Want to lose weight this summer?

Are you hoping to lose a bit of weight this summer? Maybe you’ve got a holiday booked or you just want to feel better about yourself when the weather hots up. Whatever your motivation, it’s not always easy to put the plans into action. In this blog post, I’m sharing some tips to kickstart your summer weight loss efforts and explaining how hypnotherapy could help if you need some extra support.


Tips to Slim Down This Summer

Cut back on alcohol. Alcoholic drinks can affect insulin production in much the same way as sugar. They’re also empty calories as they offer no nutritional value. Cutting back on how much alcohol you drink is a smart move if you’re trying to lose weight – even better if you can give it up completely!

Ditch the refined carbs. Refined carbs spike your blood sugar levels and increase your insulin production. For weight loss, this can be a double whammy as you’re more likely to store fat and it’s harder to get rid of too. Ditching processed, refined carbs such as white bread, white pasta and white rice and swapping them for their unprocessed and unrefined counterparts such as oats, brown rice and wholemeal bread. It might not feel like a big lifestyle change but it can have a lot of impact for weight.

Eat Mediterranean. Following the Mediterranean way of eating can be great for maintaining a healthy weight. Eat plenty of fruit, vegetables, whole grains, nuts and lean protein. Cooking with olive oil is a big part of the Mediterranean diet and it’s often also drizzled over salads.

Start meals with soup. According to studies, having a bowl of soup before you eat a meal can reduce the number of calories that you eat in the meal by as much as 20 per cent. If you don’t want to eat a heavy meal, starting things off with soup can help you to cut your calorie intake without short changing yourself.

Go easy on fruit juices. Fruit juices might seem like a healthy choice but they can be full of sugar. They also have a lot fewer nutrients than whole fruit, including less fibre. This means they’re less filling compared to eating a piece of fruit.

Be wary of “diet” and “low fat” foods. Foods that are marketed as “low fat” often compensate for low fat content by going overboard on sugar and salt. They’re not as diet friendly as you might think!

Eat in a mindful way. Mindful eating is all about savouring the food you eat. Lots of us eat when we’re busy or multi tasking and this is often a fast track to eat much more than you anticipated. Mindful eating helps you to be in control of your eating, rather than letting your mind take over. On a similar note, try to focus solely on eating and avoid watching television or any other activity during meals. A study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that eating while you’re also distracted by something else means you’re less likely to be satisfied by your food. This makes it more likely you’ll overeat.

Sleep well. You might not think that sleep is your friend for weight loss but poor sleep can definitely hinder your weight loss efforts. This is because it can affect hormones linked to appetite and satiety so that you’re more likely to overeat and not feel full.

How Hypnotherapy Can Help

If you’re struggling to change your eating habits and relationship with food by yourself, hypnotherapy can help you to retrain your brain and break away from emotional eating (and any other factors that are affecting your relationship with food).

Hypnotherapy helps to address any emotional and psychological issues which have caused you to begin over eating in the first place, helping you to eliminate these so you can maintain a healthy weight even years after your initial hypnotherapy treatment.

You may have heard of “gastric band hypnotherapy” for weight loss and it can be very effective for managing your weight in the long term. It mimics the effects of having a real gastric band fitted and uses hypnotherapy, Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to make your brain feel that one has been fitted without the actual surgical procedure needing to take place.

My sessions include my “Weight Management Model” as standard, through which I teach you skills and tools to keep the weight off in the long term and stop potential for “yo yo dieting”. I also want to change emotional relationships with food so that food becomes a friend and not an enemy.

Contact me today to start taking control of your weight!