Thinking of Hypnosis for Weight Loss? Read This First
Forget what you've heard about gently swaying beads or sharp clicks; hypnotherapy for weight loss is more mainstream (and less David Blaine) than you may think. A complementary treatment – meaning it works alongside conventional practices – hypnotherapy for weight loss can prove to be the method to help people come unstuck when it comes to their healthy weight loss efforts. Reportedly used by celebs, think Adele, Jen and Nigella Lawson, hypnotherapy for weight loss works by "rewiring" the limiting thoughts and feelings that keep people losing and gaining weight regularly – aka crash dieting. Here's what you need to know about the weight loss approach straight from the experts.
What is hypnotherapy for weight loss?
If you're trying to lose weight well but struggling, hypnotherapy for weight loss may have popped up as an option. Today, let's start with the basics: What is it and when should it be used? 'Hypnotherapy for weight loss is the application of hypnotherapy: a therapy which studies the trance of your everyday experience to help you rewrite unwanted thoughts, behaviours and emotions,' explains Jessica Boston, cognitive hypnotherapist and transformational life coach.
In layman's terms, hypnotherapy for weight loss is the process of hypnotising a patient into a deeply relaxed state. Here, the therapist will use different techniques and methods to change thought patterns and bring about behavioural changes. 'Hypnotherapy for weight loss can be used to help you understand why you are struggling to maintain or get to a weight that you are happy with, or help you to the reasons why you might be sabotaging achieving any success,' she says. 'Hypnotherapy is ultimately a tool that engages the imagination and uses the way you think to better your life.' 'I tried hypnotherapy for weight loss and healed my relationship with food’
Jessica Boston, now a cognitive hypnotherapist herself, credits hypnotherapy for weight loss as the technique to heal her relationship with food and her body. Here, she tells her story.
For most of my young life, I had a destructive relationship with my body due to fad diets and growing up around people who had a very all-or-nothing approach to food and exercise. In my late 20s, I realised I had to relearn how to eat by understanding how I had come to use food as a way of abusing myself and my body and staying small and unseen by the world. Food was both keeping me safe from harm – in the form of unwanted attention, soothing me – as a treat for when I had had a hard day and punishing me – for not being where I wanted to be in life.
Working through these issues using hypnotherapy techniques, I learnt to love and appreciate my body and lost 20 kilos – a couple of pounds of which were regained in lockdown, but it doesn’t matter to me. I learned how to eat for my body and understand my emotions instead of giving in to every single one of them and I learned how to override spur-of-the-moment urges and cravings.
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