Why therapy beats dieting EVERY TIME
Over the last several years of running my hypnotherapy clinic in Retford, Nottinghamshire I’d say that the greatest proportion of my clients (equal only to smokers) are made up of people who have spent years dieting. The reason is simple; in the long-term diets do not work. I know that sounds like a pretty bold statement but let’s just look at it from a dieter’s perspective rather than that of the diet providers marketing team.
How many miracle diets can you remember? How about the cabbage soup diet, or the F-Plan diet or may be the Atkins diet, the three day diet and the seven day diet to name but a few. If these wonder diets actually worked then why is there in increase in the number of obese people year on year – why is the diet industry worth billions? If dieting worked then why on earth should anyone need to become a life member of Weight Watchers or any other weight loss club?
Of course in the short-term most dieters can lose a few pounds and there are a few lucky people who are able to lose several stone over the longer-term but in general the opposite is true and without exception every one of the clients I see for weight loss has consistently put weight on despite dieting, or more likely because of the dieting.
So why don’t diets work?
The problem with all diets is that the thing dieters are trying to avoid, food, becomes the sole focus of attention. Imagine if someone suffering from an anxiety disorder related to a fear of snakes was told to think of snakes all day. How long before the anxiety disorder becomes a full on nervous breakdown?
Just as people who “try” to “give up” smoking deprive themselves of the thing they want, so do dieters – it becomes about what you shouldn’t eat rather than what you should. Like the smoker telling themselves “I’ll just take it one day at a time” or “if I can just make it to the end of the week”, dieting becomes about losing x number of pounds in so many weeks. But then what?
How does therapy help?
Using techniques such as hypnotherapy and NLP, therapists are ably to help you address your relationship with food. I find that it’s much more powerful to focus on what you want rather than to try to avoid what you don’t want. Over the last few years I’ve used a mixture of NLP, hypnosis, visualization and life coaching techniques to develop a mode of therapy that is all about outcomes. This positive outcome therapy© works at the very core of your values and beliefs and allows you not only to understand what it is you want but also what obstacles stop you from getting it and how to get past those obstacles.
People overeat for many different reasons such as stress, depression, anxiety, low self esteem or simply just a plain love of food. That’s why therapy works so well with weight loss; because it’s based on the individual; it works at the very deepest level to address the core issues.
After years of dieting and paying slimming clubs, buying special slimming foods, slimming pills and other slimming aids more and more long-term dieters are turning to hypnotherapists for help because it works.
Apparently there is a body revolution happening in the fashion industry!! A weekly German fashion magazine called Brigitte has taken the very brave decision to make the magazine a “model-free zone”.
