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Words Add More Weight Than Calories

Words make you fat.

My work with hypnosis long ago taught me the power of words. I’ve changed lives, removed fears, eased pain, and helped people to lose weight. I did all of that using nothing more than words. But words have so much power they can harm as well as heal.

A recent long-term US study, conducted by A. Janet Tomiyama, Asst Prof of Psychology, UCLA, followed the weight of 2,379 girls from the age of 10 until the age of 19. Almost 60% of these children had been told they were too fat by the time they were 10. Girls labelled too fat were much more likely to be obese at age 19. The greater the number of people who told a girl she was too fat the greater the likelihood of obesity at age 19.

This is not just a case of fatter children growing into fat adults, because the effects of actual weight were statistically removed in the study. The only factor whose effect was measured was being told you were too fat and by whom. The greater the emotional attachment to the person who criticises the weight – the greater the weight increase in later years.

This is quite fascinating because one of society’s solutions for problems is to point them out.

That’s all that is happening here. People who love the child, and know the problems that obesity brings, simply want to help by encouraging the child to become aware of their problem.

But it has the opposite effect.

Of course if you’ve read my book How to Lose Weight and Free Yourself from Diets Forever you’ll know all about emotional eating. So what is it going to do to a ten year old girl to tell her, no matter how lovingly, that she is too fat – in a world where attractive & loved & popular & famous = SLIM?

It’s not going to cheer her up.

It is going to make her unhappy.

And what do overweight people do when they are unhappy and can’t control their world?

They eat.

Do they eat lettuce and apples? No! They eat sweets and cakes and fats and sugars.

“When people feel bad, they tend to eat more, not decide to diet or take a jog,” Tomiyama said. “Making people feel bad about their weight could increase their levels of the hormone cortisol, which generally leads to weight gain.”

All that matters, especially with a young child, is that they learn to feel good about themselves. Not good about what they look like, or whether they fit in with society’s current view of physical perfection, but good about who they are; good about their talents and abilities; good about how kind and loving they are; and good about everything they do.

Yes, it’s a good idea to ensure they have a healthy diet, but you can do that without stigmatising a child, or regarding a healthy diet as some sort of punishment for getting too fat. I mean what 10 year old has any idea of the connection between their long-term weight and enjoying an ice cream?

Be kind.

Encourage and support a shift to a healthier diet and more active play rather than computer fun. That’s all you need – except…

You just might want to tell your ten year old daughter how beautiful she is.

 

Inspired by:

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-girls-too-fat-obese-20140428,0,4057459.story

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-04-simply-fat-young-girls-obese.html

Categories
weight control

Is Weight Loss Really that Difficult?

Round about lunchtime I nip down the road to my local ASDA coffee-shop and meet for a chat and a cup of coffee with some friends. Mostly it gets me away from the computer screen, gives my eyes a rest and lets me connect with the rest of the world. One of the group mentioned she was going to start losing weight for the summer, so next time we met I gave her a complimentary copy of my book How to Lose Weight and Free Yourself from Dieting Forever. Her dad asked me what the book was about. Obviously it was about weight loss, but that isn’t what he meant – he meant what was my approach to losing weight and how was it different from everything else.

I answered that question in four words “eat less, exercise more”.

“That’s it”, he responded with a smile.

“Well yes”.

I am a man of few words – except when it comes to writing. But essentially that’s what the book is about. But, it’s not just about that. It’s about how to do that easily and effortlessly so that you don’t even really notice you are eating less and exercising more.

As I explained to my friend, it’s about discovering ways to identify those foods that you don’t really want, but eat out of habit and eliminating them. Because you eat them unconsciously, you don’t notice not having them. I encourage you to eat whatever you enjoy and explain how the denial aspect of conventional dieting is one of the major pitfalls and one of the reasons so many people fail when they engage in weight loss using a conventional diet plan.

The book also looks at attitudes to food and where they come from; triggers for emotional eating and how to break that pattern; as well as the reasons why diets just don’t work as a long term solution to weight loss.

Weight loss is an industry worth billions. The weight loss industry is not interested in you being successful. What the weight loss industry needs to do is to convince you that you are the reason you fail. So the whole process is geared around short-term weight loss which proves that their system works (whichever system it might be that you are using), and that your subsequent, and inevitable, weight gains are therefore down to your failure rather than the failure of the system they sell.

This is why weight loss is always a battle when you sign up for Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Slimming World, or buy the latest celebrity-authored crazy fad diet book. Even food-type based diets like Atkins are just the same. They have been created with one goal – to convince you that they work, and that when you fail to sustain your weight loss that it is you that has failed.

My book is about how to avoid all of those traps, how to eat whatever you want whenever you want, and still lose weight. There are almost 100 pages so it’s got a lot more in it than “eat less, exercise more”. People who follow the advice in this book lose weight and keep it off.

To make it even easier for you the book ends with a 10-point action plan to make it really simple and there is even a downloadable food diary designed to help you conquer that emotional feasting you do in the hope that feeling bloated and heavy will make you happy.

Check it out the whole book costs less than the attendance fee for just one meeting of Weight Watchers, Slimming World, or Jenny Craig and you can lose weight enjoying ordinary food rather than the high-priced branded stuff these companies want you to eat.

The weight loss industry took $61 billion from its customers in 2012.

Categories
health self-help weight control

Weight Loss Is Not About Fighting Hunger

 

Feeling hungry isn’t really the issue with weight loss. By that I mean that people who are overweight eat regardless of whether or not they are hungry. Sometimes the problem is simply that they are so out of touch with the sensations their body produces that they just respond to external stimuli as the trigger for eating. But most of the time it’s about the tricks other people play with our minds.

It’s really difficult to watch an evening of tv with all of those food & snack adverts and not, at some point, decide you need something to eat. This is the subtle hypnosis of tv. It puts ideas in your mind purely because of the associations it creates. When was the last time you saw any food advert with fat people in it? When was the last time you saw any food advert with unattractive people in it? When was the last time you saw a food advert with miserable people in it? Unless, that is, they were miserable because they were not getting the food that was being advertised.

I especially remember a series of food adverts that M&S ran. It stuck in my mind because of two things – the stunning quality of the photography, and Dervla Kirwan’s sexy, seductive voiceover. No people appeared in these ads just the food. But there was a hidden promise if you buy this stuff.

It doesn’t mean that you are weak-willed if you are influenced by this stuff. It’s designed to do that. It’s designed by experts to make you want to eat, and to become familiar with the brand so that you automatically pick it up on your next trip to the supermarket. That way, when you next see the advert there will be some of that in the cupboard. The subliminal message is that you too will have the lifestyle and body shape of the people who eat this stuff on tv.  

What you actually get is fatter.

Feeling negative emotion is another eat trigger. Anything from boredom to despair can trigger a trip to the kitchen for something to eat. It passes the time, it reminds you of getting treats as a child and knowing you were loved. Watching an evening of tv is quite likely to fill you with negative emotion even if you didn’t have any to start off with. That’s why the food manufacturers’ advertising is so effective. The soaps are dreary, the news is never good, and reality tv is nothing like reality. It is hardly surprising that we seek a distraction and food is the easiest and quickest solution.

It would be great if it actually worked though. If food truly made us feel better then we’d all be happy fatties and the world would be a better place. But we’re still miserable fatties the next evening and the next and the next and we never stop to question whether or not the feel bad-eat, or feel bored-eat strategy changes anything except our weight.

If you want to change this then next time you realise you are heading to the kitchen in a commercial break go to the staircase instead and walk up and down ten times, then return to watch tv.

Don’t forget to check out my book How to Lose Weight and Free Yourself from Diets Forever.

Categories
hypnosis weight control

Hypnosis for Weight Control – Why Diets Can’t Keep the Weight Off for You

The trouble with diets is that you have to think about food all the time. Though “At first a diet can give you a sense of control. You are taking charge of your eating patterns. You may see success as the scale drops. But soon you are fighting cravings for forbidden foods, as well as hunger pangs and a lack of energy from the lower calorie level. Eventually you rebel against the diet and start “cheating.” If your cheats are small you can still be losing weight, although more slowly. But soon you may go into full rebellion and return to your old eating habits” Am Psychol. 2007

This is how the well known yo-yo effect starts. You get all enthusiastic, go wholeheartedly into the new diet, lose some pounds; then after a few weeks, or a few months, the enthusiasm starts to slip, you’ve done really well, and you want to give yourself a treat or a day off, then that day happens once a week, twice a week, three times a week and the treat happens once a week, once a day, three times a day…

The pounds slip back on, the clothes slowly tighten up again, and you look in the mirror one morning and think I was doing so well…

…or no matter what you do, how closely you stick to the diet, nothing much happens. Others lose pounds, you lose ounces, or even gain them. Life is so unfair…

…or you spend the whole ‘diet-time’ thinking about food, thinking about what you can and can’t eat, counting calories, or points, or syns. Until you get fed-up with the whole thing and give it up…

…for a while…

…and then, usually after Christmas, when you go try on the new summer outfits…  it all starts all over again.

The trouble, I hasten to add, is not with what the diets suggest you eat. The vast majority of them provide good healthy rules for eating that will provide you with a nutritious and balanced intake of food. And lots of people do lose weight using these tried, tested and very successful methods.But the weight doesn’t stay off. The reason is the reasons for weight accumulation are not being addressed. One of the assumptions made is that weight is purely the product of what you put into your mouth and how much energy you expend. Lots of energy expenditure i.e. active life, low calorie intake equals weight loss. Sedentary lifestyle, high calorie intake equals weight gain.

That’s simple maths and it’s perfectly true. You eat fewer calories than you expend and your body has to get those extra calories from somewhere. What you are told is that it gets them from the fat it has carefully stored away under your skin, for just such an emergency. But the truth is that it takes it from lean muscle tissue, because the body knows that lean muscle burns calories even when resting and the body is trying to conserve energy because food seems to be in short supply.

Another assumption is that it is about metabolism or genes. But the territory that is not normally explored is the territory of emotional eating. If it was explored you would find associations with food and being good buried in the subconscious. When you were good as a young child, sweets, candy, cakes, ice cream, chocolate, biscuits, cookies, were the reward for that goodness. When you pleased your parents, this is frequently the treat that was given. But very soon that got twisted and you assumed that if you didn’t get it, you had been bad. And so eating this sort of food gave your subconscious mind the message ‘I am a good and/or loveable person’. The only reason your subconscious would need to be re-assured about that is if it didn’t believe it already. But when you stop giving yourself these ‘treats’, then at a subconscious level, you feel you must have been bad and you are driven to eat something forbidden just to reassure yourself that you really are good.

Now, when hypnosis is used in weight control, the focus is not purely on changing your eating habits. The focus is on changing you deep down inside. Or more accurately, correcting a view of you (someone who is not loveable) that is mistaken, and bringing back to the front the more correct view of you which is that you are as special and as loveable as everyone else.

You will eat differently, and will eat less, but that is purely because hypnosis reconnects you with you, so you listen to your body and feed it when it’s hungry. What hypnosis doesn’t do is give you rules about what you can and can’t eat. By reminding you of the truth about you, we release a power, or an energy, that starts to work with you rather than against you. When you work purely to a diet plan, without addressing underlying subconscious issues (and I’ve only touched on one here – there are many more) there are two of you. One wanting to be slim, and one needing the re-assurance of treats. And the one needing the re-assurance of treats will work to sabotage the diet plan – because their needs have been ignored.

A hypnotherapist works on improving how you feel about yourself, they also install post-hypnotic suggestions that will make it much easier for you to not only have no desire to eat the foods full of calories, but also assist you in achieving a pleasure in eating foods that are good for you that outweighs any pleasure you ever obtained from eating sugary sweet sickly foods.

This control is short term and just to break the habit element of eating. For in truth, you can eat anything you want and stay slim. The emphasis being on want. Hypnosis retrains your mind so that what you want is to nourish a body you care for – easily, effortlessly. Once this is achieved it remains.

When you already feel good about yourself, you have no need to demonstrate that by eating foods that are bad for you. Wholesome, attractive, tasty, well-prepared food is what you deserve – always.

If you want to know more, or would like some help in easily and permanently losing weight and feeling good, then check out my website.

Author: Michael J. Hadfield

Source: Hypnosisiseasy