Your mind can be your biggest asset, or your biggest problem when you are trying to achieve something.
Your mind can provide you with supportive thoughts, or it can create doubts that stop you in your tracks.
Trying to lose excess weight is no exception to this. This is where hypnosis for weight-loss might help.
Getting out of your own way
Your mind helps provide the motivation for losing weight.
It can help you plan for weight-loss, and let you monitor your progress towards your weight loss goals.
On the other hand, your mind might not actually believe that you can do it. Maybe telling you it’s a waste of time, or that it’s too hard.
Something else your mind can do is make you crave the wrong types of food. So you start eating food that doesn’t support your weight loss plans.
This is where hypnosis for weight-loss comes in.
Hypnosis can help you with all aspects of trying to lose weight. It can help you visualise success, make you believe you can do it, and overcome cravings for foods that are high in fats or carbohydrates.
What is hypnosis?
The impression most people have of hypnosis is that it involves people on stage or TV.
These people can be hypnotised to eat an onion, while thinking it’s an apple, or doing something really embarrassing to roars of laugher from the crowd.
Well, that’s partly right.
The processes involved in stage hypnosis are very similar to those used in therapeutic hypnosis. However, the aim is different – it’s to help you with something you are trying to do, rather than just providing entertainment.
All the hypnotist does is quieten down the conscious part of your mind so that your unconscious mind can be communicated with more easily.
Another way to think of this is that your analytical left-brain is shut down a little bit so your more accepting right-brain can receive the positive information that will help you lose weight.
Without hypnosis you might find it difficult to believe that you will be able to lose excess fat to achieve your target weight.
This is because your conscious mind will analyse the information about your goals and decide it can’t be done.
It’s actually trying to protect you from harm when it does this.
What kind of harm? Feeling hungry, of course.
Your critical, analytical conscious mind can get in the way
Planning to lose weight and setting goals for how much weight you want to lose usually seems quite straightforward.
Until you actually try to lose the weight, that is.
It’s usually recommended that you write down your goals. But if you have every tried to do this you will know how uncomfortable it makes you feel.
That’s probably because your analytical, critical, conscious, right-brained mind doubts you an actually do it.
The same thing happens when visualising successful weight-loss.
Visualisation of positive results, and you at your ideal weight, is a very helpful process when trying to slim down. Without hypnosis though, your conscious mind might doubt that you could ever achieve what you are visualising, and convince you not to even bother trying.
When the conscious mind has been quietened it doesn’t make judgements about the information coming in, and your unconscious mind is much more accepting of it.
These are the “hypnotic suggestions” that you may have heard about.
How does hypnosis for weight-loss work?
The process of hypnosis makes you feel more relaxed and receptive to suggestions that will help you.
What types of hypnotic suggestion might be helpful when you are trying to lose weight?
Here are some examples.
Visualising yourself having achieved your ideal weight will let you see what you are aiming to do. If you can visualise it without dismissing it as unrealistic then this will provide the motivation for you to get started losing weight, and help to keep you on track.
Changing your desire for particularly unhelpful foods means you won’t get cravings for them. This will also help you to stay on-track with your diet plan. Hypnosis enables you to change your thoughts about these foods so you won’t want them. It will also make you feel better about healthy foods that will help you lose weight.
Several hypnotists you might know from television are now helping people to lose weight. One of the best known is Paul McKenna, who has published several books to help people with various issues, including weight loss. Two books Paul has written on weight loss are “I Can Make You Thin”, “Freedom From Emotional Eating” and “The Hypnotic Gastric Band”.
Hypnosis won’t lose the weight for you. To use hypnosis for weight-loss you will still need a proper diet (hint – try making smoothies) and an exercise plan (how about just walking more?).
But it does push the odds in your favour and make it more likely that you will be successful in achieving your weight-loss goals.
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