NLP For Weight Loss

NLP For Weight Loss

Ok so what the heck is NLP. Well if you haven’t heard of it before, NLP is short for Neuro Linguistic Programming, I know, It sounds weird right? Well essentially it is part science part art developed in the 1970s by a psychiatrist called Richard Bandler and a linguistics professor called John Grinder, their work was developed from previous work by Virginia Satir, family therapist, Fritz Perlz who developed Gestalt Therapy and Milton Erickson famous psychiatrist and hypnosis specialist.

Neuro Linguistic Programming offers a framework for personal effectiveness and is based on 4 basic principles: Rapport, with yourself, others and your environment, Outcomes, focusing on what you want to achieve, your goals, Senses, using all your senses to communicate with yourself and others, Viewpoint, being flexible in the way you see, experience, present and interpret different situations.

Essentially NLP is all about deliberately controling your mood, state, thoughts, actions and behavior to produce the outcome you desire.

Sometimes  NLP can be excessively complicated when really there is no need for it to be, a lot of jargon is used, much studying is advocated and some of it is just plain ineffective. Having said this though, there are some NLP techniques that can help you change unhelpful eating patterns and as such enable you to lose weight naturally.

How to use NLP to help you lose weight.

You already have everything within you that you need to achieve any goal you want. Its a bold statement I know, but it is the truth, it is just a question of believing it.

NLP is about programming your brain to do what you want it to do and altering conditioned behavior, in this sense it is closely allied with hypnosis, the main difference between the two is that with NLP you are making the changes consciously and deliberately, with hypnosis you are putting yourself into a relaxed state whereby you can communicate directly with your subconscious and actually bypass your conscious mind – it is more automatic. Personally I find hypnosis is more intuitive and natural, but you will find plenty of people who prefer the structure of NLP.

OK so how to do it.

1. Language.

The language you use is extremely important. If you keep saying to yourself, “I wish I wasn’t so fat, I can never seem to lose weight, I just have to look at a donut and I put on 10lbs”.  You are programing your brain to believe that you are fat, that you can’t lose weight, and that you put on weight really easily. Our brains are amazing. Dr Maxwell Maltz, in his fantastic bestseller Psycho-Cybernetics, calls it the Automatic Success Mechanism and describes how our minds are set up to achieve exactly what we believe.

If we believe we are fat and can’t lose weight then we will achieve exactly that. If, however, we believe we are slim, love to eat healthy food and enjoy exercise, we will achieve exactly that. So it is really worth paying attention to the way you talk to yourself most of the time.

If you want to change your mindset so you think and eat like a naturally thin person, the language you use should always be positive and in the present. For example ‘I will lose weight’, or ‘I am going to lose weight’, suggests that this might be something you will achieve in the future, with the emphasis on might! What would work better in terms of reprograming your thoughts is the following “I love to eat healthy food”, “I am happy at my ideal weight”. After much repetition this will convince your brain that the change has already occurred and it will quickly work towards making it so.

In the beginning, it feels as if you are lying to yourself, but it is only your conscious mind that his aware of this, your subconscious doesn’t know the difference between an imagined fact and true fact, it only takes into account your own beliefs. It is possible to convince your subconscious of something when consciously you know the opposite.

Your self image is based on your beliefs about yourself which in turn were formed through experience, your beliefs about yourself can be based on absolute fact but also on false perceptions or unsubstantiated beliefs. Think of it this way, there are plenty of gorgeous, slim people who think they look ugly and overweight – even though consciously they know they are fine their self image, based in their subconscious mind compels them to think otherwise.

Self image is essentially the key to achieving your ideal weight, by focusing on the kind of language you use to define yourself you can go a long way to changing your self image from fat to thin, weight loss then becomes automatic.

2. State and Anchoring.

Your state makes a huge difference to your results. If you are feeling, despondent, demotivated, depressed you are going to find it really hard to stick with your goal plan of eating healthily, exercising and reaching your ideal weight. When you feel that way you are more likely to reach for the first high fat sugary snack to can find in the hope of changing the way you feel. It is, however, possible to alter your state very quickly so that you are motivated, energized, happy and focused on your goal, in a far less fattening way.

So if you are feeling low, rather than changing your state by eating chocolate you can do it this way:

• Stand up tall

• Put your shoulders back
• Force yourself to smile
• Think of a time you felt really motivated (if you can’t think of a time make it up and imagine how it would feel)
• Exclaim Yes! as if you have just achieved something you have been trying to do for a while.
• Anchor that state, you can use a word, or physical anchor such as making a fist, or squeezing your thumb and index finger together,or use a particular piece of music – whatever works best for you. This physical gesture, word or sound becomes associated in your mind with the state of being motivated, and with practice you will be able to use this anchor to re-activate this state whenever you need.

3. Reframing.

This is literally looking at things from a different point of view and therefore changing the meaning for you. You can often change your point of view simply by changing your state as explained in the point above. Things can appear almost impossible when you are in a depressed frame of mind, but they can seem effortless when you are motivated and positive.

Here’s an example of re-framing, what do you feel when you think about dieting, commonly people will think, deprivation, hardship, misery, problematic, time consuming. This frame is not exactly going to help you lose weight. What if you deliberately reframed your view of dieting. Think about the results you will achieve, think about all that good food you will be feeding your body, whole, natural food is so much more appetizing than junk food, think about how much energy you will have, and think about the sense of achievement, think about learning new cookery skills and recipes if that appeals to you. Your weight loss plan looks so much better now, in fact I want to start right now!

Now don’t make the mistake of thinking you are just lying to yourself, because that is not the case, your original view of dieting, is no more real that the positive view of dieting, it is simply a case of picking the one that serves you better.

This is is a very brief foray into the world of NLP for weight loss, if you want to learn more about changing state and reframing there is a you should check out anything by Anthony Robbins, he has developed his own Neuro Associative Conditioning technique, and is a well know presence in the field of personal development, success and motivation. Other recommended reading on NLP is Paul McKenna, who combines hypnosis and nlp techniques, and the book NLP: The New Technology of Achievement by Steve Andreas and Charles Faulkner.

Check out my articles on Hypnotherapy, Affirmations and Creative Visualization which are all relevant to this article.