She could hardly fit in my chair! After filling in the intake form I need not have asked her the reason for her visit, twenty and half stone spoke for itself! Lank hair, pallid skin, depressive attitude and stance, classic hiding behind rolls and rolls of excess, life threatening FAT!
I explain how hypnosis works, take full details and case history of her reasons for wanting to lose weight and make sure the relaxing, reclining chair can take the weight. She seemed very surprised when I explained the comfort pattern of the subconscious mind, the oral gratification behind much over eating. Her life was empty, frustrating, void of all joy, the only compensation being food. She had developed a happy-go-lucky exterior to hide behind, but beneath all those layers of fat was a lot of pain and confusion after years of mental abuse from both her parents. Not actually physical abuse but the equally destructive negative conditioning and put downs over the years.
At twenty eight years old she wondered how easy it would be to change her lifestyle – to stop binging in the middle of the night and eating everything in sight. She told me that when she ate a packet of biscuits she could remember the first and the last but none in-between. On a good day she got through four packets of biscuits a night. I daren’t think how many on a bad day, and that was as well as the chocolates and other abundant sweet things.
She blamed her parents for her weight problem. Years of being ignored by her father and her mother’s frustration and submissive behaviour had taken its toll. Forgiveness had not entered her mind, nor the fact that she was now responsible for her own life.
After the first session of hypnotherapy she felt much more relaxed with me and positive about losing weight, but obstacles kept cropping up in her mind. We dealt with a lot of the baggage from the past over the next few sessions but her parental dependency was very strong. It took a “regression” back into earlier times when on one occasion she felt particularly useless, to use her imagination and some NLP to reframe the feelings and get in touch with her own power. Many tears accompanied this session but it was a turning point which could be clearly seen the next time she came for her appointment. Hair nicely groomed, a smile and positive greeting, eye contact and the news that she had met someone she was very fond of, a supportive understanding soul. But most importantly the realisation that she was in control, she had made herself fat, she could CHANGE!
It took a year, once a month, to lose ten and a half stone, to see her get married, to see this lively, excitable, new person emerge. Unrecognisable, happy and a new mother with a lovely healthy, happy baby who, I know, will never be exposed to the scourge of obesity.
Millions of people have benefited in some way from having a change of mind. That change first takes place on an unconscious level. Everything in the subconscious mind seeks expression in the physical self. For many, using self hypnosis, that change can occur instantly, others, like Janis, come to that realization more slowly, until it suddenly hits them.