Tag: weight

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Alternative health hypnosis Personal Development self-help weight control

What are your biggest difficulties with losing weight?

I’m in the process of creating an amazing new weight loss program and I need your help. Most people who decide they need to lose weight have done it before so you’ll know what the tricky bits are, what are the areas that you find most difficult, and you’ll know what is going through your mind when you eat that fattening food that, when you went to bed last night, you said you weren’t going to eat any more.

So I’m really interested in the problems you’ve experienced in the past. Why you believe you failed to keep the weight off and what makes you make unhealthy choices once you’ve made that decision to lose weight.

So if you would like to help then please leave a comment below, or, if you prefer just email me here.

And if you’d like me to let you know when this amazing new weight loss program is available, or other personal development items that I think may be of interest to you, then be sure to leave me your email address at the top right of this page.

Many thanks,
Michael

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weight control

Lose Weight Without Dieting

Seems like a ridiculous claim, doesn’t it? But did you know that 90-95% of people who lose weight by following a diet plan regain all of that weight, and frequently more, within a few years.

The truth is that weight loss diets don’t work and the evidence is out there if you look for it. After all if diets worked you’d only do it once. Yet many of my clients have been serial dieters.

The trouble is we are bombarded with information about weight loss that claims that restricting calorie intake by cutting out this or cutting out that, or just eating carbs or grapefruits or cabbage or some other ridiculously gimmicky plan with a celebrity name attached to it is the only solution. But the real problem is that, as a society, we are trained from an early age that when something doesn’t work – do more of it. Do it better, do it harder, do it longer – the fault is with YOU. So when a diet eventually palls you see yourself as a failure and 12 months later when the weather turns warmer we seek out the next ‘better’, latest, diet to fail at again.

It is a treadmill.

You can step off it.

There is an alternative.

The alternative is my Diet-Free Weight Loss Program. Now, clearly I’m not suggesting that you can carry on the way you have done and expect to lose weight. That would be as ridiculous as dieting. You recognise, of course, that for change to take place in your life, you have to do something different. My Program is Something Different. It does create change within you. But it makes that change as easy and effortless as I know how to make it.

The most significant difference between my Diet-free Weight Loss Program and a diet is that my weight loss programme doesn’t have any rules about what you can and can’t eat. But clearly you have to eat less if you want to lose weight. Can you believe that you can eat less and still have as much as you want?

A lot of the food we eat isn’t food that’s actually wanted.

A lot of the food we eat isn’t needed by our bodies.

A lot of the food we eat is eaten unconsciously.

This is the food that is reduced – and it isn’t missed. It isn’t missed because you never really noticed eating it anyway. Habitual eating – because of the time on the clock, or because there’s a commercial break on the tv, or because all your friends want to go to MacDonald’s or order pizza. Then there’s the food that you eat simply because it’s still on the plate after you’ve eaten your fill.
My diet-free weight loss program, in easy simple steps – each one of which is easy to master, gently leads you to a place of mastery over these unconscious drives that cause you to eat unnecessarily.

I help you to take control of your eating so you enjoy what you eat more and more and eat less and less of what you don’t enjoy.

If you’d like to find out more about how I can help you to lose weight then check out my Diet-free Weight Loss Program and watch the first in my series of free video – and don’t forget to leave me your email so I can send you the rest of the free videos.

Copyright 2011 Michael J. Hadfield

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Michael J. Hadfield has been successfully helping people to lose weight for 14 years. If you would like more information about how to get off the diet treadmill then visit the Diet-Free Weight Loss Program for more information and be sure you leave your email address so you don’t miss out.

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Alternative health self-help weight control

How a Personal Video Recorder (PVR), or a Sky Box, Can Help you Lose Weight

So why is losing weight so difficult?

I was sitting in front of the tv last night doing what I rarely do and watching a film ‘live’. I usually record films before watching so I can fast forward through the adverts. And I was actually recording this one to watch later anyway, but it was Sunday and although I usually end up working when there’s nothing on tv I’d not been giving myself much time off lately so I thought I’d sit and enjoy Eddie Murphy’s Trading Places.

I’d eaten 4 hours earlier – a satisfying & filling meal, with some delicious home-made apple pie and a little soya-based ice ‘cream’ (my body no longer allows me to enjoy dairy products) for dessert – so hunger wasn’t an issue, but there was a nagging in my mind to go and eat some more.

I’m sure you know the sort of thing; those thoughts that keep hinting that there’s something nice in the kitchen. Usually that ‘nice thing’ is full of fat or sugar. This is exactly what I was experiencing and it was hard to resist.

I explored the problem to see if I could find out what was going on. Part of the problem was those interminable commercial breaks every few minutes. They break up the flow of the story and make it much more difficult to be entertained and engrossed. This piecemeal presentation of snippets of story is, I believe, a significant factor in the explosion of overweight and obesity problems.

I do have a solution to this problem that I consistently recommend to my clients – not because I imagine it’s a good idea but because I use it myself. I tell them to keep a book handy, or a crossword puzzle, or a Sudoku puzzle, or a piece of knitting or embroidery – something that it’s easy to pick up and put down when the commercial break ends. More and more I tend to find myself using IMDB on my iPad to check out the goofs in the film I’m watching so I can keep an eye out for them or just reading a little about the history of the movie and seeing if I can correctly identify some of the faces that seem familiar.

I can do that from my armchair, but sometimes I even get up and go sit at my desktop for five minutes checking if my friends have been up to something on facebook, or just checking something out that’s occurred to me while watching the movie.

Last night though, none of this seemed to be working. When I looked at what was going on I found that the book I was reading wasn’t fully engaging me. I’d noticed a new Wayne Dyer (Stop The Excuses: How To Change Lifelong Thoughts) last time I visited the library, so I picked it up. Now when I first started on my self-development journey I was a huge fan of Wayne Dyer and bought many of his books. Then I bought Getting In The Gap. That was about meditation, something I’ve been doing for a long time and it just didn’t work for me. I picked up copies of his new books after that but he seemed to be going off in a direction that was of no benefit to me.

But, it wasn’t going to cost me anything, so I picked it up, took it downstairs and checked it out. It certainly isn’t grabbing me the way his books used to, and a significant part of his guidance is to use affirmations. I’ve done affirmations and, in my opinion, they are a waste of time. But these are so long-winded that you’d need to write them down, carry them round with you, and read them when you needed them. But there’s other stuff that is interesting me and I fully expect to get some value from Wayne Dyer’s words. They just aren’t grabbing me like they used to. I think I’ve moved on past the point in development where he is aiming his teaching.

But despite all that, I still wanted to eat something and my thoughts were encouraging me in the direction of toasted tea cakes. And you know what it’s like when you get that picture in your mind – in my case it was four halves of lightly toasted tea-cakes dripping with melted yellow fat (my dairy-free margarine). I was even imagining the way the warmed fat would drip down my fingers and the aroma of those lightly spiced buns.

You can see what’s happening. My thoughts are somehow not in tune with my greater desires and needs to follow my own advice that I give to people to help them to lose weight. There’s clearly some sort of rebellion going on here. I think we all have that rebel as part of our make-up. That part of us that wants to do just what it wants to do and enjoy instant gratification regardless of the consequences. In the same way that smokers enjoy the pleasure of a cigarette now and ignore the disease that will probably visit them in the future.

And in a way this is a real problem for me with what I teach. I encourage people to focus on the present moment. I tell them the future is only imagined. The past is a memory that has only the power that you give to it. Live NOW, because Now is the only moment when you are ever alive.

So I’ve got a bit of a problem here.

But I’ve also got an apple tree in the garden with about 80lbs of apples hanging from it. This is a dessert apple called Jupiter, which cooks very nicely too. My apple pie was made from a few of them.

Now, apples have a wonderfully high fibre content and contain a carbohydrate called pectin which is really good at satisfying hunger. They are free of sodium and even have some Vitamin C. An average-sized apple contains only about 60 calories.

So I recognised a couple of things. I wasn’t really in the mood to engage with some of my distraction techniques, but there was no way I was going to eat any more wheat-based products today. I wanted something sweet. You can see where this is going. Apples were the solution. I selected two, one medium, one small, peeled cored and cut into segments (This is not because there’s anything wrong with just biting into the apple) but it used up some of the ‘unsettled’ energy that was creating the ‘eat’ thoughts in the first place. A task is always a good thing to engage in as a distraction and it filled the commercial break space.

I enjoyed the apple slowly while watching the next segment of the movie and felt satisfied.

Yes I did consume some unnecessary calories, but so what. The apples were about 100 calories, but the tea cakes would have rated at least 400. I didn’t give myself a hard time about it. I didn’t beat up on myself because I gave in when I should be following my own example. You see the key to what I teach about weight loss is gentleness with self. You have to be gentle with you always. It is the harshness that leads to habitual over-eating.

Every day is a new day.

In part you see what I did is freeing. Because it left no guilt or bad-feelings, or any sense that I failed or did something wrong – which is what you tend to get when you follow a diet. These ill-feelings create a low mood state which tends to cause more over-eating and more ill-feelings. It’s a self destructive cycle.

But what I did is more than that. I used my knowledge and experience to look at what was really going on and then find a solution that was satisfying but did not violate my greater intention to be what I teach.

Look for solutions that require no calorie intake first of all; if that doesn’t work then look for solutions that satisfy, but require minimal calorie intake.

So my present moment Now experience became one of recognising that I have a challenge right now that needs a solution and that solution needs to honour my long-term commitment and intention.

Oh! …and the title of this post. Clearly the whole problem started because I didn’t wait and watch the recorded version. Obviously if I’d been fast forwarding the commercials and concentrating on catching the re-start of the movie, then I’d have had no time to think about food.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my thoughts and can take some valuable insights from them. If you haven’t seen my videos and you’d like to explore more of my ideas about how to lose weight easily without dieting then have a look at the first of my free weight loss videos and be sure to leave me your email address so I can send you the details of how to access the other free videos.

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weight control

Weight Loss – Feeling Out of Control?

Did you know that you were being manipulated?

Being overweight is undoubtedly a problem for most people who experience it. It’s a problem, in part, because society as a whole finds fatness easy to laugh at and simultaneously unacceptable. For instance, when did you last see an overweight leading lady in a film, or an overweight model on an advertising hoarding. People don’t want to see overweight women in bikinis or overweight men in shorts on the cinema, or on tv (unless of course it’s a programme where the overweight person is being humiliated or laughed at).

You can argue the rights and wrongs of this all you want – but as members of a society we are programmed with a particular view of ‘attractive’ and that view tends towards slimness. So we can’t do much about those particular preferences, but as long as we are aware that it is just programming we don’t need to buy into it too seriously. This is really important. If you are reading this because you are overweight and are looking for accessible solutions (rather than the faux-solutions the diet industry parades out for you), you really need to understand that any sense of unacceptability that you have for you because of your weight – is simply unacceptable.

By that I mean that if you disapprove of you because of your weight, your disapproval isn’t yours, it belongs to Society. Because it belongs to Society, it isn’t about you particularly, and so it isn’t in any way personal. So let yourself off the hook.

Another problem with our society is the hypnotic power of the images and words that we see around us. I notice the effects on myself of advertising and how names that we see frequently somehow become benevolent institutions within our own minds and thoughts.

Perhaps the hypnotic nature of this influence is a major reason you should consider using hypnosis to counter it – because hypnosis is working at the same level within your mind as the media.

Advertisers know how this works and know that you don’t need to be in any kind of a trance in order to be influenced by these images, sounds, and words. The snack industry, for instance, has as one of its goals, the creation of instant craveability – that mixture of tastes and textures that instantly creates that ‘more-ish’ feeling. It does this by mixing fats, sugars and salts in ‘entertaining’ ways. These are the key ingredients – usually with a carbohydrate base to carry them.

I remember once I was eating a packet of Walker’s prawn cocktail crisps and they tasted different from the way I remembered last time I’d eaten them (I’m not a frequent eater of crisps). They tasted sweet. This puzzled me. Thinly sliced and fried potatoes should never taste sweet. So I checked on the ingredients and sugar was now in the list. Why on earth there is any need to add sugar to what I thought was a savoury snack I’ve no idea, but it was the last time I bought any.

This subtle manipulation of our foods, adding sugar to crisps to make them that little more appealing, spending millions of dollars researching ways to mix fat, sugar, and salt in ways that taste good, has only one aim – to control you and to control what you eat. Sorry, there are two aims. The second one is to create wealth for the snack manufacturers, by selling you something you don’t want and don’t need, but are being manipulated into believing that you do.

And then there’s the soft drink industry. 7% of calories consumed in the US are consumed as soft drinks. I remember, years ago, I’d just finished sixth-form college and was waiting for my A-level results and my Dad got me a job in Jacob’s (the biscuit factory where he worked). I met another student there who was a year older than me and he told me that the previous summer he had worked for Coca Cola. He said that when he was taken on the factory tour he was shown this huge vat which was more than half full of sugar. He was then shown a glass tube full of dark syrup. This tiny tube was the flavour of Coca Cola for this huge vat. He tipped it in, the vat was topped up with water and that was pretty much it. I had no idea that that drink was almost pure sugar. Coca Cola instantly became something that I only drink when there is nothing else available – which is almost never.

You see how easy it is really. I found out some information about the truth about a product. I instantly decided to leave it alone and there is no difficulty about that. I’m not secretly craving a can of coke or some sweet crisps. I decided that what the manufacturers were doing was unacceptable to me and that was the end of it. No effort. No withdrawal. No battle. But I like me, and I do my best to feed my body in ways that are not only enjoyable but also nutritious.

A key aspect of my Diet-Free Weight Loss program is that the very first step that you must take is to accept yourself just the way you are. You see, as the Borg say in Star Trek Next Generation “Resistance is futile”. Or to put it another way that you may have come across if you are into other forms of self-help – What you resist persists.

Resistance is a state of mind that holds in place whatever it is you are resisting. It does this because in order to resist you need to be aware of whatever it is you are resisting. Whatever you are aware of is in your mind (otherwise you would not be aware of it), and whatever is in your mind is what your subconscious seeks to create. Your subconscious works with images and there is no image for not or no. So the thought, or the awareness, of not wanting to be overweight translates into the subconscious as be overweight. And that’s exactly what you get while you resist what you already are.

On another level, invoking the more real-world practicality of physics, if you push against something like a wall – it pushes back at you with equal force. It has to. If it didn’t it would fall over. So if you push against overweight it pushes right back at you, and like with the wall, you stay exactly where you are – stuck.

The instant you accept that, right now, and just for now, you are the way you are, then you free up all the space you need for change to take place easily and effortlessly.

So think about that for a while. Think about the ways you don’t accept you, or the ways that you kid yourself you do accept you. Then think about how easy it would be to decide that, just for now, maybe even just for this minute as you read this, that you are ok. Just decide that you are a good-hearted, warm, loving, caring individual and that’s fine. If you manage that and you want to stretch a little further – look to see if you can see the beauty that lies within you. This can be a little more difficult, but generally all it takes for you to succeed at this is for you to widen your definition of beauty a little. Move beauty beyond mere physical appearance. That, after all is literally only skin deep. See the beauty in the way you move; in your interests; in your compassion; in your gentleness; in the way you parent your children; in your desire to take control of your life; in your thoughts; in your humour; in your willingness to lend a hand; in whatever it is about you that makes you uniquely You.

You are special – you just need to see it. And as you see that more and more clearly so you will begin to reshape your body.

I will write again on this subject and guide you gently and safely through the minefield of developing a healthy relationship with food. But in the meantime if you want more, I’ve prepared some free videos with what I hope are some interesting slides and a narrative. The first one is called Do You Know the Secret to Permanent Weight Loss. Check it out. I hope you enjoy it. Let me know.

Enjoy your food.

Michael Hadfield

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Uncategorized

Seven Reasons Why Diets Don’t Work

Diets don’t work because they are based on a false premise.

The false premise is that body weight is purely a consequence of the calories you eat and expend. If you eat more than you use the excess is stored as fat. If you eat less than you use, the body burns excess fat to make up the shortfall.This is a mistaken idea.

We have all seen really skinny people who eat like horses and don’t seem any more active than we are. We have all seen overweight people who say they don’t eat very much (we tend not to believe those people). We also tend to believe what we are told. Nothing we are told by the media helps us to lose weight by severely cutting down on calories. Here is why…

The 7 reasons diets don’t work

  1. They are too much effort.
  2. They cause ‘famine’ mode.
  3. They affect mood – and not in a good way.
  4. Thoughts of food predominate.
  5. Diets lose weight not fat.
  6. Exercise is not included.
  7. Unreasonable expectations

1. Too much effort.

21% of people give up on their diet within two months. 45% of people don’t last the year. All that calorie, or syn or point, counting just gets to be too much work and it’s so much easier just to eat what you like.

2.’Famine’ mode.

The body is an intelligent system. It’s intelligence is primarily geared toward survival. When food is scarce it thinks ‘famine’ and lays down supplies of fat; slows down metabolism to conserve energy; and burns lean muscle for its energy needs, because, when resting, lean muscle tissues burn calories. To the body’s intelligence, a diet looks just like a famine.

3. Mood.

The majority of so-called experts regard excess weight as a calorie problem. It isn’t. But it is an emotional problem. Eating is often an attempt to improve mood. Dieting itself can cause social isolation – hence the popularity of slimming clubs. This can lead to low moods, rebellion against the diet, or even depression.

4. Diets keep you thinking about food.

Meals are no longer spontaneous. They have to be meticulously planned. Recipes have to be followed. Specific items need to be purchased – sometimes even specific product brands. Life is no longer about fun and enjoyment. Life is about food.

5. Diets lose weight, not fat.

Weight loss in diets is almost entirely down to muscle loss. This makes it more and more difficult to lose weight each time you diet because bodies are reluctant to release fat – especially quickly, which is the way most people want it. The only way to release fat instead of muscle is to do it slowly.

6. Exercise.

Exercise is essential. Exercise builds muscle. Muscle burns calories – even while resting. Exercise boosts metabolism. Exercise increases fitness, vitality and lifts mood.

7. Unreasonable Expectations

People have surprising expectations of the amount of weight that can sensibly be reduced. If you are 16 stone (224lbs) an initial weight loss goal of 14 stone (196lbs) would be good to aim for. A 2 stone (28lb) success is easily achievable and when maintained for a while will be the place to decide to shift a little more.

Diets just don’t work.
If you want to discover how to lose weight without the rigid discipline of a diet and still be allowed to eat what you want then check out my website here.

Author: Michael J. Hadfield

Source: Hypnosisiseasy

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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