Mind Over Weight

hypnoband


Recently one of my clients, Claire from Ulverston in Cumbria came to see me for her years of struggle with her attempts to lose weight. She had literally tried everything she could think of and like so many people had spent hundreds of pounds searching for her holy grail. She had attempted numerous diets, traditional and a few unconventional ones which she had found on Facebook and the internet but each and every attempt had resulted in the same outcome which was short term weight loss and a sense of optimism followed very quickly by an abject sense of feeling dismayed and disheartened: “I felt like a complete failure and just went straight back to eating again, putting all the weight back on again” Claire is not alone, however. Her story, like 90% of people worldwide is one of failure to lose weight with diets long term. Why is it so hard? The answer is pretty simple really. The body was not designed to be starved. When you put your body into a famine all you end up doing is stressing the system and the body kicks in to recovery mode. What this means is that once you starve yourself the body makes you feel more hungry, more irritable and more focused on the foods you shouldn’t be thinking about rather than anything else, which then compels you to grab the first opportunity to eat as much as possible thereby undoing all of the work you may have already put in. The body will keep this up until the balance is restored and the ‘emergency’ of no food is over.

And yet the dieting industry which is worth billions of dollars happily pedals the false dream of the perfect body as long as you keep trying again and again. The perfect business model for the big name weight loss companies, which I don’t even have to mention, but not necessarily the perfect solution for those they sell to. Diets are artificial, they are boring and they are unsustainable long term. This is our starting point in this discussion. So is it a lost cause? Is the idea of controlling your weight the impossible dream? Well, yes and no. You see if you are always comparing yourself to the airbrushed models in Vogue or Cosmopolitan then you are setting yourself an unrealistic challenge to become something which doesn’t even really exist. If however you can condition yourself to be happy with a balanced and healthy body, where you are simply comfortable and happy in your own skin then very quickly your resistance around what you think you should and shouldn’t eat can become less important. If you can accept and understand that food is merely a function of your life and NOT the be all and end all then you can relax more and live with less stress about your body.

So if you don’t achieve weight loss through dieting then how do you do it? The clients I work with learn to control three key areas of their lives, which once dealt with help reshape their entire philosophy around food so that they cannot only control the weight but more importantly can learn to lose weight naturally without sacrificing anything in their lives. Claire told me “ This was like nothing I had ever done in the past, because at no point did I feel like I was having to give up anything or having to use will power”. What Claire had identified was the one main difference between experiences with diets and the gastric band hypnosis process which I teach. In diets you have to choose what you can and cannot eat. With gastric band hypnotherapy, using a variety of cutting edge mental strategies you do not need any effort or willpower because our starting point is that food will always be around you therefore why fight it? You can try denying yourself but you will always want the thing you are trying to avoid so just stop resisting and realise your environment will not change BUT you can! Once food doesn’t tempt you in quite the same way, your behaviour based on your emotions will start changing. The autopilot of the body also known as the subconscious can readily train your ability to know when you are full and can be trained to feel full quicker. Claire’s experience illustrates this: “ I had always known that gastric band operations existed, but I didn’t want to put my body through dangerous surgery and I certainly wasn’t willing to spend £8000. Once I was shown how to achieve similar results using hypnosis, I was amazed at how quickly I was feeling full and how much more food was left on my plate” Once you can have more subconscious awareness of feeling full quicker with less food then through sustained automatic balanced eating, the body begins to more efficiently process burning off existing fat and preserving less new fat. The metabolism can, in effect, return to normal and function more efficiently, doing its job properly after having maybe spent years speeding up and slowing down according to any yo-yo dieting attempts.


“I would recommend this service (Cumbria Hypnosis Habit Change Clinic) to anyone who is struggling with diets. It Takes all the effort out of losing weight, gives you confidence and enables you to live your life to fullest without sacrificing anything.” Louise (Barrow-in-Furness)

The mind and body working in balance can result in dramatic and long lasting weight loss, once you have been able to engage with the creative part of brain. The reason why this approach works, is simply because it does not rely on resisting your environment and yourself, instead it is about reframing your perceptions of food and how much you actually need to eat to have the energy you need to get from one mealtime to the next without running back to the fridge an hour later. If you want to find out more then visit our dedicated page HERE

Cumbria Hypnosis serves Cumbria, South Lakes including Ulverston, Kendal and Lancaster with flexible daytime and evening clinics to suit you. If you would like to have a no obligation 20 minute consultation where I will share exactly how this process can help you then you can contact me by clicking this link

Wishing you well

David Faratian











BBC Documentary Exposes How Diets Make you Fat!

Over the past few weeks the BBC have been running a documentary series called ‘The Men Who Made Us Thin’ which explores the history and origins of our modern day obsession with dieting, counting calories, exercise, slimming pills and weight loss. In the programme journalist Jacques Peretti traces why so many people have found themselves seduced by years of dieting propaganda despite the fact that the problem never really existed up until the mid 50s when, as a result of misinformed statistics which the American government commissioned, over half of America’s population were reclassified as overweight even though they weren’t at all. As Peretti explains “At the stroke of a pen normal healthy Americans had a weight problem” This redefinition of what might be termed ‘overweight’ was adopted by the medical establishments and even the government as a result the opportunity to ‘fix’ this problem developed, and of course, the result was that the dieting industry was born.

People who for no reason whatsoever were now ashamed of their bodies were turning in their millions toward solutions for this ‘problem’. People of all ages were now neurotic about their weight and wanted to do anything and everything to lose that weight as quickly as possible.

The promotion of shakes and systems which allowed you to monitor each and every calorie gave people the illusion that they had control over how much their bodies gained or lost weight. Very quickly these quick fix shakes which claimed to promote rapid weight loss were encouraging all kind of imitation brands to spring up for this invented weight problem.

Big business was about to cash in on the misery and depression and unhappiness of people, who up until that point in history, had been able to deal with their self image more realistically. In effect, the weight problems that even influences us today was invented, and the dieting industries were more than ready to offer the solution.

What followed however was shocking to say the least. Scientific studies began to show that there was an inverse relationship between dieting and weight loss. People who dramatically lost weight in the short term, actually caused the bodies natural metabolism to take action and protect it from any harm by conserving as much energy as possible, or in other words the metabolic rate of dieters slows down if starved or put into famine which causes it to actually gain weight.

The fact that Diets fail however was good news for the dieting industries, because they realised that as long as people were guaranteed to fail they would keep coming back to them time and time again for the solution and big business relies on repeat business.

Whether Slim Fast, Lipotrim, Rosemary Connoly, Weight Watchers, The Mars Bar Diet or Atkins, they all rely on the shame, depression and misery the overweight already feel about themselves, to stay in business. The pattern of behaviour this reliance on dieting products promotes is not only harmful but also dangerous. Through continuous dieting people are stressing the natural metabolic balance of the body and therefore long term negative health implications, through so called yo-yo dieting, are increased.

Surely the point with a diet is that you are trying to achieve a significant amount of weight loss, and more importantly, keep it off. The evidence however is that diets long term simply do not work. This evidence is borne out by the fact that statistically over a 5 year period only 18% of an original Weight Watchers control group had achieved any sustained weight loss the other 84% had not only regained any weight lost but also increased their weight. On average, therefore more people regain and gain weight following a diet than if they had adopted other outlooks.

Why am I even writing about this programme, why do I care so passionately about this? The reason is simple. I don’t like or agree with the fact that concerns about weight loss exist only because of an invention of data which suddenly shifted all future benchmarks of what is acceptable or unacceptable weight. This in turn created the fertile ground for greed and big business who never really cared about the misery and unhappiness of the people they were claiming to help. Essentially the dieting industry should have died years ago leaving people to heal and recognise that actually they are fine as they are. Unfortunately things have come too far now and thanks to the internet and media and fashion, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle and unlikely to ever be put back where it belongs. As long as people are constantly comparing themselves with unrealistic ideals, in magazines, in films, on TV, then diets and the unreachable dream weight are here to stay.

So what’s the alternative. To my mind it’s all about balance and moderation. For that you need a change in attitude and perception. Learning to be relaxed around food and have neither guilt or resistance toward our everyday fuel intake is what ultimately leads to a healthy balanced body. Dealing with our addictive thoughts around food without feeling stressed all the time reduces the perception of need . Once we can reconnect with the part of ourselves that knows intuitively what we need, no more, no less, then I believe that’s the most natural way to live. Let your body and mind guide you. This approach is possible for 85% of people. Once you unlock the sensible balanced subconscious which you have trusted to look after you so far then genuine, not invented weight loss is possible.