The answer is incredibly simple. Nobody wants to do it. They may need to, they may want to be thinner or healthier, but they don’t want to regiment themselves and so are in essence rebelling against the method. You will find that is also the reason more than 80% or all dieters return to form a year or so after successfully completing a program.
Motivation is something that needs to be rewarded, once it is, there is nothing but the effort left. That is to say, if a person is motivated by a weight loss goal, once they achieve it, there are no more rewards. They don’t feel happier for long, life doesn’t get better and if they are in a bad relationship, it doesn’t improve either. Often times weight loss is not what it is cracked up to be because the motivation for undertaking a change in how you do things isn’t reflecting the change you actually want. The key to maintaining a weight loss program isn’t motivation, it is discipline. Discipline is that ugh word for so many. It is a lack of discipline that creates many of the issues in someone’s life not a lack of motivation.
As an example, if your partner is having an affair, if you are tired all the time, life is difficult or you have constant financial issues, These need to be addressed along with any weight loss attempts. Not only will the result be a happier you, but weight loss becomes it’s own motivation. If you are motivated by thinking you will be happier if you were thinner, and then aren’t, it is obvious that not getting happier, will lead you to return to the old behaviours before too long. Understand, what weight loss will actually mean, and address other issues as separate things. If you eat because you are bored (pretty common actually) you would do better to be motivated to do something else with your time. If you are unsatisfied with your job you may need to be motivated to gain the skills necessary to do what you would prefer. Once you have these under wraps weight loss itself can be targeted with the pure intention of losing weight, it is still important to have a longer term motivation that will hold the changes in the long term without feeling you are compromising something important.
On the dieting front with so many fad diets, (I am old enough to see the same diets being revived ever 15-20 years with a new name and marketing campaign. They are called fad diets because often those doing them, try any popular diet, and more often than anyone cares to say, drop out or start ‘cheating’ before the job is done. let’s go for a bit of honesty. No one EVER, became unhappy because they couldn’t eat a piece of cake or hot chippies. A person who eats really badly will feel ill sometimes, get headaches and other body problems for a short time if they remove high sugar (that includes carb based foods) from their diet.
This is a short term thing that disappears after the body has evicted the very thing it is trying to get rid of. Sugars. Carbohydrates convert to sugars so having a cream bun with sugar icing is doubling down. A few weeks of discomfort and many symptoms will disappear, many of these could have plagues you for some time in extreme cases. This can include feeling like you have a cold or allergies often, migraines, sore joints, irregular bowel movements which commonly go from one extreme to the other. Interrupted sleep and insomnia, snoring, indigestion, nightmares, anxiety and depression. Many common ailments are caused by overdosing the body with things it just can’t evacuate. Once you overload your liver, headaches and tiredness are going to be a real problem. If you put too much pressure on your gallbladder, you will often feel nauseous after eating or drinking even if you didn’t have much or ate something healthy. Once your kidneys are tired you will have toxic fluids running through your system that can lead to joint pain, tiredness, memory loss and so forth. These are just a very fine tip, of a very big iceberg. If you are medicating issues (including type 2 diabetes) you are medicating against your eating habits, not your body.
Aside from health, returning to type or long held dietary strategies, is often because you did get what you want, it just wasn’t about the weight. It can become a focus for everything you don’t like in your life. Some individual blame their weight for problems that they have in relationships. This couldn’t be further from the truth, a good relationship will cope with a bit of weight gain and thank goodness. Appearances change over time, it has very real value, to look at problems for what they are, and not focus on what they are not if you want to find a way past them.
I know a woman who had lost quite a bit of weight (in between relationships), she spent the big bucks, went to Thailand and had excess fat removed, a tummy tuck and a few other things. after 6 months she was more or less recovered and happy. A year or so later she found a man got into a relationship and then went on to put it all back on again. From the start of the relationship it would have been only another 6 months when it was clear she was almost the same size as she was pre-op. Motivation? To find love. Once found, she had her reward and was now getting nothing more out of the deal. The problem of overeating and why had never been addressed leaving her prone to old habits. Interestingly she had mentioned a couple of times that her size was an issue in her relationships.
For a few, the weight gain is habitual or related to unhappiness, for most it is more than that and needs a serious look at origins. To this day I have never forgotten the documentary on the fattest man in the world (uk). He talked about his grandmother looking after him after school and loving him to bits. She would feed him cakes and yummy things all the while cuddling him and telling him how much she loved him. Once she died he went on an eating binge and never stopped.
The key to successful weight loss is understanding the problem and resolving it. I had a client who signed up for DNA reprogramming, over the phone she told me she was worried about her eating habits. When she came in I was surprised to see she was in great shape. She went on to tell me she had her stomach stapled some years back and used hypnotherapy successfully to deal with cravings. Now she was worried she would fall into bad habits. Deeper questioning revealed that she had become a shopaholic and would go out of her way , even during meals to look through sales catalogues and was overspending to such an extent it was causing problems in her 30 year marriage.
DNA reprogramming is pretty intense and daily sessions over 5 days. This has the effect of deepening regressive experience every day and leads to rapid change that can’t be predicted. On her 4th day, we were hypnotizing for the ages of 9 to birth. After this she sat up and told me she had been molested as a child by a man down the road and had never told anyone. She hadn’t forgotten, she just didn’t see what it had to do with anything. As it turns out, every spring her mother would send her down to this old mans place to give him veges out of the garden as he lived alone. This man molested her a number of times. When she told her mother she didn’t want to take him the veges, her mum told her she was a selfish and mean child. She still made her go so this event went on for a few years. (you can’t criticize the mother, she didn’t know what was happening)
This experience lifted the lid off everything. She went away happy and sent me a number of clients over the years. We aren’t always a good judge of what is at the bottom of a behaviour because sometimes, we just don’t connect the dots. The focus on food is one of those crazy things that we know doesn’t work or at least, not for long, with the vast majority of dieters feeling worse after working through weight loss programs than they did when they started. Serial dieters need to look backward quite a long way to find the issues. Hypnotherapy is the fastest and most efficient way, but with long term dieters, it is never going to be just one session. In the end it is choosing the right strategy. Focus on weight loss? Or focus on feeling good. Research done last year found that people who felt good and were happy made better choices than people who weren’t. It seems obvious when you think about it doesn’t it?
Some weight issues are aligned to parents and family like the fattest man in the world. That was the name of the documentary by the way not a slur. These are the easiest to resolve. Some are more complex and are aligned with trauma, like the DNA program, have some unusual strategies that don’t always emphasize food. Some are aligned with mental states like anxiety, depression and good old fashioned boredom. Dealing with the issue as well as the diet will ensure long term success. Weight loss should only ever be a short term focus, with long term results.
