Welcome to Park Hypnotherapy Hypnotherapy in central Nottingham

When you take a look around at people in any typical street, you would perhaps assume that very few people had been on a diet these days, as slender frames become less and less of the norm. The truth of the matter is, that according to Mintel (2014), at least 14 million adults are on a diet 'most of the time' that means 1 in 6 of us are permanently on some kind of restrictive diet to reduce body weight! And for most of us, it won't be the first time we have been trying to fight the flab!

THE DIET INDUSTRY....

The diet industry is one of the most lucrative ever, earning a massive £2 billion a year in Britain alone...each dieter spending an average of £600 per year on diets, diet food and aids, gym memberships, exercise camps and groups. There are more people using the slimming clubs than ever before, and GP's are even prescribing free membership for their struggling patients. So what's going on? The amount of ways to lose weight out there is mind boggling....we are given a new diet or slimming pill every week, and we don't mind spending our money on getting help to lose the weight. There is obviously something missing here....the elephant in the room....something so obvious that we barely even notice it, never mind what that actually means for us as a society. The elephant being? Calorie restricted diets DON'T work! Clearly!

HISTORY'S LESSONS....

When we look back just 50 years, our nation's frame was a very different one...slender was the norm and overweight, something that wasn't. what was different? No junk food? I'm not so sure, as lots of my clients come to me for help with losing weight, and they rarely eat junk food. Did they all eat a low fat diet in the past? FAR FROM IT! I remember the food we all ate as children was fried in lard, we ate the bacon fat and the chicken skin....my mum would regularly feed us on bread and dripping! So what was different? One of the very biggest difference is food availability. We didn't have anything like the choice of foods that we have now, as global shipping of meat and exotic fruits is now huge, and the shops weren't open anything like 24 hours a day. We shopped once a week, and we bought the same staple foods week after week....frozen food was limited to fish fingers and frozen veg, everything was cooked from fresh ingredients, and processed food was just not in our mindset. We began to see the diet industry emerging in the late 70's with the likes of Rosemary Conley and her low fat diet plan, as processed food and a huge sea-change in our food availability began the flourish. Now, a generation or so on, food shopping and cooking is unrecognisable from what it was even 30 years ago.
We have always eaten well as a nation, out little island is practically self sufficient, there is an abundance of home grown foods, so why didn't we get fat before? why was that not the norm? Simply because we couldn't! It wasn't available in the shops, the process for making low nutrition, high calorific products hadn't been designed back then, and we were all so much the healthier for it.

But, to the present problem, how do we get rid of our weight now without dieting? So the elephant in the room can be ignored no longer! We have to somehow convince ourselves and our bodies that we can shed the pounds and yet not be missing out of the vital nutrition from the unprocessed and nutritionally dense food that our bodies crave so strongly that they sabotage each and every attempt to shed the pounds for good!

CHANGING YOUR BRAND?...

In the JUICE MASTER, Jason Vale called it 'changing your brand', deciding to like something else instead. Now we know that we can indeed persuade our brains that we like something different from the thing we liked before, and sometimes that might be all we need....like training your brain to like the feeling after exercise instead of the feeling from lounging on the sofa all night, but this is not an easy change! We are creatures of habit and we often need a really big nudge in the right direction, a drastic wake-up call such as a health warning or some kind. the habits that we have make life easy for us, so we don't have to consciously think of every move, but they work against us when we decide to change them.
One way we use in hypnosis is to make it as it as easy as possible by giving yourself the chance to act as if you already do have the new habit. So if you decide that you're going to start drinking your tea without sugar in, then throw all the sugar out and behave as if you've always drunk your tea without sugar in...naturalise that habit and you will trick your brain into thinking that you've always done it. It takes us 3 weeks to make new neural connections, so you don't have to wait long till you forget that you ever used to drink your tea so sweet!
Some habit changes can be really as simple as this, but others may take a little more hard work to convince your brain to take up, especially if that particular habit is more of an addictive response, such as sugar....the habit is far more complex and is tied up with all sorts of different behaviours...changing your brand to a life without sugar can feel like you're just plain denying yourself your simple little pleasure, or your favourite treat, or your little 'friend'....no amount of brand change will help with that! The trouble with denial? Our brain then thinks we are on a DIET, and the whole yo-yo cycle will begin again.

PERMANENT SOLUTIONS? ....

There are some great recipe books out there for low sugar alternatives, but you do have to be careful not to give yourself the message that you are somehow eating a substitute to the 'real thing', as, again, we're back to that feeling of being on a diet. Going cold turkey works for a while, but as soon as sugar is (often accidentally) introduced into your body, you will be back to the old addictive urges again. We need to be armed against the amount of hidden sugar in unbelievably unlikely sources, and find a way to stop ourselves feeling like we're missing out....I really do think this is where hypnosis can help massively...to just 'turn off' that little voice that tells us we're missing out, and give us the chance to turn towards more meaningful nutrition instead. It's not a mystical magic wand, we now know so much about how the brain operates, and how hypnosis fits in as a 'tool' for helping to change long term habitual and addictive thinking:)

Bridgette x 2018