I recently had an enquiry regarding weight loss from a client (who has since worked with me and made excellent progress!). She asked me how NLP worked for weight loss as she’s been dieting for years and each time ended up back at square one.

Anyway, I thought I’d share my thoughts…

NLP for weight loss works at targeting and resolving the root cause of the issue, rather than the presenting problem (i.e. the weight). Diets target the presenting problem and usually fail for two reasons…

1) The fundamental issue(s) that cause the person to eat/crave/gorge etc or even the cause of their slow metabolism is not addressed. So after a while the individual is compelled to return to old habits. In weight loss these issues are nearly always emotional, and are often unconscious problems – in that the person doesn’t know why they feel compelled etc. So for this reason dieting is like putting a plaster over a deep wound that won’t heal, i.e. eventually the plaster comes off.

2) And secondly diets starve the body which causes the mind to slow down the metabolism. Therefore it starts to store energy (thinking food is scarce) as an in-built defence mechanism which worked for us when we were fighting for survival and yet is not appropriate in today’s society. Therefore once you stop/ease off on the diet/ controlled eating – the return to less appropriate foods combined with a slower metabolism results in accelerated weight gain.

So we would tackle the ‘greater problems’ through a combination of NLP techniques and hypnosis. Once the client has addressed the deeper issues, they no longer feel the cravings and usually continue to eat foods they love – just the right amount. That said, many choose to ignore certain foods and do so easily and effortlessly.

It’s always interesting that when a client comes to see me for weight loss – we usually spend most of the time working on something else (emotional issues), for the weight problem to be addressed.

Similarly, often when a client works with me for emotional issues, there are other side benefits. I recently worked with client on a number of issues. She joined me for a full break-through session. After our work together (with her problems resolved) her running times improved – repeatedly beating her personal best from 15 years before!

The interesting point?

In our work together we never once worked on sports/performance enhancement.

Bye for now…
Stephen.