Hypnotherapy for Weight Loss
You Can Lose Weight with Hypnotherapy
Everyone has a different mechanism for coping with stress. Some people turn to exercise to sweat out their stress, others may meditate to calm their anxiety while yet others may turn to food whenever they are faced with a challenge, decision, dilemma or insecurity.
If you head mindlessly for the refrigerator or kitchen pantry every time that you are distressed, you may be more of an emotional eater than you realize. Hypnotherapy can help.
Why Do People Overeat?
For most people, eating is a practice to satiate hunger. Among these, some may do so to gratify indulgence to some extent, but then there are others who eat simply to get away from stress and anxiety. If you think you fall into this category, you may be doing so because it’s the only way you know to calm yourself when you are in an uncertain or difficult situation.
Such eating behavior is called emotional eating where you can’t stop eating even though you are not the slightest bit hungry. Most of the eating that you do is in response to your feelings and not actual hunger.
This type of eating pattern can lead to a number of problems. First off, you will find yourself faced with the irrational urge to eat indefinitely, plus there are the various health issues linked with overeating of this kind. And if you take a look on the social side of things, being heavier than average can also have repercussions such as discrimination, bullying or even physical abuse.
On the other hand, there are people who overeat without being emotional eaters. In this group, compulsive eating habits may be dictated by some of the following reasons:
You turn to food out of mindless habits such as munching on chips while watching TV
You eat because you are trying to delude yourself about your eating habits
You try unrealistic approaches like giving up entire food groups from your diet to lose weight which results in a full-fledged meltdown on the first sight of a cookie or pretzel.
You may have a diagnosis for BED or binge eating disorder, where you compulsively eat a big amount of food in a short amount of time followed by feelings of shame or guilt later on.
But whether it is emotional eating or compulsive eating that causes you to overeat, you know that trying to get the weight off becomes a real struggle. The process can easily become not only frustrating and disappointing but also rather detrimental to your self-esteem.
If you have been trying to find a way with dieting and exercising programs without much success, then you should know that you can seek professional help using hypnotherapy for effective weight loss.
How is Hypnotherapy Helpful?
Hypnotherapy has long been used to find helpful solutions for many problems including effective and long term weight loss. For instance, a 1985 study by Bolocofsky, Spinler and Coulhtard-Morris, published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology worked with 109 subjects between the ages of 17-67 for a 9-week duration.
Subjects underwent behavioral treatment either with or without hypnosis and both groups showed significant weight reduction. Further, follow up after an 8 month and 2 year period revealed the hypnosis group showing additional weight loss as compared to the non-hypnosis one.
Another similar 1986 study conducted by Cochrane and Freisen, published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, worked with 60 women between the ages of 20-65 coming from a different family, education and socioeconomic backgrounds. Once again, subjects were divided into a hypnosis group and a non-hypnosis one. After the 6-month study duration, the hypnosis group shed an average of 17 pounds while the non-hypnosis subjects’ weight loss averaged only ½ pound.
As such, results from the two studies can be used to conclude that hypnosis can be rather effective in long term weight loss.
Hypnotherapy for weight loss aims to help you in the following ways:
Establish a positive affiliation with food
Boost confidence about body image
Remove guilt or negative thoughts about food
Sever the connection between emotional turmoil and food, so you only eat when you are hungry
Break mental barriers that may have been stopping you from exercising
Provide you with the motivation to eat well, outweighing the urge to binge
Shift focus from obsessing overweight to better health and fitness
