Most living things eat when hungry, even babies only eat when they need to and stop when they are comfortable. Why is it, then, that older children and adults often eat to excess?
Part of this could be put down to fad diets, advertising promoting indulgent foods and bad eating habits where we consume unhealthy foods like fry ups. Recent research has shown, for instance, that an inability to manage your eating habits cause obesity and overweight people have a higher risk of getting type 2 diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers.
Excess weight can also make it more difficult for people to find and keep work, and it can affect self-esteem and mental health. Health problems associated with being overweight or obese cost the NHS more than £5 billion every year, says the UK government.
Many people resort to dieting in an effort to control their eating but managing weight loss is one of the most effective results of hypnotherapy and has been proven to be more successful than many diets.
The National Council for Hypnotherapy (NCH) has more than 1800 qualified hypnotherapists on its register and many of them are experienced in dealing with weight management therapies.
Rather than just reducing calories in the short term, hypnosis gets the person in touch with the reasons why they unconsciously eat. Struggling to stop eating after just a small piece of chocolate until the bar is gone is a compulsion that a hypnotherapist can help bring under control by creating new healthy self-management techniques.
As well as stopping compulsive eating, hypnosis can increase motivation for exercise and help reduce portion sizes so weight loss can be healthy steady and for a long time.
Losing weight with hypnosis is essentially about teaching the client to feel good about themselves, no matter their size as it focuses on making healthy changes to diet and lifestyle that will remain for the rest of your life.
But it is no quick fix and cannot offer amazing weight reduction overnight. Hypnosis for weight loss is about changing lifelong negative habits around food and body image so the best results are often when committing to a programme of treatment.
A series of research papers published in The Lancet showed that obesity was becoming a pandemic in the UK and the United States.
So, if you are worried about your ability to manage your eating, use the NCH directory to find a hypnotherapist near you and look forward to a longer, healthier life.