Nutrition: Feeding your consciousness – how hypnotherapy can help you make better nutritional choices
Our ability to control and lose weight is affected by the nutritional choices we make, our habits, our attitudes towards food and the behaviours we developed as children and throughout adult life. Hypnotherapy is, by no means, the first solution people think of when trying to lose weight.
It’s more likely for people to look into a diet and because of this, they’re missing out on one of the most effective ways to control their nutritional choices. Read on to find out how your hypnotherapy skills can help those wishing to make healthier nutritional choices.
Why you should consider hypnotherapy for healthy eating?
Having a healthy body comes down to eating the right foods and staying active, whatever your age or gender. Worryingly, figures (taken from the NHS website) state that ‘in 2015, 58 per cent of women and 68 per cent of men were overweight or obese’. That equates to over one in two women and over three out of five men having issues with maintaining a healthy weight. This isn’t new either, with obesity prevalence increasing from 1993 to 2015 shows an alarming trend in this area of health in the UK. It would also suggest that weight control could become a larger issue for the majority of the UK population – indicating that there is a genuine need for people to find sufficient solutions to this. For people seeking a quick fix and a way to alter the look of their body with rapid results, dieting is usually seen as a method to achieve this, however, it rarely works in the long term because there needs to be a lifestyle change.
There are lots of reasons we consume unhealthy junk food or overeat. Commonly, people use food (and usually unhealthy choices) as a way to make themselves feel better or to reward themselves for achieving something. It gets to the point where eating becomes a coping mechanism and a way to make a person feel better as opposed to eating to stave off hunger. A hypnotherapy session delves beneath the surface to identify the emotional triggers that cause people to use food as a comfort blanket, and tackles the problem head on.
How hypnotherapy can help
Through hypnotherapy, you can help the patient to regain control over the subconscious mind and those unwanted behaviours towards food – mostly the habits that are causing them to eat the wrong things. It’s not simply about following a regime for your meals, as hypnotherapy for nutrition and aiding weight loss helps people to reset their eating habits on a deeper level. Hypnosis helps the patient become more self-aware and empowered. There aren’t many therapies where the result is to build up a sustainable and healthy control over deeply ingrained habits and stresses that affect what people eat. In fact, a study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology showed that hypnosis, in addition to a behavioural weight-management programme, was more effective in helping patients lose weight over an eight-month period and again at a two-year mark, when compared to those who did not undergo hypnosis. It also states that more of those who used hypnosis not only achieved their personal weight goals, but maintained them. It’s a secure way to have control over your weight for the long-run, and aim for a positive end goal.
Benefits for end user
Not only will your patient have gained more control over their attitudes to food and be able to command their eating habits, a course of hypnotherapy is a steady way for them to gain more self-esteem and create a more positive self-image. With dieting comes a sense of guilt and stress when you’ve strayed from the path or have had a relapse, but any self-reproach is eliminated with hypnotherapy because it’s about building a healthy relationship with food through reprogramming the mind to make healthier choices – better for the mind and body.
At its core, hypnotherapy is about helping people who are struggling with a problem to identify old habits and establish new, healthier ways to tackle the issue. Showing people that hypnotherapy can be beneficial for those wanting to make better nutritional choices is something that more practitioners should be considering in order to respond to the changing needs of the communities and our society. By specialising in this area for hypnotherapy, you will find that the demand is out there once you have built up a reputation for successfully helping people to stick to healthy dietary habits, and people will discover that the benefits go beyond weight management and into their everyday lives.
