Belly Full or Mindful? A Thinking Thin Secret Shared!

As a professional hypnotist my stop smoking clients frequently ask me if I ever smoked (short answer: I tried it a few times in my younger years and didn't like it, so the habit never caught on.)

But usually my weight loss clients never ask if I ever had a weight problem-yet I was some 30 pounds heavier a few years back. Since I am above average height I didn't have the classic "obese" look but the extra pounds did have a very negative effect on my healthy, energy and comfort levels. And my pants didn't fit!

It was around then I took some positive steps to drop the unwanted weight including stepping up my activity levels and cutting back on refined foods which allowed me to drop about 20 pounds over the course of a year. 

What I want to share with you is another helpful practice that helped me drop an additional 10 pounds this year with really no extra effort on my part: mindfulness.

I stumbled into this by accident as I took a continuing professional education program to become a Certified Mindfulness Meditation Instructor to supplement my traditional hypnosis training. 

Mindfulness, for those of you who are not familiar with the term, is a state of mind where you are fully engaged in the present moment.

Virtually anxiety and stress occurs when we leave the present moment and either dwell on negative events from the past (which cannot be changed) or imagine dreadful things happening in the future. Yet in the present moment as long as you are breathing, right now you are OK.

Mindfulness meditation uses several techniques to help people become more present oriented rather than following some made up line of thinking. With practice you can learn to let a thought be a thought or a feeling be a feeling without become entangled with it and giving it extra energy.

The benefits of a mindfulness practice can include decreased stress levels, a better ability to cope with pain and discomfort and increased freedom from negative habit patterns.

In the case of weight loss, with mindfulness you learn that you can experience a thought, feeling or temptation to eat without having to respond to it. Its just a thought or feeling, after all. 

Example: you might see a fast food restaurant sign and feel an urge to make a stop. Yet the truth is you can go quite a long time without eating, its highly unlikely you have to eat right now. Almost always you can wait awhile until a healthier option is available.

As I practiced mindfulness I would catch myself going, "that's a temptation to eat, but I don't have to right now, I'm OK." And as I mentioned earlier on, I released an extra 10 pounds without any sense of struggle-no "angel vs. devil" scenario. Just letting a thought be a thought...

Mindfulness training is something I offer to all of my clients in addition to the guided hypnosis processes and other methods of self-hypnosis. If you would like to learn more a free, confidential phone consultation is available, call (732) 714-7040.