I tend to say weight management rather than weight loss. Why is that? Well, management sounds more active and involved, whereas loss doesn't sound very purposeful to me, in fact I feel there is a little hint of accidental and by chance. As well as that, for many people, losing weight is step 2. Step 1 is stopping the increase.
Purposeful weight management involves behaviour change. Eating differently. And in fact it is not really about managing weight either. It is about managing our eating. So with my clients I try to move the goal away from demanding their bodies to weigh less and be slimmer and towards changing their behaviours, focusing on all aspects of their eating-related behaviours.
And that is not just about eating less, though that will be result. It is about the daily routine, the shopping, where you eat, who you eat with. And of course how you feel about yourself. When you are feeling confident then you less likely to eat for comfort.
And it is not about losing a certain number of pounds every week. It is about changing to more helpful eating behaviours. It is about action. They may tell me that their goal is to achieve a better BMI or lose a certain number of pounds. To do this, requires action, and that is what I focus on, taking into account their lifestyle and work and home responsibilities etc.
And it is not about losing a certain number of pounds by the end of a particular period. When the eating behaviours change, the weight will change. But by how much and when?
Who knows? Setting a target may seem like a good idea, but if we continually fail, then it is likely we will just start on the cream buns again. And if there is a target you will be on the scales time and again, constantly checking and always finding the results unsatisfactory.
But what if you do lose weight? You achieve a target. What then? Do you go off the diet? Back to your old routines? Or set yourself an even more challenging weight goal constantly chasing a moving target? Continuing the cycle of diet, deny and deprive. And if one day you will see the pointer on the scales go up and you might abandon your diet as a complete waste of time and go back to the cream buns. And some people believe their lives will suddenly become fabulous when the scales are friendly. More boyfriends, more money, more fun. And when the weight is just right for these magical happenings, disappointment sets in as reality strikes. Back to the buns.
But changing eating behaviours in a way that suits you is likely to be sustainable, and eventually automatic. Eating in the way that keeps your weight managed, without constantly having to think about it or worry about it. And this will make you feel in control, more contented and stop the constant fretting about your weight.
So the goal is to change eating behaviours bit by bit. Making little changes every month and bedding them in. Starting with the ones that are easiest or give the most rapid results. That success buoys you up, and keeps you on track. So losing weight is not the goal. Changing the way you eat is.
I have blogged about this before. There is now a lot of evidence that shows that dieters are prone to future weight gain. A study by researchers at the University of Helsinki, published in the latest issue of the International Journal of Obesity, supports this and also provides evidence that the waist busting effects of dieting are not related to any genetic factors.
There is lots of pressure to be thin. Models are still abnormally skinny (less than 5% of women could achieve such bodies) and not only that, they are airbrushed to look even more unnaturally svelte. So we see before us every day lots of little hints that our bodies are not up to standard.
So there is pressure to diet. But all the research says that dieting makes you fat. So losing weight just to be more socially acceptable might make matters worse. The less you feel able to achieve the unachievable, the more likely you are to hit the Bounty bar (28g, 135 calories and gone in a trice). If you are attempting to lose weight by dieting then be warned that you may in fact be increasing your long term risk of becoming (more) overweight or even obese.
But there is another way. For most of us, we have developed bad habits, such as nibbling on crisps in front of the telly, buying a bucket of popcorn at the cinema, eating peanuts with our drinks, drinking lots of alcohol, getting hungry and work and shovelling in a mars bar on the way home, eating till we are fit to burst..... need I go on? Many of us have done or are doing all or some of these. Me too, I am just as affected by advertising as the rest of us. So, dealing with these bad habits will at least allow us to feel in control of our eating, and as a result, this will protect us from the risks of dieting.
When we get worried about our weight, we can start to obsess, thinking about food all the time. My approach aims to help you to manage your eating, without measuring, counting, restricting, denying and without using food for reasons other than nutrition and sociability. It is good to enjoy food, and even more so with friends. And you can do it without packing on the pounds and without anxiety. Here is a bit of a quiz. All of these ways of dealing with food are pretty unhealthy. Try my approach and enjoy your food while still controlling your weight, in an easy, automatic and sustainable way.
Do you eat in reaction to good or bad events? Like awarding yourself a cake if you win a contract? Or buying a takeaway when you get dumped?
Do you eat when you are not hungry? Out of boredom, habit, anxiety or some other emotion?
Do you sometimes go on a binge and eat and eat and eat till you feel stuffed and dreadful?
Do you drop in and out of dieting, trying anything, even the weird ones? Do you replace meals with drinks, even water?
Do you define foods as good, so you can eat them, and bad, so you can feel guilty when you eat them?
Do you eat the control your intake by limiting the range of what you eat? On the telly recently one woman had only eaten breakfast cereal with milk for years. Are you unwilling to extend the range and eat very selectively, maybe just bread rolls and chips?
Do you count, weigh, measure out your daily allowance and stick rigidly to it? Counting every last calorie?
Do you eat differently (more generously) when you are on your own? Do you try to fit in with the notion that real women nibble rather than eat?
Do you exercise furiously in order to reduce or control your weight? Exercise is good for your heart and lungs, flexibility, physical stamina and for the pleasure it can give you. But it takes 10 miles to burn off a mars bar.
Learn new habits with cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy. Enjoy your food and manage your weight.
Well, average weight has been going up for the past 30 years or so, and research links this with the industrialisation of food production. In the past, if we wanted to eat, we had to make a significant effort. Now, our fridges are constantly full of delicious food cooked by someone else. So easy to eat without effort.
And a lot of the food we eat is handfood. Biscuits, burgers, crisps. This sort of food tends to be eaten automatically, without thought. Hand mouth hand mouth, and you look in the packet and to your surprise you discover it is all gone. For most of us, this is the risky stuff.
This easy access to attractive calorie dense food means it is harder than in previous generations to control our weight. And new research in the Lancet shows that between 1980 and 2008, mean BMI worldwide increased by 0·4 kg/m² per decade for men and 0·5 kg/m² per decade for women. Click here to get your BMI. These averages are for the whole world. The trend is ever upwards.
This is the impact of the obsogenic environment, where it the world that we are living in that actively contributes to overweight. But we can beat this. By becoming aware of the daily risks, spotting the eating habits that make us put on weight, we can learn to manage our weight effectively. Hypnosis helps.
Womans Hour on Radio 4 devoted itself to dieting today. There were some interesting snippets. 97% of people who diet regain the weight lost. They suggested it was relatively easy to lose the weight, but hard to maintain the new lower weight. There are lots of fad diets around, and most will work for a short time, but very few of us could eat like that forever. Most of us think, I will go on a diet for 3 months, and then I will be fine. But we slip back into our old ways of eating.
My approach is to get you to challenge your eating habits, and make a series of small, easy changes, little and often. So that you don't think about food all the time, you don't starve yourself or make yourself a social pariah.
These little changes are each easy to make. No hardship at all. And gradually all these little changes build up and the benefits accumulate. In control of your eating once again. Straightforward, uncomplicated.
Get in touch and let's discuss how hypnotherapy will help you to manage your weight.
We are all really suggestible - surprisingly so - click here to see how when students are told that chocolate flavoured yoghurt is strawberry, they really believe it! This is based on research by Brian Wansink, of Cornell University.
This is very helpful. It means when your eyes see your meal served on a small plate, you will feel satisfied when you finish the plate. Likewise, when you see a huge plate filled to the brim, you eat it as well. Somehow, being served a large full plate gives you permission to overeat. On the other hand, when your portion is placed in the centre of a huge plate, you feel rather done down. You can harness your suggestibility to your own benefit!
Hypnosis is all about suggestion. If you have decided to give up puddings, that decision will be reinforced by suggestions that you no longer wish to eat a pudding, that it is unnecessary and that indeed you prefer not to.
Now that you realise just how suggestible we all are, you can be confident that hypnosis for weight control is going to help!
Think of fizzy pop as liquid sweeties. Irn-Bru contain over 140 calories in an 330ml can. That is more than 9 teaspoons of sugar. You wouldn't put that much sugar in your tea.
But on top of that, chewing our calories helps us to know when we have eaten enough and so helps us to avoid overeating.
Nowadays most of us never really feel hungry, so we no longer recognise the bodily sensations which tell us when we are hungry or when we are full. Scientists have found out that the complex aromas in food help us to feel satisfied and so stop us from overeating.
How can this help us? Well, to get the benefit from these responses, we need to give our bodies time. So eating small bites slowly lets these aromas do their work and help us to feel full.
Drinking our calories doesn't trigger these responses.
But you might say, I drink no-cal drinks. Well, research has shown that this is no strategy for weight loss. Why is that? Well, it could be that your body is expecting calories from that drink, and so triggers hunger pangs so we eat (probably high-cal snacks) or it could be that somehow we believe that the no-cal drink is all we need to do for weight control. Either way, research shows that it does not work. See my blog of 6 June 2010.
So what is the answer? We don't need fizzy pop. We might like it, but we don't need it. It makes us fat without us even noticing. You can live without fizzy pop. Give it up!
According to Weight Wise, if you've tried to lose weight, and have slipped back into your old ways of eating, you're not alone.
The key point here is slipping back into your old ways of eating. If you are going to control your weight, then changing your patterns of eating, and making those changes automatic, is the goal. You can do this bit by bit, making small changes every week. There are lots of tips here on my blog about the sorts of little changes that you can make. And gradually, these regular small changes accumulate so that your eating pattern helps maintain you at the weight you want, without thinking about food all the time. Hypnosis can help you to determine which changes will be the most effective, and then help you make them permanent and automatic.
Weight Wise offer a great chart to help you monitor your weight and waist. Weight Wise has been developed by the British Dietetic Association and they talk a lot of sense and give lots of great tips.
Estimating portion size is difficult for all of us, but developing rules of thumb will be handy. Because we have got used to larger portions in restaurants, our estimate of calorie content of a meal gets confused.
Research by Brian Wansink and colleagues shows that everyone (normal weight, underweight and overweight, men and women) has difficulty in estimating the calorie content of a large plate of food, whereas they accurately assess the calories in a more normal portion.
If we are overweight, we tend to have larger portions. That means that those of us who are overweight are making these wrong estimates frequently. As a result, we are underestimating the calorie content of most of our meals, we overeat and so we put on weight. What to do?
These researchers suggest that you should estimate the calories and then double them. A normal meal might be 500 calories. If you are overweight and you know that you are eating a large portion, then advise yourself that this meal probably contains 1,000 calories - half your day's allowance.
Counting calories is dull, but having a fair idea of the calorie content of your meals is handy. It allows you to develop useful rules of thumb when you are seriously trying to control your eating.
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