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The easy solution for successful weight loss

Fleur • 25 January 2021

Why is dieting so hard?

Why is dieting so painful and tricky? And sometimes seems to do nothing? Can you starve yourself for days and see no results apart from feeling tired and awful, whereas others in the slimming groups seem to drop weight without even trying? Is it because we are doing it wrong? Or that we are broken in some way? Are you destined to be overweight forever?


No, I promise you're not! 


It is easy to lose weight when you learn some simple tricks and understand the science behind the fat.


When we put on weight, we are generally creating visceral fat, which stores around organs. This is very dangerous to our bodies as it adds strain to our vital parts. The visceral fat is made up of cells that produce hormones such as estrogen, leptin and cortisol. 


  • Estrogen is the hormone that women create for fertility, and it is the hormone we decrease when we approach the menopause, this is why often we find it hard to lose weight when we get to a certain age.
  • Leptins are the hormones that make us feel full. Unfortunately, if we have more fats cells, we produce more leptin, therefore need to eat more food to feel full- most unfair!!
  • Cortisol is the stress hormone! The more fat we have, the more stress hormones we have! Cortisol works as a high energy “protector” to get us through tricky moments in our lives, like moving house, getting through a deadline etc. It encourages us to feel hunger (especially for high carb/ fat/ sugary foods) so it can run at high energy to get through the mission. Cortisol is designed to help us through short bursts of stress and needs to burn calories fast, however if the stress is still ongoing, the cortisol will be confused, and instead of burning calories, will store them! We will feel exhausted, more stressed and won't lose any weight.


Stress is often described as being negative, but this is not exactly true. We all need a bit of stress in our lives to incentivise us to get out of bed, feed and clothe ourselves, go to work, look after our families etc. There are 2 types of stress; challenge stress and threat stress.


  • Challenge stress is the healthy useful kind, the gentle push towards our goals, the kind that makes us say “that's gonna be tricky, but I can do it”. This type of stress controls the amount of cortisol running through our bodies and allows us to feel in charge of our lives.
  • Threat stress is the kind we don’t want! When we feel life is getting on top of us, out of our comfort zone and that things are slipping out of our control we are producing loads of cortisol which encourages us to comfort eat. We will feel tired, negative and hungry.


We can control our stress by using positive mind techniques. Mindfulness, meditation, gratitude diaries can all help us to focus on the positive things in our lives.  Concentrating on POSITIVE thoughts, POSITIVE actions and POSITIVE interactions create happy hormones and reduce fat building stress hormones. 


Using solution focused hypnotherapy, I can help you to learn how to lose weight without trying! We can challenge inbuilt behaviours that have learnt to rely on food as a way to feel good, and understand that we have the ability to:


  • Choose the way we eat
  • Choose what we eat

And...

  • Look at why we eat, often we have formed unhelpful eating patterns due to previous emotional issues surrounding food. 


True weight loss happens when we switch our bodies to burn calories, not to store them. This is why sometimes dieting doesn’t seem to work, and we can get dispondentant, disparaging and give up. 


Being in charge of the stress you are under will aid all areas of your life, you will sleep better, feel great and be your true, best self, inside and out! 

I am offering FREE initial consultations to explain more.

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Why Smiling is so good for you

by Fleur Dash • 18 June 2024
Smiling is not something we learn to do, it comes completely naturally as it is a behaviour passed down through our evolution. It is thought to have originated over 30 million years ago and was used by apes and monkeys as a way of showing potential predators they were harmless. The smile we know today is the universal sign of happiness. It is one of the first expressions made by babies innately. . The baby is usually rewarded for this smile with mirroring smiles, love and attention. The behaviour becomes reinforced with feelings of pleasure and safety. This is true of all babies regardless of culture and environment, as Paul Ekman (the world’s leading expert on facial expressions) discovered; smiling is a basic and biological uniform human expression. Charles Darwin, who in addition to theorising on evolution in The Origin of the Species , also developed the Facial Feedback Response Theory, which suggests that the act of smiling actually makes us feel better (rather than smiling being a result of feeling good). When our brains feel happy we produce neurotransmitters that make us feel good. Dopamine, serotonin and endorphins are released transmitting neural signals to your facial muscles to trigger a smile. The release of serotonin with a smile is nature's own anti-depressant. It helps give our mood a lift in the same way the prescribed medication works by increasing the level of serotonin in the brain. Smiling stimulates our brain's reward mechanisms in a way that even chocolate can’t match. British researchers found that one smile can provide the same level of brain stimulation as up to 2,000 chocolate bars and can be as stimulating as receiving up to £16,000. The smile can be thought of as an “anchor”, it is a feeling that has been anchored to a particular group of muscles that is triggered when we use them. I’m sure you have put a smile on your face to help you to enter a room or when meeting someone new. This is because you get the same benefits when you actually force yourself to smile as you do when you smile naturally, this feeling encourages us when we need a boost. We create anchors unconsciously all the time when we assign meaning to a particular sensation, such as when a song always reminds you of a certain memory or person. Anchors are a very useful tool I use with my clients as we can learn to connect other feelings to other triggers on the body. By thinking about a calm time using all of our senses, we create a strong emotional link to that feeling of calm . Doing this while squeezing our fingers or holding our wrists literally makes a physical connection to that emotion. Repeating this over and over makes a new neural path in the brain, thus making a new anchor. The brain can only focus on a handful of items of information at any time (around 7), so while it is concentrating and recalling calm , it is unable to connect with any other input such as stress or worry. This is a brilliant way to train the brain into being in your control, thinking of happy thoughts and letting go of everything else.
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