What Hypnosis is and How it Helps With Weight Loss

You may see claims online that hypnosis can help you lose weight. Many times these claims are exaggerated. But if you approach losing weight and how hypnosis can help you do that with some common sense, you won’t find a better ally anywhere else.

Let’s start the discussion by explaining what hypnosis is, then move on to how and why it works, and finally finish it off with how it can help you lose weight.

Table of Contents

What is Hypnosis

When people imagine hypnosis, they tend to think of stage hypnotists; the image that usually pops into the mind is how the hypnotist selects a few people from the audience and embarrasses them on the stage by making them do silly things.

While those shows do have some merit, they are just that – shows. In reality, no one can hypnotize you against your will. In fact, you get into a state of hypnosis (called a trance state) every day. Some hypnotist even argue that we are always in a trance state, and that we need to be hypnotized to get out of it.

But back on point – we experience mild trance states daily, whenever we are totally immersed in an activity, so immersed in fact that we seem to forget about everything else around us. This often happens when we watch TV, when we are fully focused on your exercise or when we are having a good time at a party. You know, the days when time just seems to fly by.

Hypnosis is nothing to be scared of. While hypnotized, you won’t be unconscious. Actually, exactly the opposite will happen. You will be more aware and more focused on the problem you are trying to solve, than you ever were. And you will be extremely relaxed at the same time.

We may define hypnosis as an altered state of mind, one in which we are more focused, more aware and more relaxed than usual.

How Hypnosis Works

It is important to note how our conscious and subconscious mind function.

When we want to do something simple, like change our clothes, all we consciously have to do (at least most of the time) is imagine the clothes that we want to put on. The rest pretty much happens by default. We don’t think about going to our closet. We don’t think about taking the clothes out of the closet or taking our clothes off, nor do we think about dressing ourselves in a fresh set of clothes. It is our subconscious mind takes care of all that.

On the other hand, there is our conscious mind, which is also called the critical mind. It’s role is to censor stimuli we receive from the outside world, in order to prevent unwanted or harmful information or data from accessing our subconscious mind.

This means that we actually retain very little of what is happening around us. We remember only the most important things. Otherwise, we would be overwhelmed. For example, we don’t remember the number of trees we’ve passed on our way to work. Or the color of the last few cars that passed us. We don’t need that information, so the conscious mind censors it.

We need our conscious, censoring mind, because our subconscious mind has no filter – it can not differentiate between our own thoughts and those served from the outside world.

How Hypnosis Can Help You Lose Weight

A hypnotist is very skilled at bypassing your conscious mind by occupying it in various ways, and thus he is free to communicate directly with the subconscious by placing hypnotic suggestions that would help you in the long run.

These hypnotic suggestions might say that you actually enjoy exercise, or that you love eating healthy foods that will help you lose weight. They might suggest that you have enough strength to battle all the temptations to get back to your old, harmful habits. And they do help.

A hypnotist places the suggestions that you’ve both agreed on before the session, directly to your subconscious. Please mind that people are completely aware during a session, and are able to stop it at any moment.

I’d also like to note that you should not be afraid of the word sleep. Hypnotists use the word sleep to refer to the deep hypnotic state, but we don’t actually fall asleep. This word is used for lack of a better term. Actually, what happens is that your body would completely relax, but your mind would be more alert and more focused than usual.

When we are repeatedly exposed to suggestions without our conscious mind being able to filter them, eventually we adopt those suggestions, or thoughts, as our own and we are able to lose weight or exercise more regularly much more easily than we’ve used to. Simply, it feels like we have naturally started to think in a different way about our body and how to maintain it.

The Reality – How Much Hypnosis Really Helps

It is important to stress that hypnosis can help you lose weight, but it can’t force you to lose it. It can help boost your morale, or add confidence that you may succeed, or it may even help you be more motivated to exercise and be happier to adhere to your diet. It can subtly help you change the thoughts that seem to linger on no matter what you do, thus holding you back.

What hypnosis won’t do is it won’t exercise on your behalf. You still have to do that. Hypnosis won’t stop you from overeating. You still have to eat right and you still have to give it your best.

Hypnosis is another tool in your arsenal that will help you stay the course. Much of the research shows that hypnosis does in fact help people lose weight and produces statistically significant results.

Hypnosis is best used when you are struggling with your weight loss plan, and need something more to help you stay on the right path.

If you want to test hypnosis out for free, you can try three hypnosis mp3s right now – just head down to http://www.naturalhypnosis.com/l/try-hypnosis-free/ and give it a go.