Do Not Diet!

All of us at some point in our lives decide that we want to have a different body shape. Those of us who want to lose a few pounds or more, may turn to diets.

Diets are a multi-million pound business. There are many types of diets. Some are based on calorie counting, some on keeping different food groups apart at meals and others on substitute drinks or meals.

Tried these ones lately?

All of them have one thing in common, because they are called diets, they tend to imply a temporary process, involving your short term will power. Short term processes do not provide long term success in terms of health and happiness.

All possible will power is brought to bear on a diet… and indeed the person may start to lose weight for a while.  If they do manage to lose some weight, the next challenge is to keep it off, and that's the really hard bit!

If this all sounds very familiar to you, you might be wondering why this is?

It’s because there is a more powerful force in you than your 'will power', and that is the power of instinct. 

To illustrate this, think of a caveman... 

If the caveman suddenly had his food supply cut, or restricted, by something outside of his control (such as drought for example)… what’s the first thing he would do? - He would, of course, go out looking for alternative supplies of food…

Now, to bring matters more up to date, your unconscious mind doesn’t know that the food supply has been cut by the 'will power' of dieting… all it knows is that something has restricted it’s food supply. So it sends you off looking for food, and it won’t give up until it can re-establish it’s original supply. 

In the case of a dieter, the 'will power' can eventually give in to the instinct, and the weight piles back on.

Deprivation

Going on a diet means that you are depriving yourself, so you will eventually go off the diet. You go loose the weight whilst you are dieting and then put the weight pack on when you come off the diet. This is a yo-yo effect experienced by countless number of people who want to achieve a slimmer figure.

Few people, if any, want to continuously experience this sense of self-punishment and failure in order to obtain and maintain a healthy, attractive figure.

Depriving oneself of food is not the answer and dieting does not work in the long term.

Diets do Not Deal With Emotional Eating

The process of dieting, indeed the millions of words produced by the weight loss industry can be summarised in just two: eat less. Easily said - not so easily achieved.

Diets deal with a symptom: being overweight. The millions words written about one diet or another deal with the issue of size - they do not deal with the emotional issues that result in eating too much. They do not necessarily deal with the cause. If you believe that the cause is a psychological one then the diet will not make any long term difference.

Consider if any of the follow apply to you:

• About Me [Click]

  • I am unworthy.

  • I am weak willed [Click]

    • You may have lost weight with lots of conscious effort. Your conscious mind served as a military force to keep your hunger habits from invading. But, as soon as you reached your goal and stopped dieting, your subconscious took over again. This is because the subconscious is a great deal stronger than the conscious mind, and you did what you were most strongly directed to do: You ate more than your body physically needed.

  • I am unlovable.

  • I am greedy and never satisfied.

  • I swallow my feelings.

  • There must be something wrong with me

  • I suppress my feelings.

  • I am a bad person.

  • I am stressed.

  • I am not assertive enough.

  • I am not as good as everyone else.

• About My Weight [Click]

  • If I was slim I would be more confident, successful, loveable….

  • I was always destined to be fat.

  • If I were thinner everything would be OK

  • I have always felt fat even when I can see that I haven’t been fat

• About Food  [Click]

  • I forget my troubles when I eat.

  • I cannot control my food intake. [Click]

    • The reason you overeat may not be at all clear to you. That is, you may not recognize the culprit if it walks right up and sits down at the dinner table with you. And why is this so? Any motive that is capable of making you operate in a way that causes you long-term physical, emotional, social, or mental discomfort is a motive that has, most likely, been well buried in order to avoid recognition.

  • I eat when I am afraid. [Cick]

    • Afraid of what? There are more than a few possibilities. One common fear is of the potential of your own sexuality. If you are unattractive to the opposite sex, you do not have to worry about the consequences, problems, opportunities, and decisions a relationship can bring. You can stay in your present situation, which demands nothing of you emotionally or physically, because you are not sought after. You may be thinking that there are talented, interesting, and overweight people who still have sexual appeal, and, of course, this is true. But the general rule is that you are not enticing, nor do you seem receptive, if your attractive self is literally buried.
      
      For this reason, a husband may encourage his wife to stop for donuts or a hot fudge sundae when he knows that her resistance is low, that she has just arduously taken off three pounds and will rapidly gain it back again if she follows his suggestion. Why does he do it? It is his insurance against her attracting male attention and finding that she has options, and his finding that he has competition. This last factor serves to increase his insecurity, which was the reason he tried to insure the safety of the relationship to begin with.
      
      You may have been raised to believe that thin was unhealthy and therefore undesirable. The message you received as you grew may have been "If you are plump, you are healthy. If you are healthy, you are less vulnerable to disease. So you make sure that you always have pounds to spare and thus keep illness at bay.

  • When I eat, I feel happier.

  • I feel guilty about what I eat.

  • My food cravings control me

  • I eat to reward myself. [Cick]

    • Starting in early childhood, we are rewarded with food for our accomplishments. As a child you get a cookie as a reward for picking up your toys, saying "please" or "thank you",  As a growing child you get dessert for cleaning your plate, or at least for eating your Brussels sprouts, and you get chocolate for practicing the piano. Your teacher gives a sweet to each student who gets an A on the spelling test. When you are a teenager, the coach takes your team out for pizza after a good game. You go to the movies to be entertained, and you further entertain yourself by consuming a soft drink, popcorn, and a bar of candy. When you graduate, your parents take you out to the best restaurant they can afford. When you're an adult, you get promoted to sales manager; and you celebrate by going out to dinner. You take prospective clients out to lunch.
      

  • Diets fail me.

  • I may starve if I don’t eat enough.

  • I eat when I need love. [Click]

    • As a baby, you cried and you got a bottle. If you were lucky, you got held and had a bottle at the same time. Now you eat when what you really want is to have someone smile at you, give you a kind word, touch you, give you a hug. You may want someone to make love to you, so you love yourself by giving yourself lots of wonderful things to eat. The trouble is that this behaviour creates a treacherous cycle: As you create a bigger self, the more likely it is that your self will be, from a social point of view, unlovable. Unfortunately, our society rewards thin and scorns fat.
       

  • Certain foods excite me

Change in Attitude

Looking at weight control in a different way may help tremendously in the battle between winning and falling by the way side. Having a different mind set or attitude can give us a different way of looking at what we are trying to achieve. This is where hypnotherapy comes in.

Hypnotherapy for Weight Management

Through the use of hypnosis, one can attain a healthy, normal weight and maintain it. Permanently. 

You will know the difference between physiological hunger and psychological hunger therefore, you will not want to eat any more than your body needs.

By simply feeding your subconscious mind with the right therapeutic programming you will be enable you to maintain a healthy life style whilst enjoying your food and feeling great!

Change Today

Weight with hypnotherapy is just one of the many ways hypnosis can help clients achieve a more healthier,  longer and happier life.

Contact the Totnes Hypnotherapy Practice for a free consultation to discover what changes you can achieve. Telephone 01803 868031.