Posted by Journey

Why Diets Alone Fail By, Wil Langford R. Hy.

Every year millions of Americans go on a diet and every year millions of Americans lose weight . Sounds like we have a healthy country, doesn’t it? Perhaps you are even one of those people who lost weight. Unfortunately as many people gain weight as lose it, in fact, every year, more and more people, both adults and children are overweight. This alarming and potentially lethal trend has gotten so bad the United States government has even gotten involved in an educational program about portion control.

But here is a sobering fact; many people, including the overweight, know about portion control and caloric intake recommendations, and the value of exercise. Despite their knowledge and the wealth of information available, they still continue to gain weight. What is going on?

As a behavioral therapist I treated hundreds of people who knew what they should do, they just couldn’t make themselves do it for very long. All their efforts started with the best of intentions and they were well meaning people. I heard the same story over and over again. “Wil, I lost weight, only to put it back on and now I am heavier than when I started!” they would tell me. There is even a name for this in our society, it is called “yo-yo” dieting, and it weakens the body and frustrates millions of dieters. Why does this keep happening?

The answer is that eating is a behavior and to change a behavior you have to have all the parts of the dieters consciousness, his or her mind, going in the same direction. The reason is that our behavior and habits are stored in our subconscious minds. The subconscious, according to recent research, controls about 90% of the thought processes in a normal human being. That means that you are only conscious, or aware of about 10% of your thoughts, so making a conscious decision to change your behavior is putting 10% of your will power against 90% of your won’t power. Guess who wins.

The subconscious is the seat of our emotions, often called the feeling mind. People do what they feel like doing more often than what they rationally know they should do. It is the way we work and have for millennia. It is much easier to do what we feel like doing and know we should do. So to make a new behavior a habit we have to start by convincing our subconscious mind that we want to make the change, to add the healthy habit to our subconscious mind. It is called, “behavior modification.” Behavior modification isn’t always easy, in fact, it can be downright hard when a behavior that is being changed or replaced is deeply entrenched with emotional connections to our past or self-image, but it can be done.

Many people are now using hypnosis as a means of talking to their own subconscious mind and introducing changes to behavior. It can be done with self-hypnosis, in fact, many experts say all hypnosis is self-hypnosis because a person will not enter a hypnotic state unless he or she is willing. While self-hypnosis is effective it is easier to learn self-hypnosis with the aid of a good therapist, a clinical hypnotherapist. A good clinical hypnotherapist will start by interviewing a client to learn about the overall health and lifestyle as well as emotional keys and triggers that are lying below the surface, for a dieter, it would be called a weight loss evaluation. For a free weight loss evaluation, click here Once the interviewing is over the therapist will guide the client into hypnosis and then use specially worded suggestions, called “secondary suggestions,” to plant positive ideas and ideals in the subconscious mind. Connecting those ideas with an emotional trigger allows the subconscious to choose the healthy eating habit rather than trying to force an unwanted change upon it.

The secondary or post-hypnotic suggestions can even be tailored so that a diet, exercise program, or any lifestyle change may be programmed right into the clients mind. The biggest obstacle to enjoying the benefits of hypnosis is fear of the unknown. Many people don’t realize that hypnosis was investigated by the American Medical Association and approved as an effective modality, but it was approved over 50 years ago. You can learn more about the truth about hypnosis by emailing for the free ebrochure, Facts, Fiction, and History of Hypnosis.

Whatever you do, you owe it to yourself, before you go through the struggle of another diet to learn all you can about a method that makes dieting easier and more effective. Like many thousands of people who use hypnosis every year, you may find the next diet is the last one you will ever have to try because you have finally changed the underlying cause of your weight problem, your behavior.

by Wil Langford, R. Hy.