Weight Loss and Inner Confidence - The Link Explained

As a Hypnotherapist, although I'm a psychotherapist and counsellor as well, I've had many calls over the years asking me, 'Do you do weight loss?' and when I've said 'Only really as part of a self esteem or self confidence programme' I've often heard. 'OK. I'll try someone else.' Now perhaps I've done myself out of business because I can do the 'Close your eyes. You will from now on only want to eat healthy foods' stuff. And it can work. But it can also fail dismally. And it fails because weight issues are often only the tip of the iceberg.

Being overweight can have many very valuable functions for someone that they are just not aware of. One of those functions is, to manage feelings they'd rather not have to deal with. And many of these feelings are so deeply buried, it's hard to find them. For example, I might want to lose weight, but what if I just can't see myself as someone who deserves to feel good about themselves? I might know academically how to feel good about myself. I may even treat myself to beautiful clothes and stylish hairdos. But if I'm in denial about how I REALLY feel, then I'm going to subconsciously sabotage myself all of the time. And I'm going to use food to comfort myself like the alcoholic turns to alcohol to blot out distressing feelings.

Now let's assume, a clever hypnotherapist has helped me identify the conflict of the real feeling underneath and the superficial presentation on the surface. There's still something only I can do and no one can help me. I have to change the way I feel about myself to feel more empowered and more confident. Now, that, you imagine, might be easy. A couple of sessions of hypnotherapy might sort that out. But what if our whole lifestyle and circumstances come from our poor former self image?

• What if we're married to someone who feeds off our lack of self esteem?
• What if we're married to someone who needs us to be strong all the time, and we resent it?
• What if our parents need us to be the whipping boy in the family?
• What if our friends want to be seen with us because it makes them look good?
• What if we don't have the inner calm and confidence to be able to find a partner?

You know, the work we did on changing how we feel about ourselves and our body image had to be pretty good indeed to change all these other circumstances around us. We may need to make some real physical changes in certain areas of our lives if we really want to feel more confident about losing weight. The truth is though we are very likely to backslide. And we may go back to our former habits, helplessly, miserably, reconfirming to ourselves that we are just meant to be fat and overweight and nothing can change that. And so the self fulfilling prophecy continues.

Changing our deeper feelings, once we've found them, needs to be accompanied by changing our language patterns, our ability to defend ourselves calmly, to find the self confidence to know what is right for us and what isn't. And sometimes we need to be reminded of that again and again. So what better way to do just that than to listen to my 4 hour audio course that you can download today with all the handouts to help you realign yourself with a more positive self image with all the language tools and strategies that will help you stand tall and be counted. To read more, click here.