Wild Suppositions About Losing Weight With Hypnotherapy

Hypnosis, thanks to television and movies, the very word conjures up the depiction of a beady-eyed hypnotist swinging his pocket watch repeating the words, "You are getting sleepy."

Do an msn search, and you will find hundreds of thousands of web pages focused on the subject. Unfortunately, many websites that sell self-hypnosis CD’s make wild, unsubstantiated claims. I’ve been a hypnotherapist since 1978. So I think that I'm heavier than qualified to set the record straight on weight loss hypnosis.

First of all, hypnosis is a tool, just like a scalpel is a tool. Just as varying surgeons have diversified skill levels in the use of a scalpel, diversified hypnotists have diversified skill levels in the use of hypnotism. And to complicate the matter, there are many novel methodologies of self-hypnosis.

Here are a couple of the silly suppositions that I’ve seen on websites, along with the truth of the matter:

Hypnosis will speed up your metabolism. If you want to know the truth, the fact of the matter is that hypnosis won't directly speed up your metabolism. But it can be very feasible at helping to program your unconscious with increased motivation to exercise, and that exercise will increase your metabolism. Similarly, hypnotic sleep to speed up the metabolism for quick weight loss can be effected by programming the unconscious to motivate the intake of increased amounts of protein, because that intake will step up your metabolism.

Hypnotism will make you lose some weight. This is false. But hypnotism can be used to help cast out your appetite, so that you eat less, and eating less can help you to become thinner.

Two subconscious programs cause the average person’s cravings and urges: A. When you pair eating with any other behavior, the other behavior will trigger cravings for food and a strong desire to eat. This is called a conditioned response. For example, if you eat when you watch a movie, you will automatically get an urge to eat each time you go to the movies.

B. When you feel tense, you feel a strong urge to put food into your mouth for relaxation. This you feel compelled to put something into your mouth for relaxation and pleasure. This is because of programming that you received as a baby. When you got bitchy, your mother or father put a bottle in your mouth. You got distracted, relaxed, and probably fell asleep. Now when you get cranky (anxious or tense), you feel compelled to put something into your mouth for relaxation and pleasure.

C. There is a third unconscious program that is present for some people. It's called emotional eating. Emotional eating takes place when a person is motivated to make him or herself fat, because by being fat they will protect themselves in some way.

For example, if an individual got their heart broken in a relationship, their unconscious will force them into an action that would prevent them from getting their heart broken again. Example: They are motivated to become overweight to keep them out of new relationships, because that will cut out the possibility of another broken heart.

D. I have written several articles on emotional eating that are available on my website.

There are some effective ways to use posthypnotic suggestion to eliminate emotional eating.

There are some effective and powerful ways to use hypnotic suggestion to overcome emotional eating. So just how can weight loss posthypnotic suggestion fix the above problems? Let's cover them one at a time.

In paragraph "A" above: Conditioned responses can be "extinguished" immediately using a process that I call the "Flash." The flash trains the unconscious mind to setup new responses. In the above example, the subject had unconsciously banded together the depiction of food in the hand, with the TV. Each time he / she sat down to watch the TV, the unconscious mind filled in the missing part of the visualization: It "Flashed" the picture of the food in the hand, and the subject felt a compulsion, and an craving to eat.

The Flash is a methodology that helps us program the subconscious to use the picture of the TV as a trigger for an visualization of the self-watching TV without eating. When we lose the picture of the food, we lose the cravings.

When we momentarily disassociate (see ourselves from the point of view that a subject else would), we are not able to feel our feelings (cravings and urges).

When we see ourselves in a behavior (watching TV without eating), we feel an urge to engage in that behavior. So the subject loses the cravings, and actually gets a urge to reject food.

In paragraph "B" above: The subject is eating and drinking for relaxation and pleasure. We teach the subject self-hypnosis for weight loss, because the very essence of the hypnotic state is deep relaxation.

And we utilize the "Flash" to program the subconscious to use the thoughts that are triggering feelings of stressfulness and aggravation, as triggers for secondary mental images that will trigger feelings of relaxation. When the subject feels more relaxed overall, oral urges are greatly diminished.

In paragraph "C" above: We discussed emotional eating which makes the person overweight. The "behavior" of being overweight then provides some sort of emotional protection. So we use a technique called an NLP reframe, which programs the unconscious to take the responsibility for making the subject automatically substitute some other more acceptable behavior that will provide the same emotional protection, in place of being overweight. And that reframe will clear out the craving to eat for emotional purposes.