Succeeding with Weight Control

Question

      There’s a lot written about weight loss and so many diets.  I don’t feel that am able to make losing weight easy for people who come to me with such problems.  I would like to learn to do a better job with them.

Answer

     Hypnotherapy, as you know, can help with eating habits like choices of food, eating past being full, not exercising, willpower and self-control, and being able to keep the weight off once your clients drop it.    It can also help with reasons for those habits.  It can help with emotional eating, eating for comfort and nurture, and eating to protect oneself (layering).   It can even help with medical problems related to weight issues. But hypnosis is not a “magic wand.”  Your clients have to want to change.  They have to be willing to deal with whatever benefits they are getting from having the weight on them.  They have to be willing to let go of the layers of protection they may have been collecting around their bodies. Your clients have to be willing to change habits that are unhelpful and unhealthy.

     What hypnosis can do VERY well is to release or change the needs underlying the weight, and to make those changes more easily. Through it, you can also replace the benefits of being the size the clients are when they come to you, to benefits for being the size your clients want to be  The exciting thing, for me, is that your clients can make such changes without feeling deprived--a major reason for going off diets.   

     Sometimes there can be a conscious desire to change but an UNconscious desire NOT to change.  For this reason, the best kind of hypnotherapist is the one who can help get at the cause of the weight need and habits, and who knows how to release or change those imprints.  Once that is done, then a sort of “re-programming” can happen through positive suggestions about habit changes, and any underlying reasons.  Because of this, I do two very important things before I give suggestions for new habits.  

     First, I do a very thorough intake that fills me in on the client’s childhood history; teenage life and struggles; attitudes they have about themselves and others; family attitudes toward food, weight, the body and sex; when the weight first came on, what was going on at the time, any other significant times of gain or loss; what techniques have been used before to get rid of unwanted weight and whether they have worked; and specific current habits related to eating. 

     Second, after an initial introductory induction, I ask the deeper mind to seek out any imprints on the mind, or body, that are causing the over-weight.  Then I request that some part of the mind that knows just how to do this, changes those imprints into something more helpful to the client now, at this time in their life journey, when they wish to be able to weight ____ pounds.  Only after I do this, do I begin to “re-program” related to habits, and attitudes.   

     I have found myself to be far more effective, since using this system, when it comes to issues related to weight and exercise.  By the way, one of the helps in being more effective, is to stop using the word “lose” when dealing with weight management.  After all, if you think about it, “losing” anything or anyone is a sorrowful situation.  And if you lost something as a child, didn’t your parents request that you go find it?  Do you want your client to feel bad about getting rid of their weight?  Do you want them to “find” the pounds again that they lost?  Use other words with them, such as shedding, getting rid of, etc.  Remember, we are “word smiths” because we believe in the power of words!