Don’t think of a Red Elephant!

You’re at home and the biscuits are too. You’re not hungry but you find yourself eating one, then another…

Hypnotherapist Steve Neesam helps to unravel this common conundrum and explains that help is at hand, but perhaps not where you expected it to be (and certainly not in the biscuit cupboard.)

Just why is unhealthy food so tempting and why do we eat those biscuits when we know we don‘t want to? Well, for most of our evolution, we've been desperate to get enough energy, meaning high calorie foods were actually "health foods". It is only in the last century or so that many of us in this country struggle to reduce our calorie intake. Unfortunately, evolution works much slower than technology and thus we remain wired for scarcity whilst living in an environment of abundance. But that's not the only thing we need to battle against to diet successfully. Emotions can be strongly linked to eating, and it is these bonds which we must overcome as well which can be almost impossible using will power alone.

Sometimes we try to displace negative emotions like stress or loneliness with food. The brief pleasure distracts us but when the emotion resurfaces, often strengthened by shame we eat more to distract again and the cycle continues. Help in breaking this link is essential to achieving sustainable weight changes. Emotional attachments to food can be made at an early age. Sweets for winning parental approval may anchor the experience of eating them with the nurturing feelings created by a pleased parent. In later life, we may eat sweets for comfort, in a subconscious attempt to re-experience these feelings.

The high sugar content of most treats actually releases more endorphins in the brain thus augmenting these memories of parental warmth with positive physiological effects. Consequently, it requires perpetual psychological effort to resist this temptation and the more we resist, the stronger the pull our evolutionary programming exerts on us to surrender. In trying not to think about food, it becomes all we think about. How did you get on with NOT thinking about a red elephant?

Most weight loss diets rely on the overpowering of these psychological and physiological urges, or as it is commonly called will power which can in itself be stressful. This explains the low long-term, success rates of most diets and why hypno-psychotherapeutic intervention, can be so successful. By understanding oneself better, the negative emotions can be alleviated and by working at the level of the subconscious through hypnotherapy, the amount of psychological effort needed to resist temptation is reduced. In short, instead of fighting against it, far better to enlist the sub-conscious as your ally.

Steve offers one-to-one hypnotherapy sessions combined with psychotherapy to help you achieve great results, not only with weight loss but in all aspects of your life. He is also running the next "Lose Weight For Good" group session at Physio Plus, details here www.together-therapy.co.uk

* Studies show that only one fifth of those who attempt to lose body weight, are able to lose 5% or more and maintain this loss for at least 5 years.