Have you ever thought, if only I would have been born to skinnier parents, I’d be able to lose weight easily? Is it truly genetics or learned behaviors from your family of origin that causes you to struggle with your weight? In most cases, genetics can be overcome with a healthy lifestyle. If you practice good eating habits and maintain an active lifestyle, you can have more control over your health and body. The unfortunate truth is that genetics only plays a small part in your weight challenges.

Researchers published in December of 2021 in the JAMA Pediatrics journal that having “fat” genetics does play an impact on treatment success in children who are either overweight or obese. However, as a factor in obesity, lifestyle conditions such as the environment, social and behavioral factors played the most important role in obesity treatment. Genetics only plays a small second place role.

While you may be more prone to gaining weight due to your genetics, it is more important for you to look at the lifestyle choices and lifestyle lessons you picked up from your parents that are contributing to your current weight challenges. That means that your weight challenges are due to environmental factors that are within your control.

Hypnosis can give you the power needed to exert more control in your life so you can stop being a victim of your situation. Instead, you can rise up as a winner as you take control over your life and your body.

Schedules today are busier than ever. Are you making or giving enough time for you to lose the weight you’d like?  One of the main excuses I’ve been given over the years for friends, family and random strangers not being able to lose weight is “I don’t have time.”  With cellphones, instant message and live video conferencing, it might feel like you don’t even have time to use the bathroom. You might also feel like, “I don’t even have the time to eat a healthy meal, let alone the massive amounts of time to cook a good meal. I’m struggling with juggling personal life with work life with personal obligations and with family. How am I supposed to fit in the hours and hours required to make eating healthier a priority too?”

I don’t have time to meal prep. I don’t have time to cook healthy meals. I don’t have time to eat healthy meals. I don’t have time to work out 30 minutes a day.

Raise your hand if you know what the 5 food groups are. Raise your hand if you know the difference between a carb, a protein, a fat and how they interact with your body. Food and nutrition education in the United States really needs an overhaul so people can make better choices, choices not decided by a company’s corporate profits. A lot of people I’ve worked with are often eating the wrong food combinations or not understanding that it’s SUGAR, not FAT, that makes you fat. It doesn’t help that marketing and free markets have caused you to learn untruths that were then accepted as truth.

The American diet has changed a lot in the last 50 years. Some of it influenced by GMOs, some of it influenced by biased research and some of it by dishonest marketing. There are also a number of marketing techniques that have destroyed our concept of truly is healthy; of these, the concept of breakfast stands very strong in my mind.

How many have heard the saying, “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day”? How many people actually know where it came from? This phrase was created by cereal genius Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and fellow 7th Day Adventist James Caleb Jackson and their efforts to promote breakfast cereal (as reported by Daytwo.com). It is said, that Dr. John Harvey Kellogg believed breakfast would “stop masturbation” so he created the famous Kellogg’s corn flakes. The original version was created with no sugar added. He believed that “anything that tasted too good” were considered a “heinous sin, self-pollution” (as reported by Ada McVean, B.Sc. at McGill.ca).

Read more here.

Who really has time to exercise in this fast paced world? Some of us juggle a primary 9 to 5 job, a second business you own and a handful of children stealing away your hours, minutes, seconds? Or worse yet, who would like “hitting the gym” to become your prison sentence since you have nothing else better to do? If you go to the gym, you lose a lot of time you could be doing something else. You don’t go to the gym, you feel guilty that you’re not making progress on your weight loss goals or you’re cheating yourself. I certainly do not want to live like that. 

How often do we go to the gym hoping that every minute on the treadmill will render reductions in our midsection measurements? After a few months, your waist size is still the same but the scale tells you that you’ve gotten even heavier than you were before. You become disheartened by the lack of results but you don’t want to quit on yourself hoping something will change for you.

When was the last time you had a quality 8 hours of sleep for any extended period of time? I used to spend hours upon hours at the gym, 5 to 6 days a week. I used to convince myself that I really enjoyed it. At some level, I did enjoy the endorphins from working so hard. The truth is, I also really hated feeling imprisoned by it. My friends were out having fun at the bars and clubs on any given night while I was pounding it out on the treadmill wondering where my abs had disappeared to. I didn’t realize that my limited sleep of 5 hours a night was affecting my weight loss results. 

Much like your diet, if you’re not sleeping properly, you may be destroying all the hard work you completed at the gym because you don’t sleep enough. Our bodies release a hormone called “cortisol” when we don’t sleep enough (and when we’re stressed out). This hormone tends to cause our bodies to retain weight.

• Have you lost control of how much, how often, and what you’re eating?
• Do you eat more when you’re stressed? Depressed? Sad? Bored? Would it be a benefit to you to be able to turn to something other than eating to deal with your emotional issues?
• Do you feel like you want to change but can’t due to unknown factors? 
• Hypnosis is great for habit change. This means, these habits you have developed over the course of your weight gain can be released so you don’t have to be imprisoned by them anymore. Break the chains that force you to carry these heavy weights.

If you’ve been sick or are currently taking medications, these medications could be causing you to gain weight. It’s very common to have weight gain as a side-effect of taking many medications. You should consult with your doctor or psychologist to see if your medications are causing you to gain weight and if there are other alternatives. 

Some illnesses prevent us from being able to be as active as we’d like. The good thing about our bodies is that our body fat percentage is determined more by our diet than it is by our physical activity; though both are needed for optimal health. 

• Cortisol levels could cause you to retain weight.
• Stress could cause you to cope by eating calories you don’t need. 
• Stress could cause you to sleep less causing you to gain weight or reduce your fat burning ability.