7 Ways to Manage your Weight
7 Ways to Manage your Weight There are many things we can do to keep ourselves feeling healthy. I asked clients and they agreed that eating too much, too often and all the wrong stuff were their biggest issues. This post takes a look at what can cause overeating, 7 tips on maintaining a healthy balanced weight and how hypnotherapy can help.
What Makes Weight Difficult to Manage?
-
STRESS AND ANXIETY
To survive as stone age humans, not knowing when we’d next eat, we ate as much as we could when we got the chance. When we are stressed and anxious, we go back to using this primitive part of our minds. That part is so keen to stock up against the lean times to come we can ignore feeling of being full. Cortisol the stress hormone, encourages our bodies to store belly fat. The kicker being belly fat has more cortisol responders in it. So, more stress means more stored belly fat, which can lead to feeling more stressed….
What Makes Weight Difficult to Manage?
- LOW SELF-ESTEEM, looking for comfort in food. What gives the biggest dopamine (feel good hormone) fix? High fat, high sugar and high salt. Chocolate, sweets, biscuits, cake, desserts, crisps, pizza, chips and all (and that’s just breakfast), are designed to increase our pleasure receptors in the brain but can often leave a feeling of guilt when the high wears off and the cycle repeats.
ZONING OUT, eating without thinking like snacking while watching television.
BOREDOM, sometimes it might feel like there’s nothing better to do.
DRINKING ALCOHOL stops us from knowing just how hungry we are.
- SOCIALBILITY and SABOTAGE Whether its insecurity/jealousy, sometimes other people don’t want us to succeed.
- LACK OF SLEEP 6 hours or less sleep in a night, reduces our dopamine levels while increasing our levels of Grehlin, “The hunger hormone”. Increasing our appetite while reducing the amount we actually burn off.
- CATATROSPHIC THINKING, “Everything is wrong, nothing will ever go right” “we’re all doomed”, means there’s no upper limit on the cortisol we could produce. Think instead “what can I control in this situation?”. It becomes a difficult but doable challenge, to cap off cortisol levels.
Stop Self-Sabotage in 4 Steps (welcomehypnotherapy.co.uk)
7 Ways to Manage your Weight
1. Reduce your stress. Stress links almost all these unhelpful behaviours. Hypnotherapy can help! See below. Or try yoga, meditation, walking, crosswords, painting, working out, whatever suits your personality. And do more of it.
2. Future Thinking helps get the big picture, instead of focusing on what you want right now, this moment. Give yourself an incentive by really imagining how you would feel when you become, fitter, healthier, lighter. Future thinking helps put eating choices into perspective and helps us make all those small and sustained lifestyle choices in the here and now. Discover Automatic Willpower (welcomehypnotherapy.co.uk)
3. Interrupt the Habit Loop– “We are what we repeatedly do “(Aristotle) so why not try doing something different. Take up a hobby/ exercise. Renowned hypnotherapist and psychiatrist Milton H Erikson famously gave an woman the option to jump rope each time she fancied a drink. It worked!
-
4. Ditch the diet if it’s adding to your anxiety. Stop weighing yourself, real results come over time and you can feel the difference in your clothes before you’d see a difference on the scales. They weigh on your mind, do it once a month or so if you feel you have to.
5. Eating regularly by keeping our blood sugar regulated (eating protein, fibre (beans, vegetables, oats and fruit) and heathy fats (avocados, nuts, seeds and olive oil) all help keep our bodies feeling satisfied longer.
6. Hydrate drinking enough water helps our bodies work more efficiently. Sometimes we can mistake thirst for hunger.
7. Be mindful -Try not to do 3 things at once, when you eat, just eat. Check in am I really hungry? Am I bored? give yourself a wait time, of say 15 minutes and drink some water
7 Ways to Manage your Weight
How Hypnotherapy Can Help
Reducing stress and anxiety is my favourite treatment to carry out, clients feel better, more confident, able to sleep better and more soundly. Raising confidence and self-esteem and lowering stress and anxiety levels effects our relationship with food. It can feel almost magical.
Science based Solution Focused Hypnotherapy is a combination of traditional talking therapy and deep relaxation with guided imagery. This relaxed state helps you to put aside your daily stress and obstacles and allows you to focus your attention on what you truly want and to make a plan of how you are going to get there!
A study conducted by Stradling et al (1998) compared three treatment approaches; hypnotherapy for stress reduction, hypnotherapy targeted at calorie reduction and dietary advice alone. All three groups experienced 2-3% weight loss at three months. After 18 months the hypnotherapy group with stress reduction achieved significantly more weight loss than the other two treatment aims, which were not significantly different from each other.
Follow Me:
Send Me a Message
Planting seeds of growth, small mental shifts
Planting Seeds of Growth: The Power of Small Mental Shifts
Growth doesn’t always feel like progress. Sometimes, it looks like uncertainty, frustration, or even like everything is falling apart. But just like a seed buried in the soil, change often happens beneath the surface long before it becomes visible
Anxiety and Hypnotherapy: break the cycle of overthinking
Anxiety and Hypnotherapy: Break the Cycle of Overthinking. Learn how anxiety and hypnotherapy intersect to help break the cycle of negative mental rehearsal. Discover how imagination can affect reality and how hypnotherapy can help.
Embracing Change Through Hypnotherapy
Your Journey Starts Here
Change doesn’t happen all at once, and it doesn’t need to. Vital lives are built one step at a time, with small actions adding up to big transformations. Hypnotherapy provides a safe and supportive space to uncover what’s holding you back and guide you toward the life you want to create.
Support My Blog Posts By Sharing on Social Media.