Each year, at least 50 million people in the United States go on weight loss programs. Billions of dollars are spent each year trying to lose weight and keep it off. But there is no quick fix and oftentimes people try method after method with little success. This is because diets don’t deal with the permanent lifestyle changes required, like sustainable long-term changes in our eating habits and relationship with food.

Diets are usually too restrictive or deprive us of our favorite foods, setting us up for failure. Diets don’t deal with the emotional aspect of overeating; they rely on willpower and ignore the automatic subconscious emotions and beliefs that cause many to overeat. While you may lose some weight by restricting food or being on a very specific food plan, it is often difficult to keep the weight off when you stop eating this way. And yo-yo dieting will totally imbalance the metabolism. It confuses our bodies and they will begin to hold onto fat, which, when we reduce our calorie intake, causes the body to burn muscle instead of fat.

Hypnotherapy for weight loss has remained a well-kept weight loss secret. Numerous studies have shown that those who used hypnotherapy for weight loss lost at least twice as much weight as those that didn’t, and participants still had kept it off at the 2-year mark. Hypnotherapy is so successful because it helps access your subconscious mind to discover and resolve issues that may impact your relationship with food. Negative thoughts and imprints are then replaced with positive ones. Hypnotherapy can get to the root cause(ex. childhood trauma, low self-esteem) of any unresolved issues by re-framing them and letting them go.

Through weight loss hypnosis, you can learn to enjoy healthy foods and stop sugar cravings, motivate to exercise, empower yourself, and learn to enjoy your body and not see losing weight as a source of anxiety. By tackling those deep feelings that form the foundations of your eating habits, hypnotherapy can help you adopt a healthier lifestyle and happier mindset. It is a very safe technique, without the negative side effects that most restrictive diets and weight loss pills cause to our body and mind. Irving Kirsch, a lecturer, and director at Harvard Medical School, says that hypnosis is a well-studied and legitimate form of treatment for obesity and weight loss. His research has found that those using hypnotherapy were able to lose a significantly higher amount of weight and keep it off.

There are many different approaches to weight loss hypnotherapy. One technique is Virtual Gastric Band Hypnotherapy. It helps people to lose weight and sustain results long term. It is a non-surgical technique using advanced hypnosis to retrain you to be satisfied with smaller amounts of food. It works by helping you to permanently change your eating and lifestyle habits, by communicating with the subconscious mind. All our habits and unconscious thought patterns are stored in this part of the mind. By communicating directly here during hypnosis, we can change habits and beliefs at a deeper level. It trains the subconscious to believe that the stomach is smaller than it is. Because of this, we naturally begin to eat smaller portions and become fuller quicker. It is not just a short-term fix either. It allows you to eat a variety of foods, just less of them, so you won’t feel deprived. Therefore, helping you sustain long-term results.

Weight loss hypnotherapy can train the subconscious mind to be more aware of when we are actually satisfied and don’t need to finish everything on the plate. It supports you in making important lifestyle changes, including exercise, drinking more water, eating healthier foods, not snacking, curbing your sweet tooth, stopping late-night eating, increasing confidence, drinking less alcohol, reducing stress and anxiety—anything you are struggling with that is adding to your issue of weight loss.

Hypnotherapy has the capacity to work for most people, but it is important to remember that some people are more susceptible to suggestions. In order to get the most out of your hypnosis sessions, it’s important to be fully committed to the process, keep an open mind, and be open to change. Skepticism can subconsciously decrease your susceptibility.

The truth is, we sometimes gain comfort by not making changes—we feel safe staying just as we are. So, we might consciously want to lose weight but something in the subconscious is preventing us from making it happen. Hypnotherapy aims to expose these reasons, allowing clients to break through barriers that may have been preventing them from losing weight for decades.