You’ve probably tried to ‘rationalise’ your eating before – making pacts with yourself such as no carbs with meals, green salad only, no eating at all after 6pm, no coffee with friends (because it will tempt you to cake), and no puddings ever of course.

And you’ve probably tried consciously looking out for your ‘triggers’ – the situations and events that tend to make you overeat or crave certain foods – and tried to distract yourself by thinking of something else, or even avoiding those problem environments completely.

And you’ve probably found that it works quite well for a few weeks or even months.

But it’s such a stressful, joyless existence that it’s not long before…

Why diets don’t work

The problem is that you can consciously plan whatever you like – you can make logical choices and rationally decide what you are going to do and how you are going to be. But your conscious mind is only a very small part of you – just the tip of the vast iceberg that is your whole mind. And while your conscious, logical mind may have one idea, the rest of your iceberg mind has a completely different one.

You may even feel as if you are, literally, in two minds about your eating – your head wants you to diet and lose weight, while your heart feels depressed, stressed and fearful about what it sees as giving up all pleasure and enjoyment in life.

Meanwhile, your body has its own powerful, primitive, deep-seated needs and demands – the most important being that you don’t go hungry and accidentally starve to death!

All these parts want what’s best for you and for you to be happy. They’re all on your side and want to help you and look after you in the best way they know how. But they disagree totally about what that best way is. They’re pitted against each other, arguing about what is right for you – and you’re left struggling uncomfortably in the middle, pulled all ways at once and thoroughly miserable!

That’s why it’s not a matter of willpower or self-control. If one part of you has a strong will, so do all the others– they’re all parts of you.

It’s not surprising diets only work in the short term with all that going on.

Why Mindful Hypnosis does work

It’s relatively easy to persuade the conscious part of your mind about something you can logically see is in your best interests – like eating healthily. But we also need to talk to the deeper emotional and biological parts that are buried in your unconscious mind which have different ideas – or else they’re always going to be fighting against your conscious decisions.

When your head and your heart want different things for you, and neither of them is actually listening to your body to find out what IT wants, then there’s always going to be trouble in the long run.

We need to get your head, your heart and your body to the negotiating table and communicating with each other so that they understand it’s not a case of either rigidly dieting or giving up and gaining weight, but that there’s a third way that combines thoughts, feelings and emotions so that every part of you can be happy and fulfilled, and you can eat what you love and love what you eat – without dieting and without gaining weight.

Mindful hypnosis is a very effective way of achieving that exceptional level of communication. With mindful hypnosis, we can talk directly to every part of your mind – in the logical, thoughtful way your conscious mind appreciates, and also in the imaginative, dream-like language of ideas that your emotional mind understands. And we can also access the vast store of resources – inspiring beliefs, values and memories – that are held in that huge iceberg that is your imaginative mind, and use them to motivate and empower you.