How Can Hypnosis Help You Lose Weight and Keep it Off?

To lose weight, you need to eat less and move more – you don’t need a wellness expert to tell you that! So why, then, are we Brits not in amazingly good shape? Often, it may be a sign that you mental wellbeing is plagued by subconscious baggage that’s weighing you down. Clinical hypnotherapist Belinda Hulstrom explains, ‘There are a couple of things that need to happen for us to make changes: we have to want the benefits of that change, and we have to want them enough that we’re prepared to do whatever it takes to get them. We also have to believe that change is possible and that often involves overcoming the obstacles that our mind has set up for us.’

 

This is where hypnosis comes in. You spend your life surrounded by negativity, be it from the media, or even your family and friends. According to clinical hypnotherapist Mark Stephens, creator of the Think Slim programme, this then creates a self-fulfilling prophecy which prevents you from losing weight on a permanent basis. ‘People use a lot of negative self-talk,’ says Stephens. ‘They’ll say, “I’m a yo-yo dieter”, or “Diets don’t work”. But hypnosis can take away the mental prison bars they’ve made for themselves.’ You often eat for the wrong reasons because of your negative emotions. Stephens points out, ‘People will eat when they’re sad, lonely, bored or angry – and then they’ll feel guilty and beat themselves up afterwards, creating a downward spiral.’

 

In order to lose weight, then, you need to make a change to the way you think. ‘No amount of emotional eating will help repair yourself,’ Stephens warns. ‘We need to get on top of the negative emotions and learn how to feel happy.’ With the help of a hypnotherapist, you can break the negative cycle and replace these thoughts with positive ones. Stephens comments, ‘With hypnosis you’re bypassing the analytical and reasonable part of the mind and going straight to your subconscious, where all your memories are, and feeding it with positive suggestions. Hypnosis can help by changing people’s mindsets.’ The mindset you need to adopt is one of a long-term goal, rather than a short-term obsession.

 

It’s easy to lose weight on a short-term basis; what’s tricky is keeping it off – and that’s how hypnotherapy can help. In 1995, a study published in the Journal Of Consulting And Clinical Psychology showed that ‘the addition of hypnosis substantially enhanced treatment outcome’ in six studies relating to obesity and weight loss. The patients who underwent hypnosis continued to lose weight, even after the treatment had ended. Hulstrom echoes the fact that you need to change the way you think about weight loss. She notes, ‘It’s not about losing weight but about getting rid of something we no longer need or want and about creating a whole new relationship with food and our bodies.’

 

You also need to train your brain. Hulstrom concludes, ‘Probably the most powerful message hypnosis can get across is that you always have the power to choose. You can have that piece of chocolate cake, but you don’t have to have it. Hypnosis can help create a relationship with yourself that’s more honest.’ This is why the Think Slim programme gives participant the following verse to memorise:

 

I am tomorrow what I eat today, before each meal that’s what I say.

 

The more water I drink, the more inclined I will feel to only eat a nourishing, healthy, slim meal.

 

Between main meals I drink water or tea, between each meal I stay snack-free.

 

Excess fat I burn with every step I take, I have no desire for chocolate, ice-cream or cake.

 

Whether it’s a walk, a swim or a sport I play, I aim to be active twice every day.

 

I stay focused on my goal and the body I deserve, and it all boils down to each meal that I serve.

Categories: clinical hypnotherapist, emotional eating, hypnosis, Lose weight, Losing Weight, nbsp, negative emotions, short term, slim programme, Weight Loss

Why Abuse-Resistant Versions of Addictive Drugs Don’t Work

Addiction can have a strong grip on your mental health and wellbeing, which is why manufacturers of addictive prescription painkillers work hard to find an alternative medication that won’t get users so hooked. This was the case in August 2010, when makers of the prescription painkiller OxyContin released a abuse-resistant form of the drug that deterred drug addicts from crushing the substance and inhaling or injecting it. According to a letter published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), it worked; OxyContin went from being the primary drug of abuse for 36% of prescription-drug misusers to just 13% about 21 months later. Unfortunately, however, this isn’t the end of the story.

 

Instead of drug users quitting when they stopped getting high on OxyContin, they simply switched drugs. Other opioids moved in to fill the gap left by OxyContin, with drug users choice of high-potency fentanyl and hydromorphone rising from 20% to 32%, the NEJM survey showed. Even though, when drug users were asked about the substances they used to “get high in the past 30 days at least once,” OxyContin fell from 47% of respondents to 30%, the use of heroin nearly doubled. The survey authors quoted one respondent who said, “Most people that I know don’t use OxyContin to get high anymore. They have moved on to heroin [because] it is easier to use, much cheaper and easily available.”

 

For the study, the scientists researched almost 2,600 people who had been involved in treatment programmes throughout the US for prescription opioid addiction between July 2009 and March 2012. When they gathered their data, the authors were forced to conclude, “[A]n abuse-deterrent formulation successfully reduced abuse of a specific drug but also generated an unanticipated outcome: replacement of the abuse-deterrent formulation with alternative opioid medications and heroin, a drug that may pose a much greater overall risk to public health than OxyContin. Thus, abuse-deterrent formulations may not be the ‘magic bullets’ that many hoped they would be in solving the growing problem of opioid abuse.”

 

If you know anything about how addiction affects your wellness, you won’t be too surprised by the findings. There’s something to be said for how reducing the supply of particular drugs can help to prevent some new cases of addiction, but the strategy doesn’t do anything for existing addicts, and just replaces one object of addiction with another, potentially more harmful, one. This is due to the fact that addiction doesn’t lie in the drug itself, but rather in a dysfunctional coping strategy for the widespread human desire to manage emotions. On a more superficial level, it’s like taking cupcakes away from someone who’s trying to lose weight, but has a problem with emotional eating. That person wasn’t addicted to the cupcakes, they were relying on the dysfunctional coping strategy – the emotional eating – and so will simply switch to chocolate or ice-cream.

 

Therefore, doctors who simply cut off addicted patients’ supply of prescription drugs, or pharmaceutical companies who introduce abuse-deterrent formulas, do not address the underlying need that drives the addiction. In fact, it just pushes these people into the market for street drugs, which makes the situation so much worse. They lose contact with the medical system, purchase drugs that are more likely to be adulterated or even poisonous, and don’t know the exact dose they’re getting, which increases overdose risk. Though it may seem counterintuitive, we should be bringing as many opioid addicts as possible into the medical system and using opioids themselves in treatment when necessary, instead of driving them out and into the hands of the illegal heroin market.

Categories: abuse, abuse deterrent, abuse resistant, Abuse-Resistant Drugs, coping strategy, deterrent formulation, Drug, drug addiction, drug users, dysfunctional coping, emotional eating

Five Reasons Why Your Diet Plan Has Never Worked

How to Set Off on the Right Foot with Your Diet Plan

Could Your Diet Fall Prey to the Five Weight Loss Pitfalls?

Weight

Have you been trying your best to lose weight, but still that arrow on the scales won’t budge? A faulty diet can wreak havoc on your wellbeing, making you think there’s something wrong with you when the chances are, you just haven’t set off on the right foot. So where has your weight loss plan gone wrong, and how can you fix it?

1. You’ve set unrealistic goals.

Not only is it impractical to set an unrealistic goal, but it’s just downright bad for your health. If some miracle plan offers you a ridiculous amount of weight loss in a short amount of time, run the other way! Even if it works – which is very unlikely – you’ll have to starve yourself to get there, and lose muscle, rather than fat, which will lead to deficiencies, illness and eventual weight gain anyway. If you’re only going to diet, you’re looking to shed ½kg per week, or 1kg a week if you are combining exercise and diet, losing an extra 1-2kg per week after the first two months.  When setting your goals, factor in things that will get in your way, like big events or travel plans, so that you won’t get frustrated with your progress.

2. You’re on a diet pendulum.

More often than not, people who fail at dieting are those who swing between eating what they want, and then going on a strict diet for a few days. You can’t expect good results with an eating pattern like this; weight loss takes time and effort, and will only come about if you make small but permanent lifestyle changes.

3. You’ve been unfaithful…to your workout.

Cheating on your workout may seem fun at the time, but you’re doing yourself no favours. Sure, it’s tempting to skip a few reps, or take things easy when your instructor is looking the other way, but this won’t get you any closer to your goal, so why bother? If you’re trying to do 30 reps and failing, break it up into smaller sets of 15, but don’t skip.

4. You’ve been putting it off until tomorrow.

To paraphrase a ginger orphan with a big voice, tomorrow is always a day away. You may think that gorging yourself today will guilt you into that diet plan tomorrow, but when you eat a high-calorie meal on one day, your body will craves that many calories the next day. To adjust to a low-calorie diet, your body needs a few days and so having heavy meals on and off will rev up the hunger pangs. Your body will gradually adjust and it will become a lot easier, and will even allow for the odd high-calorie food without weight gain, but you’re never going to get to that point until you start your diet – today!

5. You’ve been eating when your feelings dictate.

It’s amazing how often you find justification for indulging. Sure, you’re on a diet, but you’ve had a really hard day at work, or an argument with your friend, or you’ve even done really well at something – it must be time for a chocolate-y reward! Many dieters fall off the wagon because they chomp on calories to soothe the feelings of anger, frustration and stress, but you don’t have to. Emotional eating often occurs because your body needs a feel-good hormone called serotonin, which is released when you eat carbohydrate-rich foods. However, this isn’t the only way to increase your serotonin production so when you next feel stressed, take a few deep breaths, go for a walk or drink a glass of milk. This will be better for your weight loss as well as your wellness.

 

Categories: body, cheating, diet, eating, emotional eating, high calorie, loss, Unrealistic Goals, weight, weight gain, Weight Loss

Emotional Eating: Why Do You Do it, and How Can You Stop?

How many times have you turned to ice cream or cheesecake at the end of a bad day? Your emotional health has a direct impact on how you experience food. This is according to new research from the University of Wurzburg in Germany, which found that you eat fatty foods when you’re feeling down because you’re less likely to taste the fat in food.

For the study, a group of volunteers sampled a variety of creamy drinks that contained different amounts of fat. However, before they did so, they were shown three different videos; one depicting a happy scene, one depicting a sad scene, and one depicting a neutral scene. While the latter video had no influence on the volunteers’ taste buds, the participants were less able to tell the drinks apart after watching the two emotional clips. This means that your emotions impact your sensory perceptions of food, and what you really need has nothing to do with cheesecake. If you can break this pattern of emotional eating, you can drastically influence your wellbeing, so what can you do?

According to registered dietician Cynthia Sass, who has master’s degrees in both nutrition science and public health, ‘Whether you’re walking around with anger, sadness, or anxiety bottled up inside, allowing it to fester ups the chances that you’ll use food to detach, or stuff it back down. For this reason, I often advise my clients to find healthy ways to release their feelings, like watching a tearjerker to have a good cry, or furiously scrubbing the tub to let out aggression.’

Still, when you’re watching that tearjerker, it can be tempting to grab that bar of chocolate sitting in the fridge. Cynthia says, ‘Over the years I’ve had numerous clients tell me that they can’t keep certain foods around, because if they’re there, they’ll eat them, especially when they’re emotional.’ Banishing fatty foods can be difficult when you don’t live alone, but Cynthia advises ‘making them harder to get to. Research shows (and my own experience confirms) that the fewer steps you have to go through to get to a food, the more likely you are to eat it, and vice versa.’ So put your cookies in another bag, then in a sealed container, and then up on a high shelf that’s hard to reach. After that, are you really going to go to all the bother of getting them out again?

Categories: emotional eating, Research, temptation

Emotional Eating: The Common Saboteur of Weight Management

We’ve all had that break-up that had to be soothed with a tub of ice-cream, or that stressful workday which would not go away until we had a giant bar of chocolate. However, emotional eating can be detrimental to your diet, and, most of the time, a sign that an underlying wellness problem needs to be resolved.

According to Louise Adams, a Sydney-based clinical psychologist who specialises in eating disorders and emotional eating, ‘With emotional eating, dieting is barking up the wrong tree. You need to get to the reason behind the eating.’ This can be happiness or boredom, but Adams rates stress and anxiety as two of the major drivers of emotional eating. She says that you turn to food for comfort for the same reason others turn to alcohol or other drugs – because you haven’t been taught skills to cope with bad feelings.

‘We need to recognise that it’s OK to have a strong feeling that makes you feel bad – yet we have this idea in our culture that a negative feeling must be banished straight away,’ Adams notes. ‘Look how often we distract children with something like a biscuit if they’re upset. We’re not taught to ride out the feeling. Instead we learn to numb it with alcohol, eating or drugs.’

She continues, ‘Yet if you learn to sit with the feeling, you realise that it’s like a wave – it builds in intensity and then it passes. It’s very empowering to realise you can handle it. I think that as parents we need to teach kids that negative emotions happen, that we’re not happy all the time. If my five-year-old says she’s annoyed because of something her sister did, I’ll say, “Being annoyed is normal.”’

Instead of dieting, Adams recommends mindful eating, and gets her clients to use a zero-to-seven hunger scale that rates ravenous as zero and stuffed as seven. ‘Do your best to stop eating when you’re satisfied, at four or five, before the stuffed stage and to eat at slightly hungry, two to three, before you reach the ravenous stage – that’s when it becomes too easy to overeat. I get people to think of ‘ravenous’ as a punch on the arm and moderate hunger as a tap on the shoulder that reminds you to eat,’ she says.

Adams adds, ‘It’s also about slowing down and engaging with the food rather than eating while you’re doing something else such as working or watching television. If you’re not engaged with the food, not only can you miss recognising the fullness signals but you also miss out on the experience of enjoying the food. Emotional eaters feel as if they’re not in control, but the wonderful thing about mindful eating is that when you’ve mastered it, you feel you are in control – and if you keep practising, you’ll be in control.’

Emotional Eating: The Common Saboteur of Weight Management

Categories: emotional eating, Mindful Eating, weight gain

How to Overcome the Number One Obstacle of Weight Loss

The chances are that, in your adult life, you have, or will have one day, actively tried to lose or manage your weight. Once you have attempted this, you know just how difficult weight loss or a better wellness lifestyle can be to maintain. The nation’s current weight struggles have been attributed to a range of biological, societal and personal problems, but what’s really getting in the way of your ability to lose weight?

According to a new survey of psychologists, your emotional wellbeing plays a central role in how much weight you gain or lose, and may be the primary obstacle to weight loss. If we humans were simply rational, cognitive beings, we’d eat a biscuit, evaluate how it affects our daily calorie intake, and make adjustments to get back on track. However, as we’re not just a load of thoughts, but emotions too, we can eat a biscuit and then look down ten minutes later to discover that the whole packet has been devoured – how did that happen?

Conducted by the Consumer Reports National Research Centre, over 1,300 licensed psychologists were surveyed, with many reporting that managing the behaviours and emotions related to weight management is essential to weight loss. Emotional eating was considered a weight management-barrier to 43% of people, and emotions were also reported to interfere with maintaining a regular workout routine and making healthy food choices.

To tackle emotional eating, and its grip on your life, more than 70% of the psychologists who provide weight loss treatment gave ideas for treatments and strategies to help. Firstly, cognitive therapy is a treatment that can help you identify and address the negative thoughts and emotions that lead to your unhealthy behaviour. The psychologists also recommended a strategy of problem-solving, in which you look for alternative solutions to setbacks, changes and obstacles.

Mindfulness was also highly recommended, as it teaches you to allow thoughts and emotions to come and go without judging them, and concentrate on being aware of the moment instead. However, if that doesn’t help, the psychologists also said that they considered motivational strategies, keeping behavioural records and goal-setting as important tools in helping clients to lose weight and keep it off.

Google+
How to Overcome the Number One Obstacle of Weight Loss

Categories: emotional eating, Research, Weight Loss