3_Ways_Hypnotherapy_Can_Help_Your_Reach_Your_2015_Weight_Loss_Goals

How many times have we made New Year’s resolutions to lose weight only to end up feeling like a failure by Valentine’s Day? At The Wellness Institute, we prefer to use the term releasing weight rather than losing it. As the saying goes, “Anything we lose, we continue to search for and find”; and that is part of the problem.

Another aspect of the pattern why diets don’t work is that just that word diet connotes deprivation. More importantly, diets are a temporary solution (at best) to an ever-increasing obesity problem in our country.

The Wellness Institute has designed a weight release program called TRIM-LIFE® which has had great success at The Cleveland Clinic’s Integrative Medicine department. Here are three of the basic principles that are the foundation of TRIM-LIFE® and will help you to keep the weight off permanently.

1. Reprogram Your Subconscious Mind 

We use hypnosis to reprogram your subconscious mind into having unpleasant associations with junk foods or other food choices that are unhealthy for you. This creates the feeling that you are not being deprived of unhealthy foods but rather that you have the choice to eat them or not, and you are making the easy choice not to. With the negative subconscious association, the TRIM-LIFE® graduates no longer make the choice to eat the foods that contribute to weight gain. One graduate described her experience this way. She said, “I went into my favorite bakery after taking the TRIM-LIFE® program, and felt nauseous just walking in and smelling the baked goods. I turned around and walked out and have now released over thirty-five pounds. And I now make the choices of what to eat and how much.”

2. Do a TRIM-LIFE program

In TRIM-LIFE®, hypnosis comes in handy to increase subconscious motivation for walking, swimming, dancing, tennis and many more fun activities that incorporate physical movement. Many of the graduates who were previously sedentary are now discovering physical activity without ever having to join a gym!

3. Understand the emotional causes of your over-eating and weight retention

Many people describe themselves as compulsive overeaters or junk-food junkies.  However, the most important aspect of releasing weight permanently comes through the exploration of the emotional causes of overeating and weight retention. Some examples of emotional eating are

a) Not being able to leave food on your plate. This often goes back to the childhood guilt trips we got about “all the starving children in……..”

b) Perhaps as a child you were crying and someone gave you a cookie or a sweet, with the message, “Here eat this. It will make you feel better.”

c) Or perhaps the messages many of us received as children, “Eat your vegetables (or whatever the food was)! You are not leaving this table until you eat everything on your plate!”

These are just a few examples of the many destructive emotional messages most of us received as children. Connected with those edicts are strong emotional responses that have formed basic emotional eating patterns, deeply buried within our subconscious minds, completely running our lives and yet completely hidden from our conscious minds.

This subconscious, emotional programming from our early childhoods now eliminates the free will or choices that we like to believe we have.  For a moment, think of your subconscious mind being just like your computer. Until the internal operating system is changed and the old programs are deleted, nothing changes! The same old programs continue to replay.

So from the examples above, when we were told to eat everything on our plates because of the starving children, what emotion was created? Well, guilt of course. How do we get rid of the guilty feelings? Well, back when we were children, in order to please our parents, we ate more food.

And so herein lies the beginning of a lifelong emotional eating pattern. We have learned to medicate our emotions with food in order to feel better. Our internal computer, the subconscious mind, has a programed method of using food to alleviate unpleasant feelings.  Keeping with this analogy, our internal program now has a software virus perhaps, that generalizes to other feelings besides guilt such as fear, shame, anger, hurt, grief and others. This is the source of many eating disorders and the inability to release weight and keep it off!

And, most importantly, this is why hypnosis and Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy is so effective in bringing to our awareness these deeply buried emotional eating patterns and changing them. Hypnosis uses the language of the brain’s operating system, which has access to the internal and unconscious programming that has been operating since childhood. And through the TRIM-LIFE® program, those emotional eating programs can be discovered and changed.