I have to admit to watching the repeat of this programme just the other evening. It’s not my usual viewing, I confess, but someone had mentioned something about it, which meant it had my interest.
A friend had said that she had watched it every week. She is one of those people, who have been unfortunate enough to have been on every imaginable diet known to man. So this type of programme is right up her street.
One part of the programme had presenter, Anna Richardson trying different diets, including diet pill and of course the fad diets that many people are tempted to do (I think she even had a maple syrup and water diet – imagine that for a week!).
Anyway, the crux of the matter was that at the end of trying all these different things, the one thing that she felt had really helped her was the hypnosis. By the end of the first week she had lost three pounds without too much effort. She felt that because it dealt with the mind, it was able to be effective.
It’s exactly the way that I like to approach weight control. It’s not about being on a diet. In fact, when I say the word ‘diet’, I mean it in it’s true form ie, the things that we eat and drink – not a calorie controlled diet. In my opinion, diets don’t work, and I can say this from experience because up until the point I discovered hypnotherapy, I had been on one for most of my adult life. When we diet, in a very short period of time, the body enters starvation mode because it thinks there is a famine coming. So the metabolism of the body slows down, burning up less calories. This is why we tend to lose weight most quickly in the first few weeks of a calorie controlled diet, and why after a while, we have to cut down our intact of calories again when a plateau is reached. Of course, once goal weight has been reached and we start eating ‘normally’ again what happens? The calorie intact is higher than that being used by the body, and the weight starts to pile on again – probably more than was lost in the first place. And so continues this yo-yo style of dieting, which does our bodies no good at all.
Using cognitive hypnotherapy and combining it with NLP techniques, I work together with my clients to find the underlying causes to their relationship with food, and together we try to change that. Once the relationship has altered, it can be surprisingly easy to have a different attitude to food, so that it is not longer the obsession that it might once have been. By making sure that we eat consciously, instead of the trance-like way which may have been normal before, I help my clients to be able to eat in such a way that they don’t have the guilt that can sometimes accompanys eating. So it’s not a quick-fix, but over a number of sessions, a changing of habits and mind-sets so that you can get to a point of conscious eating – where you can enjoy eating healthily.
Tags: Channel 4, weight control