Television and movies have given hypnosis a bad rap. Stuck in our minds is the image of a seedy looking magician type, with a curly mustache and top hat, bringing you on to a stage and hypnotizing you to cluck like a chicken in front of hundreds of other audience members without you having the ability to say, “No.” This is not actually what hypnosis is about. In reality, hypnosis is a way to tap into our subconscious. To address situations that are bothering us, without our logic, emotions and prejudices impeding our thoughts.

The Idea
The idea behind weight loss hypnosis is to teach you new and better eating habits and give you the tools to stay strong and ignore your cravings for bad foods. Proponents say that hypnosis can also stop you from even having cravings. All of this is able to be done because you are in a relaxed, suggestible state while under hypnosis. Your concentration is heightened- you have no distractions and are only concentrating on your hypnotist. You are still in control of your faculties. You can comply with requests or decline to do them. You can talk, remember events from your past and you can visualize while in a hypnotic state. You will also remember everything that happened while you were hypnotized once you are ‘awake’.

What Happens
When done in person, your therapist (or hypnotist) will guide you through some deep breathing exercises. Once you are breathing in a relaxed manner, he or she will begin to ask you to visualize. You may be asked to visualize yourself in a relaxing location or to visualize calmness pulsing through your veins. Eventually, your therapist will see from your relaxed posture, breathing, and slowed response time that you are in a state of hypnosis and will begin to work with you.

You may be asked to describe the person you’d like to be, or the eating habits you’d like to change. You could also be asked to discuss when or why you started eating poorly. Your therapist will take the information and will ask you questions about how to change it. A large part of the focus will be on you visualizing the end result. This is a picture that will have a very strong impression on the subconscious and that you will carry with you. Your therapist will then start feeding your subconscious ideas and methods of losing weight and controlling urges.

When buying hypnosis tapes for weight loss, you may be instructed to listen to the tapes while you sleep. Others will guide you through similar relaxation techniques to those an in-person therapist would. With weight loss hypnosis tapes, you will be given a generic list of suggestions to help your subconscious, but they will not be tailored to your unique situation.

Is it Effective?
There is no scientific or clinical evidence that weight loss hypnosis actually helps with weight loss. Those who undergo hypnosis in the hopes that it will end their life long struggle with obesity may or may not find that it helps them. It affects each individual differently. For some hypnosis provides them with the extra nudge they needed to be successful on their diet. The visualization techniques of seeing themselves slender and having accomplished something are the perfect recipe for accomplishment and they go on after their session to become the person they visualized themselves being. For others, the visualization does not get to the root of their eating disorder and is not enough of an incentive to succeed and they continue to try and fail.