Motivate and Empower Yourself to Be Slim and Healthy

By Deborah Ferris

Many people who are overweight feel that they are weak-willed with no motivation to lose weight and keep it off. Are you one of those people? Would you like to have more motivation?

The word ‘motivation’ comes from Latin and it means move. It involves taking an idea, a desire, a goal and moving it from the thinking stage into the action/doing phase. To be successful at losing weight or even just exercising, we, therefore, need to take our desire, our drive to be slim, fit and healthy and move it into the real world of action.

Hypnosis can help motivate you …

Hypnosis can help you to motivate yourself and to turn bad habits into good ones. The subconscious part of the mind contains all our permanent memories, our feelings, our beliefs and our habits. So when you go into hypnosis, you can focus and relax as you eliminate the negative thoughts and behaviours. As you release the old patterns, you replace them with positive ones. Really this is about you empowering yourself with your own mind.

While hypnosis has been proven to change perceptions in the brain, it also works on reinforcement. That means that you need to keep hearing and visualizing and feeling the way you want to be and you need to put into practice what you wish to happen. To begin, you need to have a clear idea about how you want to look and feel at your ideal weight and size. The more details you can bring to this picture of yourself the better. You also bring in sounds and feelings.

Building your Motivation day by day

Each day you build your motivation by thinking, visualizing and acting in positive and healthy ways that help your reach your ideal (and realistic) weight goal for you.

While you imagine how you eat healthier foods and how you look and feel good, you also carry that out by doing activities like shopping, preparing and cooking healthy, nutritious foods that can translate into positive results for you.

Each day you work on establishing new habits -- like not overeating when you are full and not eating after dinner. You motivate yourself to keep on going even when you face obstacles or set-backs because this goal is what you want/desire. It’s important to you.

You create new ways of acting such as making a healthy lunch for yourself rather than eating out every day. You choose to make exercise a habit because you really want to lose weight and boost your metabolism so you can continue to burn more calories.

Motivation involves having a strong desire and drive to overcome hurtles. This means that if you don’t lose weight the first week or the second week you don’t give up.

You stick with the program. You continue to do self-hypnosis and modify your lifestyle. You might even kick it up a notch!

Self-Hypnosis helps reinforce your motivation

Motivation also includes having a positive self-image, being confident. When you do your self-hypnosis at home, in-between sessions, you imagine how you are capable and confident. You are confident about your ability to stay motivated and to be the way you want to be. So you use your senses – see and feel yourself capable and confident. Remember those times, those instances when you have felt capable and confident and bring the feeling forward into the future. You imagine how great you will feel and look when you are at your ideal weight. You imagine the new clothes you can wear, the energy you will have and how you will feel stronger.

It’s also important to celebrate the successes however small or big. Sometimes we think losing 5 pounds isn’t that big a deal especially when we need to lose 20, 50 or 100 pounds. But it is a big deal! You’ve just shown yourself that you can do it. You are headed in the right direction, traveling down the path that leads to a brighter future.

Jim Rohn, an international motivation speaker, says: “Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.” I’d like to add to that idea. Once you have started down the pathway of establishing good habits just continue to move down this road as you pave your way forward to the ultimate success. Be truly committed to the journey.

It’s also important when you want to lose weight that you have a realistic and reasonable goal. You want to lose weight in a healthy way so that means eating healthy foods in moderate quantities and exercising. That of course takes time. While Rome wasn’t built in a day, you too will make the changes day by day, even moment by moment as you continue to motivate yourself in positive ways. It may take awhile before you see results on the scale but know that if you commit to a Hypnosis program and embrace it then you can expect to see changes.

Here are some of the components of a Hypnotherapy program for weight loss:

• Participate actively in your Hypnosis sessions. Follow the hypnotherapist’s instructions as you allow yourself to relax and focus. Use your imagination and senses as the hypnotherapist gives you positive and healthy suggestions. Realize that you will need to come for more than 1 or 2 sessions. There are a lot of factors involved in losing weight. There isn’t one magic number for everyone. The more weight you have to lose then generally you need to come for more sessions.

• Practice self-hypnosis every day for about a month and then 2 or 3 times a week or as you feel the need. Self-hypnosis helps you to keep reinforcing the positive, healthy pictures in your mind to make positive habit changes. The more you do self-hypnosis the easier it is for you to get to that relaxed, focused state of mind and to visualize yourself at your goal. You can get better at visualizing yourself as your slim, healthy self. It’s also important to have a strong desire, positive feeling about your goal. Be enthusiastic and passionate about it!

• Be aware of any negative thinking, any self-talk that prevents you from feeling good about yourself and what you have decided to do.

• You need to stop that negative thinking and reframe it in a positive way. Catch yourself… Say something simple and positive to yourself. If you feel unworthy of reaching your goal, you can do some inner child work as well. This helps you to understand and remember that you are and always have been okay just as you are – lovable and valuable.

• Educate yourself about what to eat and then follow a specific food plan for the best results. There are many sensible plans to choose from that help you to be successful whether it’s Dr. Phil’s Ultimate Weight Solution diet, the Blood Type diet, the GI diet or others. You will need to consciously think about what food you will eat to lose the weight. Hypnosis will work with your subconscious to change the old tapes, the old habits that are stopping you from being successful.

• You will also want to exercise your way to success as well. It has been proven that weight lifting helps to create muscle and that muscle helps to rev up your metabolism so you can burn more calories. So adding some weights to an exercise routine will help too.

• Keep track of what you eat and when you exercise. This is a very helpful way for you to be honest with yourself and encourage yourself. When you write it down you can see where you might be having problems and make adjustments.

What else can you do to be successful?

It’s important that you fully participate in your hypnosis sessions. Be upfront and honest with the hypnotherapist. Let her know why you want to lose the weight at this time and know how you want to look and feel. Tell her what has stopped you in the past from being successful.

When you are in hypnosis you use your imagination to see, hear and feel how you are at your ideal weight goal and size. Your subconscious loves to be creative and even though your conscious mind may think that this is silly because you aren’t slim now, the subconscious can work on this idea of you being healthy and slim now. Keep repeating this and it will and does work.

It’s also important to get support from family members and friends if you can. They can be encouraging and helpful if you let them know this is important to you.

Motivation involves urgency... No excuses

If you have doubt or fear about your ability to be successful because you have failed so many times before in the “diet wars”, your hypnotherapist will help you to work on this.

But you must want to change. You need to be committed to wanting to change and you must be willing to do what you need to do to get to where you want to be. If you are half-hearted, how can you succeed?

You need to have a sense of urgency about reaching your ideal weight and size. You need to stop making excuses for yourself.

Motivate yourself with the following:

• Positive self-talk and genuine caring about yourself. It’s not selfish to love yourself.
• Make your goal a must, not a maybe. Being healthy is a priority. It needs to be a top priority.
• Stop giving yourself negative feedback and don’t give up. Giving up is not an option!
• If you think you “should” lose weight rather than making it a must, then you are heading toward failing.
• Reflect upon your past successes in other areas of your life (school, work, volunteerism, hobbies etc). Why did you achieve your goal previously? What did you give up along the way so you could be successful?
• Decide to lose weight right now. Today! Begin with the first step to take the “1,000 mile journey” (Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching). Believe in yourself.
• Set up an appointment with your local hypnotherapist so you can empower yourself to reach your weight loss goal.

Deborah Ferris is a Certified Hypnotherapist and is a member of the Ontario Association of Hypnotherapists. She has been helping clients to empower themselves with Hypnosis, Reiki, Transpersonal Psychotherapy and Meditation since 2001.