Ely & Newmarket Hypnotherapy: Dieting & Weight Loss

Does dieting work long term? It’s a question that not many people seem to stop and ask before they sign up to another dieting programme and start handing over their cash to try and achieve weight loss.

I’ve met dozens and dozens of people who are not happy with their weight, health, shape, dress size, fitness or some other part of them connected to weight, eating, exercise and self image. Yet I can’t recall more than a handful who have been able to meet the control and demands of any one system of dieting year after year after year.

I have, however, met many who have initially lost weight through dieting, maybe to their target or for a particular event, and then found their old habits coming back and their weight creeping up and up. And so they sign up to another, different diet plan and start the whole process again.

I’ve been working with a client who followed one of the well known diets and lost two stone. Six months later he’d gained three. Why? Because his underlying habits around food, health and exercise had not been addressed and his emotional eating remained a problem.

If you rely on food for comfort, to relieve stress or boredom and to change the way you feel then sooner or later you will fall off the diet and back into old ways and putting on weight (feeling worse for having failed than when you started).

What makes a diet even more damaging is that they mess up your body’s food clock. Instead of eating when you are hungry and stopping when full, you restrict your intake of calories/fat/food which leads to your body slowing itself down to conserve energy (‘starvation mode’) so you burn less energy, you will feel more lethargic and any food you do eat is stored by the body because it doesn’t know where the next meal is coming from. Added to that, any initial weight loss will be muscle rather than fat as the body tries to generate more energy.

It doesn’t have to be that way! People who are comfortable with their weight and body don’t obsess about what they eat and they certainly don’t weigh themselves often (if at all). They trust the natural hunger signals from their body, enjoy the food they eat and can effortlessly stop when they’ve had enough.