.

7. Come back to everyday awareness when you are ready.

As with all self hypnotic work, the more you practise these exercises, the better they’ll get. At the very least, self hypnosis will help you to relax – and since stress is a key predictor of weight gain, this isn’t to be undervalued.

The next article is Self Hypnosis To Quit Smoking

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