Alison Munro

Tried every diet going? Grapefruit diets? Liquid diets? Protein diets? Blood-group type diets? Not eating after 8pm diets? The list just goes on and on.

Unless you're enrolled on and dedicated to a proper weight loss programme, where healthy eating and exercise are combined and you share in the support of the group, you've probably experienced the yo-yo effect of dieting.

Before we look at anything else, lets look at the word itself - DIET. I don't know about you, but any word that begins DIE is a sure sign for me to avoid it!

Usually, when we diet, we begin with such enthusiasm until we reach a point where we become obsessed with thoughts of what we're not eating! We feel deprived, starved, restricted and usually for good reason!

'A little bit of what you fancy won't hurt you'. How many times have you heard that? But usually we've been on a diet, done really well and lost weight, so we treat ourselves to something 'naughty' to eat (i.e. calorific!), but it doesn't stop there. We tend to find that before we've even realised it, we've eaten all the calories we consumed in the whole of last week, in one hour! Before we know it, we've gained all of the weight we lost, feel angry and depressed and continue in our old habits that just make us feel worse.

Sound familiar? You're not alone. It's probably one of the stories I hear the most from weight loss clients. The other frequent one is, 'I eat healthy most of the time, I just need to stop snacking - you know, crisps/chocolate/cheese/biscuits etc' These people tend to have a little weight to lose, and benefit from just a couple of hypnosis sessions really focusing on not eating those naughty foods that they know they shouldn’t and then half hour booster sessions over time. This can work really well for keeping people on track.

In a session we'll look at your food history in detail. We'll build as big a picture as we can concerning your personal relationship with food - you'll probably see things in your own eating pattern that you've never seen before. And I'll make sure it's fun, the last thing we want is to depress you even more so that you go home and eat the whole fridge!

I do believe that we are conditioned to eat excessively in our society. As kids, if we do something good at school, we are given a chocolate bar; if we bravely go to the dentist we're given a sweet (I never worked the irony in that one out!); as teenagers if we go out on a date to the movies it involves popcorn or a pizza afterwards; as adults, we celebrate good news by going out to dinner and so the conditioning goes on. Something good happens, we eat, likewise something bad happens, we console ourselves with a favourite meal. All this is so automatic to us that when we come to change it, we feel resistant and fight against it. No wonder!

However, changing the way we eat is achievable using hypnosis and EFT. During trance I'll use suggestion therapy with positive imagery and visualisation techniques. I'll also use future pacing work so that we encourage the unconscious mind to move almost effortlessly towards our slimmer, healthier, more vibrant self.

I'll also incorporate self-esteem boosting suggestions, which penetrate deep into the unconscious mind. When dieting, we rarely focus on the good aspects of ourselves and of life generally, as we are too preoccupied with our food intake. Hypnosis allows us to do that.

For people that have a fair amount of weight to lose, the focus is always 2 pronged. We look at those ‘demon’ foods, as I like to call them, but we also need to look at the bigger picture and delve into the reasons behind the feeding, and that is usually emotional. Fat is rarely about food and usually about feelings. Often we eat because we feel something we don’t want to feel, so we stuff those feelings down with food. Sometimes we feed ourselves food, to gain comfort or satiety, when what we really need is love, attention, support, praise etc. I use EFT – emotional freedom technique, to deal with these underlying emotional issues at the core level. It’s often unresolved emotional content that’s crying out for something to fill the hole, and it’s almost conditioned in this society that a cake will happily do that!

Sometimes people with unwanted weight on their bodies are aware that they are feeding themselves food instead of dealing with deeper, more difficult issues. Sometimes people are completely unaware of that. I find increasingly that to maintain successful weight loss people need to look at their whole life when deciding to lose weight, not just at the contents of their fridge, and EFT allows us to safely do that.

So, if you're ready to leave those fad diets behind and prepared to take a realistic look at your eating habits, then hypnosis can help and EFT can successfully deal with any underlying, unresolved, emotional issues. You'll soon find the benefits infiltrating into other areas of your life too - sound like a good choice?

It is... or you could always choose to go heat up that cabbage soup you've been saving yourself for..!