If you’ve begun to find that life has become a daily struggle with your weight, then hypnotherapy could just be the answer to your problem. And not just the problem you have with weight, either. Hypnotherapy works because it also looks at what has led you to have the relationship you do with food.

Our relationship with food is a complex one. In our hierarchy of needs, food is right up there at the top, along with water, warmth and rest. It outranks security and safety, companionship and self-esteem. We need food, but sometimes we don’t make it our friend.

Most of us have battled with our weight at some point or another, but sometimes we need a bit of help from someone else. At Zoe Clews and Associates, our hypnotherapy treatments have helped a great many people to get off the weight-loss treadmill and find happiness.

We understand the frustration of failure when it comes to weight loss. How many times have we committed to doing something to combat the relentless inching upwards of the pounds and ounces or the rising dress or trouser sizes? How many of us have at some time or another embarked on the fad diet du jour?

The Scarsdale Diet in the Seventies, the cabbage soup diet in the Eighties, the Atkins Diet – all of them and more promised almost overnight success and all of them topped the bestseller lists for months at a time.

On the surface of it, they sold because they worked. Or, at least, they appeared to work. Certainly, the world buzzed with the short-term success stories. What we didn’t hear so much about were the far more common long-term failures as people came off their regime and their weight ballooned again.

The weight loss industry thrives on selling us a dream that’s achievable with limited effort. It’s not so good at encouraging us to look more deeply at the reasons why food has become our enemy. There’s no quick buck to be made that way.

Yes, the simple physiological reason we put on weight is because we eat too much of the wrong things. But you can be sure that if you’re struggling and failing to control your weight on an ongoing basis, the reason has nothing to do with physiology and everything to do with psychology.

And that’s why our hypnotherapy sessions are so effective at helping you to achieve the outcome you want.

For many people, food is the ‘drug’ they choose to fight an internal battle – one which involves subconscious issues arising from a past event or experience. Eating can be an emotional bolt-hole, a place of comfort where some of us choose to hide from something we find emotionally too hard to deal with head-on.

We have all sorts of names and labels for this – comfort eating, emotional eating among them – but in the end people who want to lose weight but find it difficult to stop overeating are usually subconsciously compensating for something else. Hypnotherapy can help you to identify what that something else is and then deal with it permanently.

For many, the consumption of food forms a system of personal reward. We ‘earn’ that curry or fish and chip takeaway. Yet that too is simply the positive veneer we use to mask negative feelings. Often, for example, this ‘earned’ reward this can be a mechanic we use to try to mitigate the fact that deep down we know we shouldn’t be making that choice at all – most of us will know that feeling of ‘why did I eat that?’

In our hypnotherapy sessions we work with you to disrupt that negative reward structure and instead help you to find a way of resolving whatever is leading you to make the eating decisions you do.

Our conscious relationship with food naturally starts when we are children. Once we get beyond the automatic reflex of accepting food as necessary fuel and we begin to make choices about the foods we do and don’t like, we are exposed to all manner of messages and instructions about the food choices we make. And the older we are, the less nutritionally-informed those messages and instructions are likely to have been – how many of us, for example, were told we had to finish everything on our plate before we were allowed to leave the table or have dessert?

Still more, were told we needed to eat for our growing bones. Others had a parent who was continually on a diet or a friend or family member who made jibes about their weight.

So, food becomes inextricably linked to how we feel – or how we are sometimes made to feel – about ourselves. If we’re lucky, that results in a positive relationship with what we eat. But in a great many cases the reverse is true and we find ourselves on the slippery slope of fluctuating weight and yo-yo dieting that masks underlying emotional issues we’re trying to ignore or avoid.

That’s where hypnotherapy can be a true ally.

The feelings we’re trying to calm or avoid are rarely recognised but are instead experienced as an illogical and subconscious need to eat even when not hungry. Our emotional need to eat is also strengthened by stress or boredom.

Each cycle of weight loss followed by exponentially increased weight gain can become progressively worse and the simple fact is that if it hasn’t changed on its own by now, it’s unlikely to in the future and it’s time to do something about it. Our sessions are designed to use hypnotherapy to gently break the destructive cycle and instead allow you to clear the psychological issues you’re facing in order to move on.

Taking the decision to intervene in your own relationship with food and use hypnotherapy to find a way of healing the issues that may be preventing you from having a positive relationship with what you eat can be a challenging and emotional step – but hypnotherapy might just be what it takes to free you forever from the prison that overeating has created.

HOW WE CAN HELP

Our hypnotherapy for weight loss sessions have been highly successful in helping clients battling weight loss issues. We use the revolutionary new weight loss system – the Virtual Gastric Band, which works just like the real gastric band, but without the surgery, scars and terrible hospital food!

By using our weight loss hypnotherapy and looking at the full picture of issues that lie behind your weight issues, we believe we can help you to make significant permanent changes to heal your relationship with food. Our clinic is based in London’s Harley Street.

You can find out more about the people we’ve helped to successfully lose weight with hypnotherapy and keep it off by reading their testimonials here.