As Easter quickly approaches, here is a quick blog about Weight Management and how Clinical Hypnosis can effectively be used to manage your weight. While managing your weight can involve losing excess weight, it also involves being able to maintain a desired weight without any undesired losses or gains.
To begin with, here are are some statistical facts about the weights of different countries around the world:
- In the USA, Obesity affects more than one in three adults.
- In England an estimated 28.0% of adults are obese and a further 36.2% are overweight but not obese.
- An estimated 67% of Australians aged 18 and over were overweight or obese (36% were overweight but not obese, and 31% were obese).
- Globally, more than 1.9 billion adults are overweight, out of which 650 million adults are obese.
Why we Gain Weight:
All food we eat contains a resource called Calories, which is essentially the bodies "Fuel" that we must refill every day. Throughout the day these calories are burned up by the body to create the Fuel we need for our body to work. However, excess calories that are not burnt for "Fuel" become stored as Fat Reserves, that are meant to be used as a back up Fuel in case our bodies have no new calorific food intake.
When this excess Fuel from our fat reserves isn't used, our body still stores it, causing us to gain more weight. The Weight we gain can then also continue to grow on top of the fat reserves we have already collected by eating increasing larger meals, with larger amounts of calories.
How our Brain works when trying to lose Weight:
Our brain is comprised of two different sections that act in different ways. These are known as our Intellectual Brain and our Primitive Brain. When we are in either of these states, our decision making is drastically swayed in one way or the other. For example:
Our intellectual brain
When we function from here our brain:
• Always makes a proper assessment of the situation
• Helps us produce feel good hormones which boost our mood and confidence
• Favours food as an energy source
• Is able to inhibit our desire to eat
• Is able to delay gratification in favour of future goals
Our primitive brain
When we function from here our brain:
• Always tells us the worst case scenario
• Thinks in an obsessional way
• Refers back to, often unhelpful, patterns to guide our behaviour
• Releases stress hormones which reduces our feel good hormones which in turn encourages our brain to seek reward through food (then we get stuck in The Dopamine Trap)
• Favours our food as a fat store to help us deal with future dangers
• We sleep poorly and our hunger hormone, ghrelin rises whilst our satiety hormone, leptin drops, increasing feelings of hunger by 24% and desire for high carb, high fat food by 33%
• Makes short term decisions
During Dieting, our brain is typically stuck in this Primitive state, which is likely to make us set unrealistic goals, rely on willpower (which generally fails us), we then fall back on bad behaviour patterns around food and exercise and eat to reward ourselves or make ourselves feel better in the short term.
How Clinical Hypnosis can help:
When Clinical Hypnosis is used to help manage weight, the main goal of the process to help the individual get into and stay in their intellectual brain when it comes to decisions regarding food and exercise related activities.
This can be achieved by helping to reduce stress, set realistic and motivational goals and also generally help create a positive mindset, find a balanced approach and create positive habits.
If you would like to know more about how hypnotherapy can help you reach your desires weight and maintain it, get in touch.
Contact: Nicholas Holmes at info@ndny.uk