Written by Rena Greenberg
When you have 30, 50, 80, or more pounds to lose, the prospect of weight loss can be daunting. You can see how easy it would be to just give up at the first signs of difficulty.
Since 1990, I have helped over 100,000 people to lose weight, including myself, so I have absolute faith that it can be done. The key to success is simply keeping your mind straight.
Hypnosis is a powerful tool that can help you to do just that. It’s a state of focused concentration and physical relaxation that invokes the power of suggestion and images to create personal change.
Suggestion with repetition can place the images that lead to success, front and center in your mind, ahead of any voice of doubt or self-sabotage that wants to creep in.
We move towards pleasure and away from pain. The brain is wired that way — it will never change. In a state of hypnosis or self-hypnosis, suggestions can be planted to help you associate absolute pleasure with looking and feeling your best, with being in control of your life and your eating habits, with eating small portions of healthy, delicious, nutritious, water rich food, and moving your body.
Since it is your deep-seated beliefs that create your reality, and not just fleeting thoughts, you’ll need to implant these positive suggestions so they become your new normal way of thinking.
Many of us who like to consider ourselves “positive thinkers” like to believe that all we need is positive suggestion. That would be wonderful, but science tells us the opposite. Studies indicate that most people are more motivated by what they don’t want, than by what they do want.
What that means is that most human beings are more likely to take action to avoid a negative consequence than to gain a positive result. This understanding about the human psyche can be extremely beneficial in helping you to achieve your weight loss goals. It lets you know that you are more likely to do what you need to do (eat less, exercise more, and eat healthy food) by the fear of loss — whether that be the loss of health, family or social status — than by the promise of fitting into a size four pair of jeans.
Based on this understanding, to succeed over time without feeling deprived, it’s necessary to associate pain with the harmful, energy draining, life sucking foods that propel you into food addiction.
Unless you condition yourself to associate a great deal of pain with harmful foods (whether that be pipes in your stomach, being too uncomfortable to move, loss of mobility or even loss of eyesight or feeling ashamed and being isolated), you are most likely going to want to continue to eat the foods that are causing you to be overweight, since undoubtedly you currently link the culprits with pleasure.
If you want to live the rest of your life at your ideal weight, the trick is to associate fat-producing foods with pain. This makes it easier to eliminate those foods from your diet, permanently, without ever feeling as if you’re on a diet. Think of getting rid of those foods as if you are banishing a toxic relationship from your life.
Instead of fantasizing about all the pleasure these foods give you by focusing on the fleeting sensation of a tempting taste, remember the result of eating them and all the pain that has caused you in your life on so many levels — physically, mentally and emotionally.
To strengthen yourself, associate those foods with rolls of fat, illness, disease, shame and guilt.
Roger, who has lost 60 lbs. since he came to see me for gastric bypass hypnosis last year, told me that what helped him change his eating habits was imagining the horror of having half his stomach cut out, and a pipe put in, and months of dealing with the aftermath of that! He knew that was his fate if he wasn’t successful with his weight loss attempts and he felt a great deal of relief and joy in avoiding that.
You, too, can imagine the pride you’ll feel when you get down to your ideal weight and are no longer even tempted by harmful substances (if you like, instead of thinking of such edibles as food anymore — substitute the words harmful substances that the food industry tries to seduce you to eat).
“Suggestion with repetition can place the images that lead to success, front and center in your mind, ahead of any voice of doubt or self-sabotage that wants to creep in.
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A Successful Mind-Set
Deprivation and the state of wanting will cause you to feel pain and in your desire to escape pain, the old impulse will be to reach for food. To avoid wanting, convince yourself that you are doing what you want by not eating that which hurts you.
Success is so much easier when the goal is optimal health in mind, body, emotion and spirit, and you think of weight loss as the side benefit.
Focusing too much on the result of weight loss puts pressure on yourself that creates desire for rebellion, or self-talk that says things like: I’m fine the way I am, one cookie won’t hurt me, or this is going to be hard.
It can be more helpful to think of food as either lifting your vibration or lowering it, increasing your energy or decreasing it, building your life force or destroying it, perpetuating health or addiction. This line of thought makes it much easier to make good choices.
Eliminate Emotional Eating
If you are an emotional eater, realize that reaching for food when you are feeling strong emotion is just a habit that you can shift. Set your intention to make that change and stay committed. Use the power of hypnotic suggestion by planting new seeds of thought and positive, reinforcing images in your subconscious mind to help you stay on track.
To help you cope with disturbing feelings, it can be helpful to write down your thoughts and then write down the opposite thought and realize that they are both true. There is usually some truth in opposing thoughts – so you might as well choose the highest thought. The highest thought leaves you feeling expanded and the lowest thought leaves you feeling constricted.
Next time you feel upset, notice the constriction you are feeling in your body. When you check-in to your bodily sensations, you may feel tight in your neck, upper back or jaw.
Write down the thoughts that are floating through your mind, without sensor. Your journal may look like this:
“I am too tired to do anything.”
“I am a fat slob.”
“This diet is not working.”
Now, without talking yourself out of it, write down the opposite of these thoughts:
“I am not too tired to do everything.”
“I am grateful for the energy I do have.”
“I am attractive in many ways.”
“I have successfully stopped drinking soda and that is a great feat.”
Now, without making yourself wrong, notice what happens to your areas of tightness when you breathe in the more positive, generous statements.
Since there is a shred of truth on both sides, why not nurture your loving thoughts? Remember that what you focus on grows. By reinforcing your kinder thoughts, you are growing your own self-love and at the same time increasing the likelihood that you will act on your more positive impulses in the future.
The bottom line, is that your mind is more powerful than you know. The key to success is to commit and re-commit every day to the road ahead of you. The more you do, the easier it gets.
Tomorrow will come either way, so you might as well increase the likelihood of having the life (and body) that your heart desires. You’ve got to talk yourself into it! Trust yourself, you can do this! Create a sensible, doable plan of action. Never give up on yourself! The only one who fails is the one who abandons their own dreams. See (visualize) yourself in five years. This is an important choice point in your life. Decide what you want in your life and claim it!
Rena Greenberg is an author, healthcare expert, and educator whose programs are sponsored by over 75 US hospitals and 100 major US corporations, including Disney, Home Depot, and AT&T. She has helped over 200,000 people find their journey to health. Her weight loss and smoking cessation programs, as well as her organic CBD line of wellness products have been featured widely in the national press.