It’s a Weighty Issue – Part II When to Say When, by Connie Brannan, CHt.
I love helping people with weight loss. People come into my office and itemize their issues: what they eat, when they eat, why they eat (when they’re not hungry), how fast they eat, and all the accompanying aspects of self image and internal dialog, limiting beliefs, and so on. Many things need tweaking for success.
The topic of the moment is: Portion Control. When to say when. How to become attuned to the right amount of food for your body and energy needs. How to eat less and enjoy it more. Here is part two of my continuing essays on the various aspects of the “Weighty Issue” of weight loss and weight management, and the successes to be had through Neuro Linguistic Hypnotherapy.
Our mind has unconscious strategies for everything we do. How we act, how we think, what we choose, what we perceive as real. We acquire these strategies through learning. They become embedded in us like programs running on a computer, which we then call “habits.” Habits are learned, and they can be unlearned.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP–a conversational hypnosis) studies successful unconscious strategies, and we can grab, install, and live those strategies in ourselves. In studies of naturally slender people, we have successfully gathered naturally slender food strategies. Via NLP and hypnosis, we can install these into people who would benefit from them. This is a necessary piece of the work I do with clients! A client can adopt an unconscious new strategy and find themselves engaging in new behaviors without any mental effort.
We get clients in tune with physical hunger vs. emotional hunger. The mind can notice the difference. Emotional hunger is “fed” in new non-caloric ways. Physical hunger leads to a healthy choice strategy in the mind, meaning you’re more likely to reach for an apple rather than a cookie, a salad rather than a cheeseburger and fries. We implant a speed strategy, how fast to eat. Slowing it down is usually helpful. We implant a beverage of choice strategy: water! And then most importantly, we implant an exit strategy. When to STOP EATING. This is set at the point of satisfaction, when the body’s nutritional and energy needs are met in accordance with achieving and maintaining a healthy weight.
There are, sadly, desperate people out in the world who don’t realize the control they have over their own minds and bodies, and they go to bizarre extremes like surgeries that attempt to PHYSICALLY limit food intake. That’s not necessary! Installing new unconscious strategies with hypnosis creates better success, without the expense or health risks.
When it’s all said and done, the weight loss client finds themselves engaging in:
–Less emotional eating
–Healthier choices
–Smaller portions
–More satisfaction.
It’s all good.
If your unconscious strategies (habits around food) need adjustment, it’s so much easier than you think to make healthy changes. You can discover it for yourself any time. After January 1st or before.
For more about your mind and how it works and this continuing series of discussions on weighty issues of body weight and self and food habits, stay tuned to “The Monthly Trance.”