80% of New Year’s resolutions fail in the first six weeks. Once again that elusive beach body appears on your list, which means the restrictive diets and unrealistic exercise regimes that you put yourself under in the past didn’t remotely achieve any everlasting effect.
Most of us have hopefully realised by now that our aim shouldn’t be to go on a diet dreaming of the day we come off it to have a feast, but to adopt a sustainable healthy eating pattern we can keep for life.
The same applies to exercise, a regular activity that you enjoy, such as dancing or walking, will keep you fit for years to come instead of risking injury by strenuously (and honestly unwillingly on my part), working out at the gym to get a 6 pack in 6 weeks when you’ve been sedentary for 6 years or however long.
Diets are not a healthy lifestyle
Make a lifestyle change that sticks permanently. You will never find permanent weight loss by changing what you eat temporarily. You have to change the way you think about food for good, that’s what adopting a healthy lifestyle means.
When you change in your mind how you feel about food, it naturally programs you to want to eat less and to only want to eat healthily.
Do you know of any vegetarian who is dying to savour a slice of bacon in their full English and struggling with meat cravings?
In the same way, you too can program your mind to alter your food choices and to prioritise healthy foods.
You will find yourself effortlessly refusing the foods that make you overweight and making better food choices without realising it.
You can take my Type of Eater Quiz
and get tips based on your results.
Diets don't resolve your emotional issues
In order to manage and control your weight forever, the reasons behind your overeating and cravings must be addressed. No drastic diet, crazy exercise, magic pill or risky surgery can tackle the emotional issues that drive you to overeat.
Once you face and resolve these issues, you will easily develop a healthy, respectful relationship with food and you will inadvertently choose to fill your supermarket trolley with healthy foods because that’s what you’ll prefer to eat.
Eating habits are built during childhood and they firmly establish a relationship between food and comfort which, in your adult life, can be detrimental to your health, wellbeing and confidence.
Your overeating may be addictive, emotional, habitual, ignorant, destructive, angry or a combination of more than one category.
70% of overeaters are emotional and addictive eaters, and 43% of people use food to feel better.
Once you identify the type of eater you are, the three core drivers of excess weight must be addressed:
your eating habits, because our behaviour follows patterns and you can replace old negative ones with new positive ones, sort of like upgrading your software.
your trigger foods, because you can be indifferent to them and prefer to choose healthy options.
your feelings, because XXL portions, second helpings and fatty/sugary junk are not the kind of food feelings need and your body ends up paying for it.
Thoughts, feelings and behaviour
You believe that what you do and think is your decision, and you are right in the sense that you have the ability to change the beliefs that drive your behaviour.
However, it is your subconscious mind that tells the conscious mind how to behave based on the ideas that formed as subconscious beliefs in your childhood. These beliefs determine how you feel, and your feelings drive your actions.
Let’s look at an example of how this translates into weight loss.
When you were 6 years old, your mum needed an operation and was hospitalised for 2 weeks. You were not allowed to visit her and you felt lonely.
Your dad cheered you up by feeding you your favourite foods, crisps and chocolate. And there you have it, your subconscious mind was imprinted with the belief that the pain of being lonely is cured by eating crisps and chocolate.
Now, as an adult, you consciously know that neither crisps nor chocolate can take loneliness away, yet you find these foods irresistible when you are feeling down.
This is because your subconscious beliefs are in control of your actions. And your actions determine, in this case, your weight.
Of course, when you were 6 years old, you didn’t have the resources the grown-up you has. Now you can chat with a friend, you can go for a massage, you can join a group and take up a hobby… there are so many other things you can do instead of reaching for crisps and chocolate. But your mind won’t be aware of this new better solution until the old imprint is debunked and replaced with the upgraded behaviour you desire.
So in order to change your eating habits and lose weight forever, the decision you must make is not whether to go on a diet or not, but whether you want to address and update the subconscious beliefs and emotions that are driving your food choices and making you overweight so you can, once and for all, lose weight effortlessly.
No other therapy can do this as easily, quickly and effectively as RTT hypnotherapy.