About 10 per cent of 13-year-old girls are ‘terrified’ about putting on weight, reports the BBC. This is from the first UK study looking for warning signs of eating disorders in which doctors said they were worried by the high degree of weight fixation found in 13-year-old girls, years before eating disorders typically start.
Researchers say it might be possible to stop full eating disorders developing. Their findings, in the Journal of Adolescent Health, came from interviews with the parents of 7,082 13-year-olds.
Eating disorders, such as anorexia, tend to start in the mid-teenage years, although the symptoms can begin before those disorders start.
But hypnotherapy can help those who want to manage weight loss and it is one of the most effective results of hypnotherapy, says the National Council for Hypnotherapy.
Losing weight with hypnosis is essentially about teaching the client to feel good about themselves, whatever size they are. It focuses on making healthy changes to the diet and lifestyle that will remain for the rest of their life.
Rather than just reducing calories that a person is likely to put on again in the longer term, hypnosis gets the client in touch with the reasons why they unconsciously eat. If the client is the type of person that struggles to stop after a small piece of chocolate and feels compelled to finish the packet then a hypnotherapist can help them understand why and help to create new healthy self-management techniques.
As well as stopping compulsive eating, hypnosis can increase motivation for exercise.
It can also help the client reduce portion sizes so they lose weight healthily, steadily and for the long term.
Hypnosis for weight loss is about changing lifelong negative habits around food and body image; the best results are often when committing to a programme of treatment.
One of the researchers in the recent eating disorder study, Dr Nadia Micali, told the BBC she was surprised children were so concerned about weight at such a young age.
“For me the results were particularly worrying, I wouldn’t have thought they’d be so common at this age. Part of me thinks it’s a shame we didn’t ask earlier, we don’t know when this behaviour starts. Quite a large proportion will develop full-blown eating disorders, maybe more than half.”
But, according to Beat, an organisation which provides helplines, online support and a network of UK-wide self-help groups to help adults and young people in the UK beat their eating disorders, the Christmas emphasis on food can make some days tough for people affected by eating disorders so hopefully this page will offer you hints, tips, support and ideas on how to cope and enjoy the season.
An example of how hypnotherapy can help weight loss comes from Paul Howard, a clinical hypnotherapist at the Surrey Institute of Clinical Hypnotherapy and the marketing director for the NCH.
He was the hypnotherapist who worked with ‘Miriam’, a woman weighing over 18 stone who needed to manage her eating and weight.
“As a rule, exercise has very little impact on weight loss. It is very important for health but for most people that are obese or overweight, exercising is difficult and they often find it embarrassing,” said Howard.
Miriam found that, as a rule, whenever she was on any diet she would tend to lose motivation after three weeks and the diet would start to fall apart soon after. Even when she did stick to it for longer, she found it hard work and felt quite low a lot of the time.
But, with hypnotherapy, Miriam found that the treatment helped to keep her motivation focused and high which made it much easier to stay on track.
The big change for Miriam was the change in behaviours. Her new-found ability to eat more appropriately, together with the lack of cravings for inappropriate food, was a big surprise to her. Also, because of the nature of the eating plan, she could go out, have fun and enjoy herself, something she always struggled with on other diet regimes. In the first two weeks Miriam lost just under a stone and the weight loss continued at a fairly steady rate, culminating in losing 3 stone in just 12 weeks, averaging a loss of 3.5 lbs a week.