Your body is an amazing creation. It is the most sophisticated machine in existence and its reactions and responses have been fine-tuned over hundreds of thousands of years. The one thing that hasn't changed though is that your body's first, and most powerful, driving force is survival and that's why dieting doesn't work on a long-term basis.
When you give your body less energy (food) than it needs it will initially draw down the energy shortfall from your fat reserves and you will start to lose weight. But if you carry on like this your body is going to think that it might be killed by starvation. So it will adjust to these new circumstances and respond by adjusting your energy requirements so that you can function on a lower intake of food. But because your body's so smart it then goes one stage further and actively works at rebuilding your fat reserves so that you can't sneak up on it and try to starve it to death again.
It's a scary thought that whilst you are fighting hunger pangs, having withdrawal symptoms for your favorite meals and suffering the sheer boredom of a restricted diet your body is actively working against you because it is determined to put back the weight you have lost.The good news is that although you can't change your body's instincts and response mechanisms, with a little knowledge of how they work in different situations, you can use them to lose weight naturally and to maintain your target weight almost without realizing you're doing it.
You need to get some basic knowledge of how your body handles different types of food and match that to your lifestyle, to pinpoint the areas where you are in conflict with your body's pre-programmed responses. This will allow you to identify acceptably small changes, which you can sustain almost without noticing, that will really make a difference. For anyone who wants to lose weight and keep it off, it's best to gradually develop a pattern of good eating habits that can be continued for life.
Try this five-step approach to getting rid of those unsightly pounds.
1. Keep a note of what you eat and drink for the next three weeks. Don't cheat! 2. At the end of the three weeks measure and weigh yourself. 3. Set yourself a sensible target of what you want to weigh and measure in the future. (If you don't know where you are trying to go you will get lost along the way.) 4. Check your food notes for bad habits ? missed meals, snacking between meals,bad food combinations, frequent processed food meals and excess alcohol or sugary drinks. 5. Reduce the frequency of bad habits. For example, if you can't resist snacking replace your usual snack with something healthy like fruit on alternate days. Or if your favorite meal is a cardiac surgeon's nightmare, save it for once a week rather than twice ? you'll enjoy it all the more and it will only do half the damage.
Continue to make small adjustments to your favorite meals and eating patterns so that you progressively create good food combinations and eating habits. You'll find that not only will you shed those unwanted pounds but also eating will continue to be a pleasure.
Read on. Chances are you could change your mind.
You see, diets are fine - as far as they go. The problem is, of course, that no-one can spend the rest of their life on a diet. Sooner or later, you are forced to come off it. And that's when, for most of us, the weight just seems to pile back on.
Why is this? We were doing so well and now we aren't. What happened?
To fully understand, we need to see the fundamental flaw in our approach to losing weight.
We need to realise that diets, though often effective in helping to shed the pounds in the short term, are pretty bad at helping us to keep them off.
The reason for this is simple:
Diets are just another word for denial. 'Don't eat this!' 'Don't touch that!' 'Don't have too much!' So you deny yourself until you find your weight loss program delivering just what you want - a slimmed-down you.
And then a feeling inside just seems to call out to you: 'You have been so very good. You have done so very well - you deserve a little reward. Time and again you have denied yourself; you've lost weight, so now you can eat normally once more...'
The problem is that 'normal' all too often means eating in the old way, the fattening way. And before you know it, on go the pounds and its back to square one.
But now you feel even worse. You did so well. You did lose weight. And now you've gone and thrown it all away.
Then come the terrible feelings of failure. The terrible cycle of self-disappointment and self-pity - and eating in order to compensate for those difficult feelings just seems to take over.
You feel so very bad. 'I've had enough of this!', you think. 'I feel bad and at least food makes me feel better, so I'll just eat something. Heck, I can always go back on a diet...'
You know the rest of the story: the more you eat the worse you feel and the worse you feel the more you eat.
If this rings a bell with you then maybe what's needed is a new and different approach, one not based on denial and diets.
When we have trouble controlling our weight and there really is no medical reason for it, then the simple truth is that we are eating in an attempt to satisfy something other than hunger.
We are eating in an attempt to satisfy feelings and emotions. And no amount of food can do that because food can really only satisfy hunger.
You see, the reason why you have been having difficulty controlling your weight is because somewhere in the past your subconscious mind has taken on the false belief that food can satisfy uncomfortable feelings. In all probability, the patterns of emotional eating have been 'programmed' into your mind when you were a child.
Now, emotions and feelings are triggered in the subconscious mind. So the only truly effective way to tackle emotional eating is through the subconscious mind.
And this is where advanced transformational hypnotherapy can be of real help in bringing about permanent weight loss.
Through this kind of hypnotherapy, we can go directly to the underlying reasons of why a person overeats.
Once the reasons are uncovered, effectively dealt with and neutralised, the person is free to eat as he or she was intended to eat. They are released from the compulsion to eat in response to emotional needs and difficult feelings.
They become free to eat in a natural and truly normal manner.
The emotional and compulsive reasons for overeating having been dealt with and neutralized, powerful positive hypnotic suggestions are then 'programmed' into the subconscious mind, enabling the person to eat smaller amounts of nourishing food and yet feel pleasantly full and entirely satisfied.
Through the intervention of Advanced Transformational Hypnotherapy, the subconscious mind becomes the individual's biggest ally, making weight management an entirely natural and painless process.
If you have had enough of deprivation, if you are tired of the vicious cycle of on-and-off dieting and self-recrimination then why not go to the root cause and eliminate your difficulty once and for all?
With advanced transformational hypnotherapy you really can get the permanent weight loss you need - without the pain of denial.
Peter James Field has sinced written about articles on various topics from Hypnotherapy, Cure Anxiety and self improvement and motivation. Peter Field is a leading British hypno-psychotherapist with clinics in London and Birmingham, England. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Health and Member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. For. Peter James Field's top article generates over 33100 views. to your Favourites.