Why did I use the word “release” instead of “loss”? Because subconsciously you’re trained to find whatever you lose – weight included. How many times have you lost weight, only to find it again? What you’re aiming for is permanent weight release, so let’s talk about the five crucial components for your success.
Maybe you’re expecting specific diet or nutritional advice, but what you’re going to get here is even more important because your mental diet is as, if not more, important than your physical diet, and the right mindset can support whichever nutritional plan is the best fit for you. Yes, after 17 years of helping release weight, I have some opinions about the various different options that are out there and are happy to share those with you, but I also honor the fact that you know yourself better than I know you and am happy to support whichever plan you feel is going to be your best fit. That’s one of the many beauties of hypnosis.
Crucial Component Number 1: Understanding That Health Is Not a Short Game
It’s not something that’s going to last 6, 8, or even 12 weeks. Health is a life-long game and you need to wrap your mind around that truth. Releasing the weight is only half the challenge, keeping it off is equally important. Your health is your number one most valuable asset. It’s something that too many of us take for granted, but without it you can’t do what you want and need to do. So, don’t think about the short game of releasing weight, think of it as a game you’re going to be playing for the rest of your life, releasing the weight, keeping the weight off and continuing to refine your health and strength so you can live life fully vs. living life in the doctor’s office.
Crucial Component Number 2: Identify Its Purpose
For most, excess weight serves a purpose, and until you understand what that purpose is, the weight will keep coming back. Two common purposes that your mind believes excess weight serves are protection and punishment. Protection from unwanted attention, advances or hurt, and punishment for past mistakes.
You’re probably aware that there is a correlation between sexual abuse and excess weight, so for many, weight serves the purpose of helping us become invisible and from the mind’s perspective “safe”. For others, the body puts on weight to create a barrier or buffer from other people’s harmful words or energy. To protect from hurt. Not that this works, and in fact the weight creates its own painful feelings and experiences, but without help, our minds can’t think of a better option.
Did you know there was a correlation between abortion and excess weight? Abortion is something that women, and men, punish themselves for, and weight is one of the classic ways to exact that punishment. We punish ourselves with weight for other life mistakes as well, or for simply not being perfect or “good enough”. I’ll go out on a limb and say that this last one is what most of my weight release clients struggle with. It’s very difficult for your body to present as “good enough” when inside you believe you’re not, so that’s one of the first places we focus the work – building self-confidence, self-esteem and body respect. Eating junk food is a classic sign of disrespect and your body deserves better. Once you really know that, by nature you’ll make healthier choices.
Crucial Component Number 3: Disconnect the Connections
Your mind started forming connections to food when you were just an infant being breast or bottle fed by mom. Food = love, food = comfort, food = attention, food = safety & security, food = happiness. Depending on how you were raised more and more connections formed over time. Food = scarce, food = a reward, food = celebration, food = family, food = company and entertainment. Connection after connection formed until food became connected to everything – so anytime we need love, or company, or comfort or reward, we turn to food. What we don’t realize is that none of those connections are true – none of those feelings came from food – they came from the people who where there when we were eating! Food is simply FUEL for our bodies and until we understand our unique connections around food and disconnect them, we will continue to be drawn to food for the wrong reasons. Fortunately, your subconscious mind can easily identify and disconnect the connections your mind has made around food and free you to make conscious and healthy choices instead of repeating those unhealthy choices over and over.
Crucial Component Number 4: Identify Your Emotional Drivers
We all experience a wide range of emotions every day. As a society, we’ve never been taught the purpose of our emotions or how to deal with them. So, our natural tendency is to try to stuff them down or distract ourselves away from them. And, because of all the connections our minds have formed around food over time – because we really think its comfort, or company or happiness – we try to use food to serve the purpose of stuffing, numbing or distracting. And yes, it may appear to work temporarily, but what it’s really doing is creating more of the very emotions we’re trying not to feel, and increasing the size of the old emotional reservoir that we need to hold at bay. It’s a vicious cycle that causes us to eat far beyond our bodies’ needs for fuel. If you think about food as fuel for your body like gasoline for your car – if your car has engine trouble you’re not going to open the hood and douse the engine with gas, nor will you stop at the gas station when your tank is still three-quarters full, or fill it beyond capacity. We wouldn’t consider doing any of that with the vehicle we drive but we do it all the time to the vehicle we live in.
Crucial Component Number 5: Positive Suggestions
Whether you realize it or not, you’re in constant dialog with yourself. And everything you say to yourself, (you know those not so nice words that you put at the end of “I am”), are literally suggestions, or marching orders, that you’re giving to your subconscious mind. Suggestions your subconscious mind is taking literally and acting upon. You’ll be amazed at what you hear when you start listening. I challenge you to write out your self-talk as you become aware of it, and when you look at it in black and white you’ll realize that it’s not pretty. In fact, they are most likely things that you’d never dream of saying to anyone else.
Self-talk is so important because what we say to ourselves at the conscious level our subconscious mind takes literally. It becomes our self-instruction and very often we’re giving our mind the wrong instructions. Let’s take the word “need”. How many times have you said to yourself, “I need this chocolate? I need this drink, this dessert, this bread, this pasta, this ________.” When in essence you don’t need it – you just want it. If you tell yourself you need something over and over again you begin to believe it’s true. Then the connection or draw towards that food will get stronger instead of weaker, which make it harder to make healthy choices. At those moments try being honest with yourself. “I want this because I feel I deserve a reward.” “I want this because I’m bored or lonely.” Or whatever the truth is in that moment. That honesty will help you understand how you’re using food and will allow you to find other, healthier things to address your emotional need.
How many times have you told yourself “I’m fat”, “I have big hips”, “I’m never going to look like that”? Every time you say those things to yourself your subconscious mind takes you literally and works to achieve those instructions instead of what you want which is fit, strong and healthy. Or that famous “I’ll start tomorrow”, when you know that the tomorrows will continue to come and go. Instead pick a single start date and hold yourself to it. So, be aware and be careful of how you talk to and about yourself.
Hypnosis, which is a conversation with your subconscious mind, will allow you to become fully aware of the purpose your mind thinks your excess weight is serving, the specific connections your mind has made around food. It will help you literally drain your old emotional reservoir which equals less triggering and more control and will help you become aware of and shift your negative, demotivating self-talk to positive propelling self-talk. It will help you create healthy change in all these areas which will translate to a healthy relationship with food and a healthy body.
Here is an inspiring story from a former client:
~ John from Simsbury
Lisa Zaccheo, MA, BCH, BC, is the owner, lead hypnotist and hypnosis instructor at Mind Matters Hypnosis Centers in Avon, Glastonbury, and Guilford, CT. She is Board Certified by the National Guild of Hypnotists and has numerous additional certifications in all aspects of hypnosis and the subconscious. In addition, she’s a best-selling author of “Free Your Genius, a sought-after lecturer and high-level Executive HypnoCoach. For more information or to schedule an appointment, lecture, workshop or receive training, call Mind Matters Hypnosis Center at (860) 693-6448 or visit: MindMattersHypnosis.com.