Slimming

I’ve never yet met anyone who came to see me for help in losing weight who knew less than me about calories. Most of the people I see have been serial dieters for years. You name it they’ve done it, from the grapefruit diet to the one where you make an enormous pan of soup and wind up after a while smelling vaguely of cabbage.

I asked a client once to check how many books she had at home on food and slimming. It turned out that over half the books in her house were on food, slimming or both.

The basics of losing weight are simply to take in fewer calories than you burn up. So it doesn’t matter whether you have a slow metabolism a low this or a high that. The formula stays the same.

OK, if the formula’s so simple, what’s the problem?

The problem is that whilst the long term gain is theoretical the short term “pain” is pretty much immediate.

The solution? - To make the experience of getting there as rewarding as the arriving.

When someone tells you that you must do such and such or you mustn’t do this or that, the human tendency is to rebel or at least bend the rules. The same response is often evoked when you tell yourself these things. There's nothing new here; St Augustine’s prayer was “'Lord give me chastity and continence, but not yet.”

So, how can I help? My approach is to help you reframe the choices you make and make those choices conscious choices.

You’re already choosing to be overweight.

Alright, I know it doesn’t seem like that but that’s the truth of it. The upside of, in the jargon, owning that choice, is that you can make a different choice.

When you manage to disguise the choices you’re making and somehow the calories get past your tonsils when you're looking the other way, then you are in the absolution business.

You absolve yourself of responsibility for being the size you are and wind up putting it down to being something beyond your control.

So the first thing you need to do is decide roughly the size and shape you’d like to be - picking a particular weight doesn’t seem to be a positive thing in my experience.

Then reframe how you experience the choice you make to only have one of those or a thin slice of that or simply saying thanks but no thanks to an offer of calories you don’t need so that the “buzz” is in making what used to be negative choices as positive - that’s where the hypnotherapy comes in.

The other bit you’ll need is to recognise that there is no restriction on what you can eat. Though you can eat three Mars Bars at a time it means you won’t then eat for the next day or so. Missiles launched in the Indian Ocean are programmed to hit a particular target. If the wind is blowing from one direction the missile will compensate and end up on target after all. Reaching your target should be similarly flexible.

It’s not a tyranny it’s a choice.

Usually the people I see have a vast experience of placing a range of restrictions around what and when they must and mustn’t eat. They fail and then the whole thing is blown. They feel down and defeated and it’s a while before they start again. When you keep the direction of travel always in mind you find you always choose to have a couple of chunks and never the whole bar.

OK, so that’s the practicalities sorted.

The other common aspect of being overweight is that for a great many people eating calories they don’t need is an “instead of” activity. The activity they are often displacing is an emotion they feel they cannot express. In this case, the calories become a sort of emotional salve. There’s something rubbing but instead of dealing with it extra calories become the more acceptable alternative.

Working out just what the “instead of,” behaviour is all about may be the most liberating thing you’ll ever do.