06 Sep 10 Hypnotherapy And Weight Loss

Why is hypnotherapy so popular for weight loss?

Is it just another ‘quick-fix’ for a problem that just won’t go away?

Well sadly, yes it usually is. And in fact hypnotherapy is no more successful than any other method for losing weight.

So the real question is…

Why doesn’t hypnotherapy work better for weight loss?

Well fortunately the answer is quite simple. It’s not a problem with hypnotherapy. It’s a problem with the weight loss strategy.

Back when I first set up a in practice in Adelaide in 2000 I had people come to me wanting hypnosis for their weight loss. So I would apply hypnotherapy to whatever they had as an issue.

Maybe it was emotional eating, maybe it was a craving for chocolate, maybe it was trouble with their motivation. Whatever it was I would address this and by and large the issue was resolved.

But then I noticed something worrying. The change in their behaviour or their motivation would happen, but they wouldn’t lose weight. Or, if they did lose weight, it would have all come back on when I followed them up months and years later.

The hypnosis was working fine. However…

The changes were not enough to make people thin in a lasting way.

And nothing I read about hypnosis or learnt from my colleagues convinced me I was an unusual case.

Heck if hypnosis worked that well, everyone would be doing it wouldn’t they?

After about 3 years in my practice I gave up. I would tell patients I’d be happy to give them the changes they requested eg lose the craving for chocolate, but I stopped telling them that it would make them lose weight.

Just like I discovered later about exercise and weight loss, hypnotherapy itself is not enough.

It wasn’t until 2006 that I came across the fact that diets and standard medical advice are wrong. This advice really just teaches people how to yo-yo diet and feel like failures.

What I needed to do instead was deceptively simple. Change people to think and act around food the way a naturally thin person does.

Even better I discovered that this meant that the method I used didn’t matter! Some people needed hypnosis, others just needed to know what to do, and others preferred other ways of changing. The results were the same.

When they changed to thinking and behaving like a naturally thin person, they lost weight and it stayed off.

Bottomline: Hypnotherapy can be the most powerful change tool in the world, but if the change isn’t the right one, the weight won’t go away for long.

Learn the right way once, and you’ll have it for a life-time.

-Dr Martin Russell