There are a number of factors that we all need to adhere to in order to keep our weight where it needs to be. None is more important than portion control. Portion control is also one of the toughest. Portion control can play a significant role in achieving your health and weight goals. You may already be eating all the right foods and exercising. But if you still find yourself carrying excess weight, it could be because you are simply consuming too much. Portion control can make a big difference. Good portion control won't just make you slimmer - it gives you more energy. Eating the right amount will mean your body actually has to work less hard to digest unnecessary excess food.
Americans spend $100 billion annually on diet products. This exceeds the projections for the entire Federal education, training, employment and social services budgets. In fact, this figure is more than the gross national product of Ireland. An estimated 100 million Americans will go on diets this year. And while some will succeed in taking the weight off, very few--perhaps five percent--will manage to keep all of it off in the long run.
Why is it so difficult for us to stop eating when we are already feeling satisfied? Why don't we know how, when, and how much to cut down so that you can really begin to see some progress in reaching your weight goals. It all starts with our subconscious minds. How many times have you heard as a child, "your not leaving this table until your plate is clean". I need to digress a bit at this point and talk about how our subconscious and conscious minds work.
Conscious and subconscious are really just shorthand terms to describe the general characteristics of the human mind. The "conscious mind" is the bit where we tend to "live" - the bit you might think of as "you". If there's a little voice reading these words out loud in your head, that's the conscious mind talking. The subconscious mind is everything else!
The subconscious controls all of the processes that you don't have to think about - the heart rate, the blood pressure, tissue growth, cell regeneration, the immune system and so on. It's where our thoughts, memories and accumulated experience reside. It controls our emotions, our habits and our responses to the world.
In many ways, it creates that world for us. That means that the reality you're actually aware of from moment to moment has been brought to your conscious attention by the subconscious.
The conscious mind is more logical, critical and analytical - it's constantly making value judgments. If somebody was to say to you "you really should eat less, you know, it's terribly bad for you", you're highly unlikely to be able to control your portions on the spot. You're more likely to come up with a dozen, rational sounding reasons as to why you should carry on eating, or you might tell them to shove off and mind their own business. Even if you do consciously accept that you should eat less, it's not the conscious part of the mind that's keeping the habit in place.
The unconscious part of the mind, on the other hand, is much more accepting. It's also quite literal and tends to take things personally, relating any information it receives to you as an individual. The only way your are ever going to be able to change the way your subconscious mind views portion control is by updating it is with new and more helpful information, like reprogramming a computer. A great way to do this is through hypnosis. Hypnosis works by bypassing the critical conscious mind (through relaxation or linguistic techniques), and speaking directly to the unconscious in a language which it understands - pattern, association and metaphor.
As mentioned earlier, the unconscious mind is basically in charge. The vast majority of things that we do are unconscious, which we can be grateful for - if you had to consciously think about every single thing you did, you wouldn't do anything. However, it can lead us astray. Most problems are things that we've learned how to do at an unconscious level - we've just learned how to do them in an unhelpful way ("you're not leaving this table until your plate is clean). Hypnosis works, then, by shaping our perception of reality by dealing directly with the unconscious mind, the seat of most of our problems, and most of our solutions too.
You can learn how to unconsciously know when enough is enough on your plate !
Why is it so hard to exercise portion control?
Habit rules our lives much more than we realize. We eat because it's time to eat (even though you had a snack just half an hour ago). We overeat out of politeness, or not wanting to 'waste' what is on our plate, or just because we are so used to stuffing ourselves that we have forgotten how to recognize when we've had enough.
Of course, there are some common sense things that can help you control portion size:
- You can consciously eat more slowly - this gives your stomach a chance to register its fullness in your brain and switch off your appetite.
- You can start your meal with soup - a low calorie soup can be very satisfying and allow you to feel happy with a much smaller portion for your main course.
- You can use the old smaller plate trick - so you literally have to eat smaller portions.
- You can avoid buffets and ignore 'mega-meal' deals.
Hypnosis is a powerful tool for portion control
But great as all of the above advice is, you still need to overcome habit and compulsion - and that's where hypnosis can really help. Food is fuel, and fuel needs to be of the right quality and quantity. Imagine trying to put more fuel into your car when it's already full. It just doesn't make sense.
Portion control will take you into a deeply relaxed state and quickly train your unconscious mind to know instinctively when to leave excess food alone and allow your digestion to be so much more comfortable. You will rediscover the pleasure of being in tune with what your own body really needs for nourishment. Do you want to gain control of your eating habits today ?
