Will Hypnotic Suggestion Suppress Your Appetite?

Hypnotism, thanks to television and movies, the very word conjures up the picture of a beady-eyed hypno-therapist swinging a watch and chanting, "You are getting sleepy."

Do an Internet search, and you will find hundreds of thousands of web pages devoted to the subject, especially weight loss hypnosis. Unfortunately, many websites that sell hypnosis programs for weight loss make wild, unsubstantiated claims. I've been in professional practice since 1978. So I think that I'm larger than equipped to set the record straight on weight loss hypnosis.

First of all, posthypnotic suggestion is a tool, just like a scalpel is a tool. Just as varied surgeons have diversified skill levels in the use of a scalpel, diversified hypnotists have different skill levels in the use of hypnotherapy for weight loss. And to complicate the matter, there are many noteworthy forms and types of posthypnotic suggestion.

Here are some of the assertions about weight loss hypnosis that I've seen on websites, along with the truth of the matter:

"Hypnosis for weight loss will speed up your metabolism." If you want to know the total truth, the fact of the matter is that weight loss hypnosis cannot directly speed up your metabolism. But it can be very compelling at helping to program your subconscious with increased motivation to exercise, and that can increase your metabolic rate. Similarly, suggestibility to speed up the metabolism for quick weight loss can be effected by programming the unconscious to motivate the intake of increased amounts of protein, because that intake will step up the metabolic rate.

Posthypnotic suggestion will make you slim down. This is false. But weight loss hypnosis can be used to help eliminate your appetite, so that you eat less, and eating less can help you to get rid of weight.

The average person's cravings and urges are triggered by two unconscious programs:

A. When you pair eating with any other behavior, the other behavior will trigger cravings for food and a strong urge to eat. This is called a conditioned response. For example, if you eat when you watch a movie, you will automatically get an urge to eat each time you go to the movies.

B. When you feel tense, you feel a strong urge to put food into your mouth for relaxation. This is the result of training that you received as a baby. When you got cranky, your mother or father put a bottle in your mouth. You got distracted, relaxed, and probably fell asleep. Now when you get cranky (anxious or tense), you feel compelled to put something into your mouth for relaxation and pleasure.

C. There is a third unconscious program that is present for some people. It's called emotional eating. Emotional eating takes place when an individual is motivated to make him or herself fat, because by being fat they will protect themselves in some way.

For example, if someone got their heart broken in a relationship, their unconscious will drive them into a behavior that would prevent them from getting their heart broken again. Example: They are motivated to get fat to keep them out of new relationships, because that will eliminate the possibility of another broken heart.

D. I have written several articles on weight loss hypnosis and compulsive eating that are available on my website. There are some effective ways to use hypnotism to overcome emotional eating.

So just how can weight loss hypnosis fix the above problems? Let's cover them one at a time.

In paragraph "A" above: Conditioned responses can be "eliminated" quickly and easily using a avenue that I call the "Flash." The flash trains the unconscious mind to setup new responses. In the above example, the subject had unconsciously combined the impression of food in the hand, with the TV. Each time he / she sat down to watch the TV, the unconscious mind filled in the missing part of the depiction: It "Flashed" the picture of the food in the hand, and the subject felt a urge, and an urge to eat.

The Flash is a scheme that lets us program the subconscious to use the visualization of the TV as a trigger for a visualization of yourself watching TV without eating. When we lose the image of the food, we lose the cravings.

When we momentarily disassociate (see ourselves from the point of view that another person would), we are not able to sense our feelings (cravings and urges).

When we see ourselves in a behavior (watching TV without eating), we feel a strong compulsion to generate that behavior. So the subject loses the cravings, and actually gets a compulsion to reject food.

In paragraph "B" above: The subject is eating and drinking for relaxation and pleasure. We teach the subject self-hypnosis for weight loss, because the very essence of the hypnotic state is deep relaxation.

And we utilize the "Flash" to program the subconscious to use the mental images and thoughts that are triggering feelings of annoyance and nervous tension, as triggers for secondary mental pictures and thoughts that will trigger the relaxation response. When the subject feels more relaxed overall, oral cravings are greatly diminished.

In paragraph "C" above: We discussed impulsive eating which makes the person overweight. The "behavior" of being overweight then provides some sort of emotional protection. So we use a scheme called an NLP Six-Step Reframe, which programs the subconscious to be responsible for making the subject automatically substitute some other more acceptable behavior that will provide the same emotional protection, in place of being overweight. And that reframe will abandon the compulsion to eat for emotional purposes.

Self-hypnosis for weight loss can be a very useful technique. I can only uncover the tip of the iceberg in this short article. Please see my website for more comprehensive articles and information.

(c) 2007 by Alan B. Densky, CH. This article may be reproduced on your website as long as you retain all clickable links contained within.