Is Your Relationship With Food Unhealthy?

If we are trying to lose weight it is important to understand that reducing calories is just a small factor in the equation. The main factor to work on is our relationship to food. It is easy to develop an unhealthy relationship with food in today’s society. With so much food easily available for us to access it can become a crutch in times of stress and difficulty. This crutch can develop into an unhealthy relationship that lasts a lifetime. This is one of the main reasons why diets rarely work.

Diets (like the kind that send you boxed food) focus on calorie restriction only. Even if we are able to reduce our calories for a short time it is impossible to maintain without developing a new relationship with food. This relationship is based on how we think and feel about food on a very deep (subconscious) level. Hunger, body temperature and attachment behaviours are located within the hypothalamus. Because emotions play such a huge role for weight gain the first step is identifying our emotional ties to food.

It can be a fascinating project to document your food eating without judgment. Take one week to log all your food intake without criticism or judgement. Allow yourself to act and eat as you normally would but every few hours update your notebook with what you ate, what you were dealing with at the time of eating, the time you ate, and most importantly, what you were feeling before you ate and then how you felt after you ate. Doing this for one week can reveal startling facts about your eating habits.

Most people find that emotional eating dominates the chart. It also can reveal a habit that has developed from previous stress or trauma. With this information you can easily see why a diet wouldn’t work in the long term. The solution is to be found in changing a fundamental way we think and feel about food. Changing this pattern takes time but it is time well taken because we can then direct our energy into a strategy that will actually produce results.

An experienced self-hypnosis teacher (who has at least several years experience and can demonstrate success with real testimonials from people like yourself) will focus on a few key areas when helping a client lose weight. The first is reducing and eliminating stress. Stress causes greater weight gain from producing high cortisol hormone levels, which function to store food as fat. Stress also is a trigger for overeating. Stress even affects our breathing and efficiency of digestion. Therefore, eliminating stress is of paramount importance.

The second step is working with the deeper levels of mind to change the way we think and feel about food. Replacing the security and comfort we think comes from food with self-esteem, self-worth and self-love. This transfer can only be accomplished in a state of deep relaxation with a subtler level of consciousness. This is why hypnosis is so effective in weight loss situations. By working with the subtle mind, changes are made on a foundational level. Otherwise it is like building a house on sand, it will quickly sink.

Through guided hypnosis and meditation the brain can be retrained to think and feel positively about food without shame or guilt. In fact, the people who lose the weight develop a greater appreciation for food than before! When we develop a healthy relationship with food not only do we feel better but food tastes better and we enjoy it more. This success spreads to other areas of our life such as personal relationships and business. By working with our mind at the deepest levels we can bring about real and lasting change in our life.