Trick Yourself into Losing Weight

The struggle to manage weight can be a lifelong and ongoing battle. Mothers, especially, can fall into the trap of managing work-life balance, where taking time out to take care of yourself is often a reserved luxury. It becomes rather frustrating and de-motivating when your efforts toward getting to your goal weight is hampered by one factor or the other. However, there is a solution. Your woes could very well be in the hands of your subconscious. One such method, the Virtual Gastric Band Therapy, has been gaining momentum thanks to its non-invasive nature. This program uses a combination of hypnotherapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) that trains your subconscious to develop a better relationship with food, permanently. Anna Yates and Louisa Kiernander, Therapists at Mind Solutions, share their input:

THE LINK

Your subconscious mind has two significant roles; one is to protect and keep us alive (carry out physical processes such as breathing and digesting food), while the other is to keep us happy and help us achieve our goals (juggle our emotional and mental levels). Its primary function, however, is to avoid pain at all costs. Dieting is a painful process (working out, training your body to eat less), and so your subconscious resists. Your subconscious mind’s only focus is your pain or pleasure in the now. That means if there is a piece of cake on the table in front of you, you are more likely to eat it than pass it on. Even if your conscious mind knows that staying away from the cake will reap benefits later, your subconscious does not have a sense of delayed gratification, and that is the struggle a lot of us deal with on a day-to-day basis.

GET TO THE ROOT OF THE ISSUE

The battle to lose weight can come in many forms; general overeating, no time for the gym, too many take-out work lunches, medical hindrances – we all have an excuse, one that our subconscious mind is more than willing to facilitate. These may ring a bell, ‘you’ve had a really stressful day, go ahead and eat that chocolate” or the classic “feeling a bit down today. Let’s just skip gym.” It is these voices that your subconscious keeps feeding, to keep you in your comfort zone and off-track. The Virtual Gastric Band Therapy sessions peel back the layers of the onion to get to the actual problem, which is often an underlying emotional issue or a learned behavior. We can sometimes be blind to the contributory issues causing us distress; frustrations in our marriage or parenthood, and unsatisfying jobs. We get so used to living in an, ‘I’m fine culture that we don’t always realise that something may be causing trauma and hindering our efforts to get to our goals.

FIND A BALANCE

Considering our subconscious controls over 90 per cent of our mind, it is not hard to understand why most of us struggle with willpower to shed the extra kilos. The unfortunate reason for that is that our willpower is stored in the conscious mind, and often our willpower will lose the battle. With each session, you are offered tools and techniques to conquer the “battle of wills.” The techniques help you to stop for a moment, think, and make the right and healthy decision.

IS IT FOR ME?

This method of weight management has proven to work on all kinds of personalities. Whether you are a strong-willed person or maybe even a bit skeptical, the critical thing is your desire to make the process work, and to listen to and practice the advice given.

We have all been down the route where a typical diet sometimes leaves you with a desire for unhealthy choices, greater than before your started. The program comprises of four sessions (six hours in total), and takes a look at eating habits, stress-levels, and emotional links, to open up your subconscious to accept and replace old habits with new and healthy ones. Each session ends with hypnosis – to allow clients to enter a deep state of relaxation (similar to zoning out) – and the client is given a copy to listen to in between sessions as well.

As for the success rate, therapists are seeing tremendous results with both men and women, as
the process is a completely different approach to conventional dieting. It’s time to focus on yourself, in a practical and emotional manner, rather than just treat the symptoms.