How to Completely Reprogramme Your Brain’s Approach to Food

The hunt for the right office in which to see clients was not an easy one. I was shown weird shaped rooms at the end of long, dank corridors and simply couldn’t imagine a client in a distressed frame of mind finding that an uplifting experience. Eventually, I found the office I finally settled on. I still wasn’t convinced…the marble atrium was huge and imposing, would client’s think it was too much? As I was pondering this standing in the empty room, the woman next door wandered past. I’d noticed the sign by her door – Liz Hogan – Hypnotherapist. I collared her and she dispelled any worries I had. I moved in and was so thrilled to have such a nice neighbour next door to me.

What’s this got to do with your brain and food? Well, Liz has developed a highly successful programme to help with weight loss. She started telling me about it while I was stuffing a Kit Kat into my gob, and it sounded so cool I decided to interview her for the blog! Here we go:

TSD (that’s me, by the way!): So Liz, what is hypnosis and how can it help with weight loss?

LH: In essence it’s just a deep state of relaxation, it’s a very natural state that we drift in and out of all the time. It’s helpful to think of it as similar to how you feel when you drift off into a daydream. There’s absolutely nothing to be afraid of!

TSD: How is being that state helpful?

LH: When you’re more relaxed it becomes easier to access the sub-conscious mind, it’s more open to positive suggestions. When you’re nice and relaxed, positive suggestions just slide in nice and easily.

TSD: And what’s the big deal with all these positive suggestions?

LH: We all have associations with food being “good” or “bad” hanging out in our sub-conscious minds. For example, parents often say to their children “If you’re good, we’ll go and get and ice-cream”. It’s pretty easy for the sub-conscious mind to get that twisted up so that if you don’t get rewarded with the ice-cream, you were bad. Eating treats (like ice-cream, sweets…whatever) gives your sub-conscious mind the message that “I’m a good or loveable person”. The only reason your subconscious would need to be re-assured about this is if it didn’t believe it already. But when you stop giving yourself these ‘treats’, then at a subconscious level, you feel you must have been bad and you are driven to eat something forbidden just to reassure yourself that you really are good.

TSD: The sub-conscious mind sounds a bit like a small child!

LH: Not far off! The sub-conscious mind is much, MUCH more literal than the conscious mind. It doesn’t understand complex language and it doesn’t understand things in the negative. It processes about 40 pieces of information a second, whereas the conscious mind processes 4. Whatever you figuratively think about food, your sub-conscious mind literally thinks about food, like the example about. So your conscious mind knows that you’re still loveable even if you don’t get an ice-cream but your sub-conscious mind doesn’t process it that way.

TSD: So what happens in the hypnosis sessions?

LH: We have a good long chat about what’s up, what you’d like to change first of all. We start on the foods your craving so that we’re aware of what your trigger foods are. Then I pack you off with a CD and a food diary. The CD is just 20mins long so it’s easy to fit in listening to it in your day. Let’s face it, no one has time to listen to an hour long recording of hypnotic suggestions! The suggestions have been very carefully worded to deliver high-impact results, they are short but really intense. Client’s of mine who are committed to the process and make the time to listen to the recording get incredibly fast results. The statements are worded in the present tense, this helps to side-step the literal aspect of the sub-conscious. If you state something in the future, it thinks it doesn’t have to bother with it now…it’ll be happening later. With suggestions stated in the present, the sub-conscious immediately jumps on board!

TSD: So clients start seeing results pretty quickly?

LH: Yes! Obviously, it’s important to commit to the process, but clients who are ready and willing to lose the weight find their cravings disappear within days. They’re always amazed that they can be ordering a coffee in Starbucks standing in front of all those pastries and cakes and literally feel unmoved by any of it. Your triggers around foods get erased so you can be eye ball to eye ball with family sized bag of Doritos and not care, that desperate need to scoff the lot is just gone!

TSD: Wow…! That’s about all I can say!

LH: I know! It’s an incredible process. That feeling like you’re at war with yourself or battling your own mind and body just stops. That feeling of scarcity goes away, that feeling that there isn’t enough for you. Food is often very closely linked to emotions…back to the treats analogy again! So going to granny’s and getting a Mars bar forms a link in your mind between food and love. If you don’t have enough food, you don’t have enough love. The process of hypnotherapy helps to re-programme that association.

TSD: What sort of results can clients expect?

LH: You’ll feel peaceful around food, it’s not unusual for you to start losing around 3-4 pounds a week in a really effortless way. That is of course if you put the effort into listening to the CD! Motivated clients who want to change obviously do the best because open and ready to start having a healthy relationship to food. You become free to live your life without obsessing over food and your size, in a body that feels right, that you’re no longer at war with.

Liz Hogan is awesome. If you’d like to book an appointment with her to talk about kick starting your weight loss, then you’ll find more information at www.lizhogan.co.uk