“I used to think that skinny people had so much willpower,” Debbie said, “but now I understand how they think. They just don’t want the junk, so they’re not using willpower. It (the junk food) actually is not appealing to them.”
“That’s exactly how I feel now,” Debbie added, as she shared her experience one month after her Gastric Bypass Hypnosis Surgery, and reinforcing that with daily self-hypnosis.
How can that happen, you may wonder? How can our taste for food completely change? That is one of the wonderful wonders of your incredible, brilliant subconscious mind. When you plant new suggestions in to the mind, properly, these suggestions take root and change your thoughts, your preferences, your perceptions, and of course, your behaviors.
The secret to these shift lies in your perception of pleasure and pain. Let me give you an example. If you grew up in a home where there was a lot of fighting (perhaps even physical abuse), and then at the end of each traumatic event, there was a tender moment (no matter how brief) where there was a respite from the aggression and perhaps even an expression of love, you would subconsciously begin to associate love and tenderness with needing to be preceded by an emotional explosion.
Even if rationally you know that’s not true, you will come to link arguing with making up and getting your need for love and reassurance finally met. As a result of that association between receiving love and being yelled at first, you may subconsciously create situations later on in life where you either need to abuse someone else or be abused, so that you can later receive the affection you crave.
Even though you understand consciously that you don’t need to fight to share love with another, you will be programmed to do so. You have subconsciously, inadvertently, linked pleasure to abuse and so you continue to draw it to yourself and create it, on some level.
Objectively, abuse creates enormous pain—physical, mental and emotional pain, and yet, if this is the program that is running in your brain, you will continue to experience this type of trauma in your life.
So what does this have to do with changing the way you think about food?
Everything!
You, like Debbie did, may think that craving cupcakes and fast food is normal, and that people who don’t eat those foods, or don’t eat them regularly, are exhibiting herculean amounts of effort. But the truth is, you were programmed to eat these foods.
Your mental program is successful, because you, too, are blocking out the massive amounts of pain resulting from your behaviors. If you deny that you experience pain as a result of your choices, then whey do you spend so much of your life force energy researching ways to lose weight? Aren’t those hours spent in search of the magic weight loss bullet simply your way of trying to free yourself from the pain? The problem is these weight loss solutions (whether they are pills, diets, or bariatric surgery) can never work, because they are not getting at the cause: your thinking.
When you stop to think about it, you were born to consume water rich foods from the earth—healthy foods that sustain you and nourish you. You weren’t created to eat fattening, empty-calorie, processed foods, that the food industry spikes with substances that keep you coming back, addicted to their creations. Nor were you meant to eat horrible diet foods that taste like cardboard.
Look at the foods from the earth and from nature and how naturally delicious they are—mangoes, papayas, greens, squash, broccoli, sweet potatoes, carrots, celery, avocados, fresh brown rice, olive oil, rich delicious meats and eggs. Many of these foods have just the right amount of fat to make them melt on your tongue or you can combine them to give them a better taste—there’s no need to add addictive chemicals and substances to alter them.
Not eating cupcakes and French fries doesn’t have to take a whole lot of willpower when you connect in to the pain they are already causing in your life. The problem is, if you are still eating these foods on a regular basis, right now you link only pleasure to these foods. Whenever a picture of one of these toxic foods pops into the space between your ears, you run mental movies of sweet, salty or oily tastes on the tongue that bring you joy.
What you are blocking out is the actual result of eating these foods—thick rolls of ugly, uncomfortable fat, tight clothes that leave you barely able to breathe, difficulty walking or doing activity, shame, guilt and humiliation over your physical condition and perceived lack of control, and possibly medications or even surgeries that are made necessary because you continue to indulge in these harmful foods.
Therefore, to have success with changing your thinking about food, you don’t have to imagine elaborate fantasies of bugs crawling on cupcakes so you don’t want them, but you simply need to REMEMBER (and that’s a form of re-programming) the immense pain that these foods cause you ULTIMATELY.
Just as the battered wife may only want to remember the bliss of the “make-up” moments, and block out the immense pain and humiliation of being abused, so you, up until the point of change, only want to remember the joy of eating rich, sugary, oily foods.
She doesn’t want to think about leaving him because that might seem scary no matter how much other people may tell her that something better awaits her. In the same way, until you get to the point where you are completely fed up with the way you look and the way you feel, you may want to continue to focus on what you don’t want to “give up.”
The greatest joy I have as a hypnotherapist who specializes in weight loss, breaking free from addiction, and gastric bypass hypnosis surgery, is helping to facilitate that ‘ah hah’ moment for people. So many of my clients walk in telling me that they want to lose 50 lbs. or 100 lbs. but they don’t want to ‘give up’ their diet coke, or greasy lunches with friends, or the hot rolls they like to consume daily.
Can you stay married to an abusive partner and only extract the love from him or her? Not unless the abusive partner completely wakes up and transforms.
Can you continue to eat fattening, unhealthy, addictive, empty calorie foods and still lose weight? Only if you reduced the amount of food you ate to bite size portions and increased your activity many times over. Is that possible? It may be possible for some, but if you are susceptible to food addiction, like I am, then it would be next to impossible to control the amounts of food you are eating, when you are eating foods that physically make you crave more.
The great news is your mind can be re-programmed! Being overweight and/or unhealthy does not have to be your destiny!
Think about all the times in your life when you already used this ability to change your perceptions for your own good. Didn’t you get over an ex-love when you thought you’d never stop thinking about that person? What about that period in your life when you bit your nails, sucked your hair or smoked cigarettes? Remember thinking you’d never get over something, but with the passage of time, you did?
Time takes time. However, time in and of itself won’t change anything unless you set the intention to do so. Use your time wisely. Start practicing self-hypnosis daily so that with the passage of time, your perceptions about yourself and food really do change.
A great way to learn how to do self-hypnosis properly is to use cds that guide you into the hypnotic state and give you suggestions to help you re-program your own mind for health, happiness, being in control of your life and your eating habits and living at your ideal weight.
Anything that someone else can do, you can do, too! I never thought that I would prefer a salad to pizza, but I do. It doesn’t matter what my family and friends are eating, my desire guides me to foods that keep me nourished and energized. This is a result of 25+ years of reinforcing to my subconscious that rich, sugary foods make me sick and unhealthy, and eating in a light and balanced way, with enough healthy fat to make my foods taste great to me, is the key to my health, happiness and a much more fulfilling life.
You, too, can experience health and freedom without ever feeling like you’re on a diet or mustering up enormous amounts of willpower. Your vast, creative, intuitive, intelligent subconscious mind is here for you and wants what’s best for you. Say “yes” to yourself, today, and start letting time work for you to create the wonderful, joyful life of true freedom that you deserve.
Weight Loss Hypnosis Articles
Read some of our articles about how hypnosis can help you reach your ideal weight without going hungry. Rena Greenberg Health, Wellness and Weight loss expert, rated best hypnotherapist for gastric band hypnosis, has helped over 200,000 people lose thousands of pounds, without dieting. Hypnotherapy benefits are recognized by the world of medicine, and renowned hypnotherapist Rena Greenberg has developed advanced self-hypnosis programs that deliver outstanding results. Her clients’ testimonials speak for themselves. If you are interested in starting your weight loss journey and need some help, contact Rena today to learn more.