Hypnosis for Permanent Weight Loss for the 65% of Americans Who Are Overweight

Over 65% of Americans are overweight. According to
researchers, Americans are getting fatter at the rate of ten
pounds per decade despite a weight loss industry that is
costing billions every year. As a hypnotherapist and
hypnosis trainer for twenty-five years, I’ve dedicated myself
to finding a solution. It seems to me that our approach to
weight needs to address the underlying causes of our eating
habits, rather than simply adding more superficial strategies
which are not producing for many of my clients the long term
results they deserve. While many weight programs seem to work
in the short run, they frequently lead to cycles of weight
fluctuation. Even if I help a client lose fifty pounds now,
do I want my client to still be counting calories, struggling
with new diet plans, and obsessing about their weight ten
years from now? Should I consider that a therapeutic
success? No, I believe we can do better. Let’s deal with the
sources of the problem. That’s what this series of articles
will address.

Most of us know friends whose lives do not revolve around
their efforts to manage and control their eating. They just
naturally seem to eat the types and the quantities of food
that keep their bodies slender and energized. We will learn
how to match our subconscious eating habits and metabolic
patterns with theirs, so we can experience the freedom and
energy they naturally enjoy.

There are two primary elements of this challenge. First,
there is the client’s tendency to eat too much of the wrong
foods, and at the wrong time (eating at night, for example,
is the wrong time because the body cannot effectively burn
the foods you eat.) These eating habits are not simply
random errors, easily correctable by education or self
discipline. They are based on “emotional eating habits” we
learned as children. We will learn to recognize these eating
patterns and, more importantly, how to change these habits in
the subconscious mind, so that our weight loss is easy and
natural.

A second and equally important element of these articles is
to explore our metabolic programming to keep fat on the body.

If you’ve ever wondered why your clients can’t seem to lose
much weight even on the most rigorous of diet plans, if your
friend gains back all that lost weight within months of
losing, if you can’t seem to eat a single croissant without
wearing it around your waist, listen up. We will be
addressing the causes of this metabolic programming to stay
fat, and will learn to eliminate these subconscious programs.

First, I’ll address some underlying causes of our
inappropriate emotional eating habits. An “Emotional eating
habit” is a way of using eating as a mood-altering behavior.
This behavior is unrelated to the body’s natural hunger, and
for many of us produces not only excessive body fat, but can
lead to such proven health consequences as diabetes and heart
disease. We’ll learn how with advanced techniques of hypnosis
we can heal these patterns.

The first of these emotional eating habits I call infantile
eating. I ask my overweight clients these questions in our
first interview.

• Do you crave sweet foods or dairy products frequently,
especially at night?

• Do you feel a deep emptiness when you eat these foods, or a
sense of grief, or despair?

• Do you tend to wolf down meals without tasting them,
craving the satiety of a full belly?

• Do you experience dieting as a source of despair or a kind
of self-punishment, an empty stomach that says nobody loves
me?

If you answered yes to any of the questions above, then
infantile emotional eating habits may still be haunting your
efforts to lose weight. Most of us have completely forgotten
where these patterns began. But hypnotherapists have known
for years. They know that as infants at our mother’s breast,
or on the bottle in our lonely crib, we begin to develop the
emotional eating habits of a lifetime. So the choice that
our caregivers made – breast or lonely bottle –has enormous
implications for a lifetime of overeating!

Let’s examine the ideal experience of the infant at the
breast. The infant sucks hard and works hard to get the
milk, while experiencing lots of affection, cuddling and play
with mother. The child is nourished in body and soul, while
taking a long time to fill its stomach with the warm liquid
that is synonymous with love. This ritual is especially
important at night, so the baby can sleep through the night,
or for at least a few hours, free of hunger.

Bottle-fed babies, in contrast, when the caregiver ignores
the child’s needs for attention, discover that it’s easy to
guzzle the milk from the bottle. So this poor infant learns
that the only way to experience nurturing is to wolf down the
proffered meal as quickly as possible, trying hard to ignore
his body’s feelings of loneliness and abandonment, until his
tummy is so full that he can drift off to sleep. Filling up
with food quickly, therefore, becomes a substitute for our
basic needs for love and affection. So we learn very early to
become “compulsive eaters”, eating sweet foods, eating too
fast, filling up too full, and eating at night or when we are
lonely, depressed or sad.

Some of my clients with this pattern protest, “I was
nursed!” I inform them that their nursing experience was very
likely troubled or too brief if they show all the signs of
infantile emotional eating. It is highly unlikely that they
received the two to five years of healthy nursing on demand
characteristic of all primeval cultures. One client
remembered after a bit of prodding: “My mother told me she
was a heavy smoker when I was a baby. She said I became
allergic to her milk, so she had to quit.” Problems like
this are all too common among my overweight clients. Although
only a skilled hypnotherapist can take us to the true
memories of infancy, I have learned that if my client shows
the symptoms I’ve described, they probably have this
conditioning. The body does not lie.

By taking our clients back to infancy in a hypnotic trance,
we hypnotherapists help them experience and understand all
the pain and hurt that the body has been running from all
these years, running to food. But far more important,
they’ll have the chance to experience through hypnotic
suggestion, as that infant, the real love and nurturing that
comes from an ideal mother. We implant these blissful
experiences in the subconscious mind. We embed these
suggestions in the mouth, the stomach, the heart of the
client. Then we implant these blissful bodily feelings into
those times, usually at night, when the client is craving
sweets or feeling that familiar ache of loneliness. Every
act of eating can be infused with these happy feelings.

Clients can then experience the sheer joy of eating slowly, chewing thoroughly and eating much less while enjoying eating
far more – the way properly raised humans are supposed to enjoy
eating. Or they may discover that they aren’t really hungry and simply close the refrigerator, perhaps choosing a hypnotic nap in the arms of their inner mother instead for a few minutes. In just a few sessions, lifelong habits can be
changed, as the client learns to access this mother/child

bond on their own. Other addictive patterns, notably
cigarette and drug cravings, can also be reduced or
eliminated through this technology. Food allergies also will
vanish sometimes, as food assumes different roles in our
emotional lives.

One hypnotherapist described this technique to me as a
“Radical new approach.” Radical, yes, because no other
hypnosis school in America teaches these techniques. But
this methodology is based on Sigmund Freud’s “oral complex”,
one of the important foundations of psychoanalysis for the
last one hundred years. My belief is that while Freud
brilliantly described the nature of this fixation, his own
life-long addiction to smoking demonstrated that insight
alone is not enough to break the patterns of the oral
complex. To the extent that nearly our entire society
suffers this complex because of modern parenting strategies,
more must be done. The evidence is within our bodies here in
America. Through hypnosis therapy, an answer is available.

This is just one of the emotional eating habits we will be
addressing in hypnosis. We will also explore the role of
stuffing negative emotions in compulsive eating.

About Alchemy Institute of Hypnosis: We offer a list of
hypnotherapists in your area. Our website also offers an
extensive library of information about hypnotherapy. This
includes articles on weight loss. If you are interested in
further explorations of this topic, or would like a copy of
the other articles in the series, or perhaps are interested
in making changes in your life through the techniques of
weight loss described here, call our office at 1-800-950-4984
or visit our website at http://www.alchemyinstitute.com/Weight-Loss/.

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