Weight Control

Being overweight hurts Do you ever feel like a yo-yo ? Force yourself to eat less, and your weight goes down, feel starving and frazzled, and up it goes again ? Have you got the mug and the t-shirt for the high-protein diet, the calorie-counting and the appetite-suppressant guck ? Do you try every new thing that comes along, and it's no better ? Being overweight hurts. It never goes away. Everyone can see it. It makes your life miserable. We know this is true. We help people shed the stigma, danger and suffering of being overweight.

Our eating habits A few people have a physiological reason for being overweight, and may find that their doctor can help them with this. For others, the situation is not helped by the fact that they take no exercise at all; but although exercise is important, it cannot counterbalance dietary excess. For most people, their eating habits are the key. If a person eats meals of a modest size, doesn't snack in between, and avoids sweets and junk food, they are unlikely to have a weight problem. But many people today find that such a regime leaves them feeling uncomfortable, empty and miserable. The human body will complain if it is not supplied with sufficient nourishment, and this complaint, called 'hunger', is a response relayed via the nervous system to the brain, and thus to the mind. For most of us today, a serious physical hunger response will not often happen.

What kind of eater are you? Emotional eaters Emotional eaters are people who eat food because of emotions such as stress, worry, loneliness, boredom or frustration, for want of companionship or reward, or wish for punishment. Conditioned eaters A conditioned eater is a person who eats foods because of early childhood conditioning, such as the child who was made to feel guilty if they left anything on their plate because people were starving in other countries. Or the child who was motivated to eat everything on their plate in order to get the dessert. Conditioned eaters are in the millions. Subconscious eaters A subconscious eater is a person who is unaware of all the food they are putting into their mouths. Watching a movie and eating a whole bag of popcorn or a litre of ice-cream. The person who is continually snacking at work at the sweet basket on the table or desk, and not aware of how much they are eating throughout the day. A subconscious eater is an automatic eater and no aware of their over-eating habit. Hypnosis is a great tool to help you get fitter, improve your eating patterns and help you lose the weight that you want to lose. I can help you with the programming in the unconscious part of your mind, but you need to take responsibility for you conscious mind.

The problem is rarely the real problem Overweight is a good example of how people can waste a lot of energy trying to correct a problem that is not the real problem. They can spend years fighting fat and are still overweight. The excess weight is only an outer effect of a deeper inner problem . Fear and the need for protection can be at the bottom of overweight. When we feel frightened or insecure or "not good enough" many of us will put on weight for protection. To spend time berating ourselves for being heavy, to feel guilty about every bite of food we eat, to do all the numbers we do on ourselves when we gain wait, is just a waste of time. Twenty years later we can still be in the same situation because we have not even begun to deal with the real problem. All that we have done is to make ourselves more frightenend and insecure. Do not focus on excess weight or on diets, for diets do not work. The only diet that does work is a mental diet. When we begin to love ourselves, it's amazing how weight just disappears from the body.

Our subconscious processes The mind is a complex entity which processes signals from the senses, from the body (such as the hunger response), and from its own subconscious region. The subconscious contains a huge number of memories, desires and impulses which feed and interact with the conscious mind, and it plays a huge part in determining our personality and behaviour. This is good except for one thing. As we have no conscious notion of what the subconscious is doing, it is possible for subconscious material to affect our behaviour without us knowing why. The reason why hypnosis is so useful in dealing with this kind of problem is that it makes the subconscious processes more accessible and thus easier to change.

What can we do? If you relate to what we have said so far, if you perhaps recognise yourself as a comfort eater, or if you find it troubling that a process beyond your control is governing your eating, there are several methods I can use to help you. If you decide to consult me, our first session will be an in-depth talk-through of your habits, your attitudes to food and to yourself, and your past background. I will then explain the options, and we can agree on a strategy for sorting the problem out. It will probably require a further two to six sessions to reach a satisfactory resolution.