Do you identify with any of the following? As, aside from medical reasons, there are other reasons for weight gain.
1. EMOTIONAL EATING
This is a condition where ‘a person eats as a way of soothing or suppressing negative feelings such as sadness, stress, fear, boredom, loneliness and anger’. There are many times when people indulge in eating to relieve themselves of the stress that they feel or to reward themselves. Though these actions are not exactly harmful or problematic, people still must remember to do these in moderation to avoid weight gain. When this type of behaviour becomes a person’s way of coping, emotional eating can develop.
There are five factors that may contribute to emotional eating:
a. Unawareness or not being conscious of what or why you’re eating.
b. Food as Your Only Pleasure. At the end of a long day, a big bowl of ice cream can be effective in temporarily soothing ourselves. Eating sugars and fats releases opioids in are brains (also the active ingredients in cocaine and heroin), so the calming, soothing affects you feel are real and breaking the habit can be like kicking a drug habit.
c. Inability to tolerate difficult feelings. We learn from a young age to avoid thing that feel bad.
d. Body Hate. Negativity, shame and hatred rarely inspire people to make long-lasting great changes and think they will stop hating their body after they reach their goal weight.
e. Physiology. Letting yourself get too hungry or too tired is the best way to leave yourself vulnerable to emotional eating. Your body sends strong messages to your brain that signal it to eat.
In addition to emotional eating, weight gain can also occur when:
2. LACK OF EXERCISE
Nice guidelines state ‘to prevent obesity, most people may need to do 45–60 minutes of moderate-intensity activity a day, particularly if they do not reduce their energy intake. People who have been obese and have lost weight may need to do 60–90 minutes of activity a day to avoid weight gain’.
3. IMPROPER EATING HABITS
Perhaps learned during childhood e.g. ‘eat everything on your plate’ used to be considered good. Instead, it is healthier to be in tune with your body and simply stop eating when you feel full, regardless of the food remaining on the plate.
4. WATCHING TOO MUCH TV
As a result of someone sitting still on the sofa is burning less calories than someone moving around and perhaps the food TV advertisements are designed to make people feel hungry and do! The growth of the internet and readily available personal devices can also contribute towards inactivity and weight gain.
5. UNDERSTANDING A ‘BALANCED DIET’
When you consider than home economics and nutrition skills are not widely taught within schools, our understanding of a balanced diet largely depends upon our own family habits or personal motivation to educate ourselves. Public Health England have published the Eat Well Guide which recommends:
• Basing meals on starchy foods
• Eating lots of fruit and vegetables
• Eating more fish
• Cutting down on saturated fat and sugar
• Trying to eat less salt – no more than 6g a day
• Getting active and try to be a healthy weight
• Drinking plenty of water
• Not skipping breakfast
6. PROCESSED FOODS
Ready meals are known to be less healthy and more fattening primarily due to the higher levels of salt, fat and sugar. Not to mention, it takes significantly more time to shop, prepare and cook dishes from scratch, increasing the appeal of pre-prepared meals.
HYPNOTHERAPY CAN HELP
Hypnotherapy is a pleasant, relaxing experience during which you are completely in control and whereby I, a trained therapist, will target your unhelpful behaviours.
During my ‘SIX WEEK MOTIVATIONAL WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAMME’, we will specifically enhance your ability to reduce weight, maintain weight loss and prevent future weight gain.
You’ll identify your:
1. Goal weight
2. Dream weight
3. Happy weight
4. Acceptable weight
5. Disappointed weight
and, using hypnosis, together we take a fresh approach that enables and empowers you to gain control and break the cycle of your self-destructive weight gain patterns once and for all. You’ll develop new behaviours that enable you to achieve and, most importantly, naturally maintain your goal weight.
By Jenny West
Kromberg, J. (2013). Emotional Eating? 5 Reasons You Can’t Stop. Available from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/inside-out/201309/emotional-eating-5-reasons-you-can-t-stop. (Accessed 11 November 2016).
ICE.org.uk (2016). Obesity: identification, assessment and management. Available from: https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg189/chapter/1-Recommendations#assessment. (Accessed 14 November 2016).