As someone who has quite a lot to do with helping clients in their battle to be more healthy and to look and feel better; I feel overwhelmed just thinking about it. So let’s attempt to break it down. 

Whatever your story, you are the one who has the power to make changes…

There are more reasons for people being overweight than makes of Jeans.  Some of us are overweight because we have been going through a difficult time and it is a passing phase, some are chronically overweight (lifelong) to varying degrees and some have medical conditions or have to take medication that cause weight gain. 

There is an immense amount of guilt and pain attached to how we feel about our bodies when we are larger or less attractive than we would like to be, often either stemming from the opinions of others or our own self condemnation. Not to mention the vice-like framework that the media enforces upon us about being their idea of perfect.  Then there are the harsh, but popularly held beliefs such as ‘you are what you eat’ ‘if you want to lose weight just eat less’, when it just isn’t that simple.  In fact I would go as far as to say that often overweight people are mis-represented and maligned as weak-willed losers. 

It is no wonder that people get depressed and give up, because they feel they are in a no-win situation! Whatever your story, the first thing to do is to gain more understanding, then you will have the power to make positive changes.

Small but significant steps…

The bottom line is that we are all individuals and each have our own path in life.  No-one’s experience is the same and we cannot generalise, even though we do.  When people come to see me about weight I could give them hypnosis and hope for the best. Whilst sometimes that is all they need as maybe the problem is not long-term, I prefer to explain to clients that we have to face the issue of weight like the beginning of a journey to feel and look better, taking small but significant steps.

Your mind holds the key…

Do you realise that everything that has ever happened to you is stored in your unconscious mind?  In fact to explain things very simply – our active minds are like the M25 in the rush hour and our unconscious mind is like a huge library with archives going back as long as we existed.  The thing is that we are not always aware how much the unconscious mind actually rules us - naturally, because it is unconscious. It is in this part of our minds where our deepest beliefs about life and ourselves are stored.  The term ‘self limiting beliefs’ is used to describe the ways in which our mind shapes the way we see our world, sadly often negatively.  

We can be aware of saying harsh things about ourselves ‘putting ourselves down’ and this can be the outward sign of an inner negative belief.  So for example, someone might feel that they are not worth anything, and that underlying notion can seriously affect their everyday life experience.   With hypnotherapy we are able to access those out of reach parts so that we can bring relief and solace to our minds, emotions and bodies.  That is how it works.  Mind affects emotions causing the release of chemicals such as Endorphins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorphin and Cortisol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortisol and those chemicals if produced to excess can have a positive or in the case of Cortisol, a detrimental effect.

Emotional Pain…

The body also remembers emotional pain as well as the mind.  A person can almost physically ‘hang on’ to weight sometimes for self-protection, i.e. weight stored around the stomach area where we are most vulnerable.  Think for a moment what happens physiologically when you are upset – pain around the stomach area?  Shock – feel like you have received a blow to the stomach?  I had one client who whenever she had to face something difficult would literally hold everything in until the worry had passed.  Irritable Bowel Syndrome is a condition often as a result of how emotion affects us physically. 

When we have dealt with the emotional roots of pain, the power of positive thinking and using positive affirmations and lifestyle changes can help us make the new ways of thinking stick and become part of us.  Studies have shown that using hypnotherapy and NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming) techniques when working on specific areas we can actually change the way our minds react from negative to positive.

Stress and Digestion ‘I feel gutted!’

When we have to live with prolonged stress, not only does it affect our glands, but particularly our digestion. Two of the main problem areas are the inability to eliminate waste and poor absorption of nutrients in the intestine. When we are stressed the effects impede our digestion often resulting in the over or under production of acid.  If food is undigested (not enough acid) it goes off causing all sorts of gastro-intestinal disturbances and if too much acid is produced it can lead to a stomach ulcer.  These kind of problems can contribute to weight gain and water retention. 

Another popular subject around food related to digestion is that of food sensitivities.  Not to be confused with a food allergy where a person can have a life threatening reaction and go into body shock.  A sensitivity can happen at any time and is often precipitated by a stressful time.  If you are stressed and your digestive tract is inflamed it can be easily react.  Sometimes sensitivities are only transient.  Naturally as we get older our bodily functions slow down and also some of us simply do not tolerate things like dairy from a young age. 

My food relationship…

It has been said that food is the great pacifier and we all need to comfort ourselves at times.  Some people associate food with being loved and cared for and there are many different takes on food positive and negative. One thing that often gets overlooked is that we need to feed our bodies.  Since we are biochemically individual and have to cope with busy lives, and depending how well our body processes everything, it is often sensible to supplement our diets as a practical way of caring for ourselves. 

Hypnosis, NLP and Life Coaching can help enormously to help with weight control, tackling things from the mind angle and helping you to implement lifestyle changes that suit you and serve you. Hypnosis can deal with and remake underlying beliefs so that we are free to make more positive choices about how we look after ourselves. 

If we want to successfully improve our wellbeing i.e. lose some weight and improve our health and self image here are seven points to consider:-

• We are all individuals mentally physically, emotionally and chemically.
• We each have our own journey and reasons why we arrived at our current weight
• Our body is the physical ‘house’ we live in – we are more than a suit size
• The best way we can make permanent progress is step by step
• We will need to make life changes
• We will need to decide that we are going to turn this corner
• Life is a network of experiences and it is important to keep going no matter what

The following are examples of how Hypnosis, NLP and Life Coaching helped to improve the wellbeing of two people with weight problems. (Names have been changed).

A passing phase…

A lady came to me called Susie, because she had put on a 2 stones/28lbs in just over a year.  After talking to her about her life to see where this weight problem might have stemmed from, she told me how she had always been very close to her mother who had unfortunately died.  It had started gradually since then.  Susie was not conscious of overeating.  In the course of treating her, hypnosis helped Susie to mend the feeling of disconnection with her mother that had not been resolved. After one session she had started losing weight and Susie was enthusiastically going to the gym. A couple of weeks later, she had lost a stone/14lbs.  Not only that she began to change her wardrobe and look and feel younger.

Childhood obesity…

Belinda had been a ‘bonny’ child and came from a family where home cooking was the order of the day.  There were always home made cakes freely available and her mother was quite over protective.  Whenever there was an upset her mum would offer Belinda a ‘treat’ to comfort her and so Belinda was used to associating food with comfort.  As she grew up, she would go to the cake tin and help herself until she really made a habit of it, every time she felt a bit low for whatever reason.  In Belinda’s family they all enjoyed good home cooked food and because food was so available it became the pleasurable norm to overeat.

When Belinda first came to see me we looked at her life’s journey so far and the physical mental and emotional aspects of her weight problem.  We did some hypnosis to help prepare her unconscious mind to be able to lose weight and let go of the past.  I recommended that Belinda checked with a practitioner for food sensitivities.  At the next appointment she explained the results, we did some more hypnosis. Belinda made some dietary adjustments and lifestyle changes so that she could get more exercise really without doing anything particularly drastic and she began to lose weight. 

There is always something more that can be said about weight because it is impossible to make light of a heavy issue.  Why not call and find out how I can help you. 

Helen Bright Dip Clin Hyp, PNLP, Lifecoach.