Better Concerts and Music

Oh, you magnificent Daily Mail Online readers, you’ve done it again! I never stop to be startled by the level of rage and smugness you show, or your enthusiasm to present opinions in areas upon which you noticeably have diminutive expertise.

Who are these people who become so incensed by another individual’s alleged lack of healthy lifestyle/fatness? Every health associated headline in the DM might as well read ‘how this individual’s laziness/greed is consuming YOUR well-deserved money in NHS tax funding. Let’s run them out of the nation with sticks!’.

This week’s distinct little wad of perception comes from Lizzie in London who, as a reaction to a feature of how hypnotherapy helped one lady go from a size 24 to a size 14, says:

‘The hard work in excercising [sic] and eating well is down to her own will power and sheer perseverance.

Hypnotherapy is not a magic bullet to slimming and weight loss. There’s still loads of work involved!’

First, Lizzie, please learn to spell, lest I chase your presumably slender yet mournfully untaught self out of the state (using sticks).

Secondly, as Mark Newey, certified hypnotherapist and catalyst for countless thriving weight loss undertakings shows, this thing we refer to as ‘willpower’ is really our conscious mind, which is a meager 9% of our total brain mass.

If we indulge in an individual behaviour for a long period of time, be it a positive pursuit (exercising, driving) or a negative one (smoking, overeating) it is embraced by the much larger unconscious brain as behavioural programming, thus liberating up the conscious to think about other things (like the scrummy bloke we happen to be dating and what occurred on Eastenders recently and why you never see a baby pigeon….ok perhaps that’s just me).

Have you ever read to the bottom of a page and realised you were not concentrating and can’t recall what it said? That’s your unconscious mind saying ‘aaaah, I know how to read. I’ve read things before! Let me take over this activity’. Your conscious mind ambles and before you know it you are punishing yourself for not paying attention and having to replicate the entire reading procedure.

Now, say you make a choice that you would like to alter an individual behavioural programme. What’s essentially transpiring is that 9% of your mind is taking on the force of 91%, attempting to affect change when the great and strong unconscious is forcing you to keep on acting as you have always done. And then we question why ‘diets’ don’t work in 90% of circumstances.

Hypnotherapy is merely a way of going around the conscious mind and getting into the unconscious to make permanent and fast changes. It can break established behavioural patterns and wipe the slate clean. Mark says to his weight loss clients ‘now I want you to go away and not give a damn about what you eat’. They stare at him in disbelief, not quite able to follow the idea that, after so many years of badly trying in vain to curb themselves, they can now eat absolutely everything they fancy.

The fundamental aspect, however, is that because their attitudes regarding food, their bodies and themselves have been malformed in the unconscious, they’ll easily make better selections, picking foods according to what will feed them, rather than those which will fulfill their emotional appetites.

Which leads me tidily onto my next statement. People don’t overeat because they are gluttonous, or languid or selfish or even because they have an insatiable appetite. Commonly, people overeat because it brings them an immediate (if very transitory) sensation of satisfaction. Comfort eating is merely another support, permitting us to feel that we are effectively coping with sensations of seclusion, stress or anxiety. Needless to say, all it really seems to do is distract us from those feelings (and add an growing waistline onto our lists of qualms).

Guess what other change can be promptly and permanently made in the unconscious? Yes, dear Blog fanatics, we are back onto my pet matter – removing feelings of low self confidence.

And that is why I’m especially sorry to have to testify that Lizzie in London is erroneous.

To find out more about the Winning Minds weight loss programme go to http://www.winningminds.co.uk/therapies/weight-management/.