Hypnotherapy For Weight Management
Thom Bush
Clinical Hypnotherapist
Losing Weight Is Only Part Of The Challenge
How Hypnosis Helps With Weight Reduction
Have you ever wondered why diets so often don't work and why only 1 in 200 dieters ever achieve their goal? You may also wonder why so many people who claim to help you lose weight, trim their content down to the bare minimum? Maybe it's because it makes light reading, who knows? Truth be known, there are many reasons why people lose control of their diets. And even knowing that it could cost them their life or at the very least, impair its quality, they remain committed to their unremitting lifestyle!
Research shows that only 1 out of every 200 dieters actually achieves their goals! The failure rate of diets and weight reduction programs is claimed to be as high as 99.5%. The Washington Post reports that "out of every 200 people who go on a diet, only ten lose all the weight they set out to lose." And of those ten, only one person keeps it off for any reasonable length of time. Perhaps you are or have been a dieter, so, do these statistics resonate with your experience? Maybe you've tried everything you can think of to lose weight and then been faced with the most difficult thing of all, keeping it off!
If your weight reduction attempts have been unsuccessful or difficult, perhaps your subconscious has been working against you. If so, it may interest you to know that your thoughts and behaviours are largely controlled by brain processes that occur outside of conscious awareness. In fact, clinical research has shown that 98% of everything we do stems from this form of subconscious programming. This is why we so often seem to find ourselves doing the very things we try so hard not to do.
So, it should be no surprise that crash diets and many of the current weight reduction fads are not recommended by most professionals. Mostly they consider such approaches to weight reduction as dangerous. Physical exercise and sensible eating will always be part of any useful weight-reduction plan. And when these are combined with a course of Hypnotherapy you can look forward to better than ever results.
Likewise, it should be no surprise that this article is a tad on the heavy side. This is simply because of the nature of how and why obesity is becoming one of the biggest threats to the quality and longevity of life! The complexity of the ever-increasing epidemic of life-limiting conditions, cannot be briefly so easily explained.
Knowledge Is Power, Action Is Everything Else!
The healthiest way to reduce weight is rarely the quickest method. Crash diets, "instant" weight reduction plans or drastic increases in exercise are not recommended. As I said above, most doctors consider these approaches to weight reduction unhelpful, in some circumstances, maybe even dangerous. Exercise and a healthy diet are recommended ways to reduce weight and changes should follow a gradual reduction plan. This helps you pursue a balanced, natural and safe way to lose weight. After all, we do not gain weight instantly, so it takes time and careful planning to lose it.
Part of the planning is in discovering and understanding any physiological reasons for the weight gain, e.g. hormonal or organic conditions underlying the increase. Satisfied that all is well physically, we then look for any psychological aspects of gaining weight. For example, is it because of comfort (emotional) eating? Powerful subconscious motivations for weight gain, are often a subliminal way of getting emotional support. The fact that it leads to other problems, like body image issues, lack of energy, and health and fitness issues, often gets overlooked. This unfortunate set of circumstances can exacerbate the problem, creating more emotions that now also need feeding, a bit of an unmerry-go-round!
The psychological drivers, habits and other emotional factors lurking in the background, often filter out into many areas of our lives, creating discomfort, disillusion and often personal contempt! It is specifically because of this subconscious component, that hypnotherapy helps. Hypnosis helps us to discover these hidden weight reduction wreckers; the underlying emotions that lead us towards self-sabotaging strategies. What complicates matters, is that we can, and often do, justify all of our behaviours and strategies; why wouldn't we, after all, they too came from our subconscious!. Consequently, what we need to discover is, that what we want consciously, is not always what we need at a deeper level; sounds illogical doesn't it? Well the subconscious or unconscious processes are exactly that; illogical and the best way to work with illogic, is to think illogically' it's quite logical really!
Basically, it's not so much about learning or attempting to align ourselves with our thinking but rather by discovering how our thinking evolves. Memory is an automatic function of life, especially emotional memory, it's one of the most basic components of life. If we can't remember when, where, why and how we were in danger, we are more likely to become emotionally vulnerable. This would lead to emotional instability and anxiety, thus invoking survival strategies, it's the way our brain attempts to reestablish stability. All things being equal, our brain does an amazing job, however, when anxiety becomes a disorder, all things are not equal and that's when we go off the rails! Hypnotherapy helps us to subconsciously discover how our nonconscious world works. Once we start to work the way our brain works, life begins to get better and hypnosis makes that possible - it really does!
This is because of the way our brain processes language and converts that into meaning. Basically, we use our spoken language to communicate with each other, as well as, ourselves. Our brain then converts spoken into a chemical language and vice versa, a language that we refer to as the subconscious mind. The brain stores language, and its meaning, in memories, this then translates into emotions that create the feeling that we call life! The emotional drivers that make us eat, even when we are not hungry, are the very things that make us gain weight. It is because of the way the brain finds pleasure in certain foods, e.g. chocolate, cakes, as well as drinks like Coca Cola or alcopops, that emotional relief is experienced. This emotional pleasure occurs as feelings that arise out of our reward pathways. The insatiable ways our brain experiences emotional relief, allow us to ignore the weight gain. This means that we are often oblivious to the knowledge that our lifestyle and body weight are actually doing us harm! Hypnosis allows you to better understand the emotional needs and what drives them. From there, a better sense of self develops, you become less reliant on the outside world and more reliant on your inner self. A welcome outcome of this realisation comes from an understanding of why we think so little of ourselves. Low self-esteem, self-worth and self-respect are a consequence of this poor self-image and somewhat dictate our need for the approval, validation and acceptance of the outside world. Self-esteem, self-worth, as well as self-love, is an inside job and hypnotherapy will teach you that!
Additional Information
Enter the Leptin Ghrelin dilemma:
Successful weight reduction is as much, if not more, about re-educating your brain (the subconscious department), as it is about dieting. Hypnosis is one of the most natural ways to re-educate these emotional centres, thus leading to reduced weight. This is because a major factor of why and how we gain weight is consequential to the way our brain rationalises our emotional experience of life. While clients often have a rational sense of why they gained weight, they rarely have the necessary irrational understanding of how their emotional brain was involved.
We rarely wait until we are hungry to eat, mostly we eat at prescribed times and sometimes snack in between them. These are habits and it is the interplay between the emotions of logical and illogical habits, that lead to psychological disorders. However, it gets rather complicated because of the way our brain monitors our Full/Empty fuel gauge. Ghrelin is a hormone in the gut that tells our brain we are hungry and leptin is a hormone that tells it we are full. While ghrelin normally tells our brain when we are hungry, it can seemingly be adversely affected by psychological and oxidative stress. This can lead to false signals of being hungry (aka emotional eating). Leptin is produced in fat cells, so the more fat you have, the more leptin you are likely to produce. Well, if you have more leptin, that would tell you to stop eating, right? Unfortunately not always, because if we have too much leptin, we can become leptin resistant, meaning we are full, we just don't know it!
So, without getting too technical, a lot of the issues we have with weight, are sometimes a consequence of confusing/conflicting brain functions. Ghrelin is predominantly synthesised in the gastrointestinal tract. However, it is also believed to be produced in the hypothalamus, ostensibly as a consequence of stress. However, there is some evidence that disputes this. Another possibility is that it is a consequence of a specific growth hormone receptor and growth hormones are synthesised in the arcuate nucleus (part of the median eminence of the hypothalamus). But to describe ghrelin and leptin as merely empty and full hormones is a gross oversimplification. They have many diverse functions, relating to feelings of happiness, anger, pleasure (reward), circadian rhythms (our body clock), sleep-wake cycles and emotional wellness. Essentially they are involved in homeostatic balance, a central management system that keeps everything working at optimal levels. Mostly this is a consequence of appropriate activation of the parasympathetic nervous system. And this is what I am beginning to believe is the precursor of the experience we call love! Interestingly, the hypothalamus plays an active role in the activation of both primordial functions, love (parasympathetic nervous system (PNS)) and fear (sympathetic nervous system (SNS)). Consequently, it is involved in the creation and maintenance of all the systems that make life possible. In that sense, love (PNS) is the system that maintains cellular progression, aka wellness, fear, (SNS) is the system that helps us survive a predatory attack, aka fight or flight!
So, we have a hormone that is supposed to tell us when we are full but we may now be resistant to it? We also have another that may be telling us we are hungry, when we may not be because we are too stressed. Hopefully, it is now easier to understand why losing weight can be so complicated and you may be forgiven for wondering how hypnotherapy could help? Hypnotherapy essentially helps to deal with the emotional roller coaster called life. It also helps by making us calmer, which equates to us having less stress and therefore, less prone to erroneous ghrelin production. This helps to regulate appropriate fuel levels and aids in lowering our food intake to what is sufficient to meet our daily needs. This will eventually help to restabilise normal leptin production, leading to the creation of better eating habits. So, by helping our brain function to normalise, we become emotionally more stable and in control of our life.
If you want to discuss your options in achieving your ideal weight, then why not make an appointment for a Free Consultation, just click on the link below?
