Trying to Lose weight? Consider Virtual Gastric Banding (VGB.)
The New Zealand Health Survey 2016/17 found that: around 1 in 3 adults (aged 15 years and over) were obese (32%) a further 34% of adults were overweight but not obese. 50% of Māori adults were obese.
For all those striving to lose weight, Blenheim clinical hypnotherapist, Chris Steadman has one simple and clear message: STOP dieting.
Her experience with such clients has shown dieting to be pointless, until they can tackle the root cause of their problematic relationship with food.
“There’s a reason that the plethora of fad diets that are available these days don’t work long-term,” she said. “Overcoming bad eating habits is a decision of the mind, not of the tummy. What people actually need is a mental reboot.”
Very often, the ‘triggers’ of dietary problems go as far back as childhood experiences, according to Chris.
“When we’re born, our bodies are kitted out with everything they need to sense when we are hungry. Babies cry because they need nutrition, not because they want to over-indulge.”
“Then, as we grow, experiences form habits. Maybe our parents offer us sweets or chocolate as a treat and we start to associate such things with feeling happy, content and safe. Many children have been taught to ‘clean their plate’ before they could leave the table. Others eat as though each meal is a race. These bad eating habits become more of a lifestyle choice, than a means to keep us alive and healthy.”
In New Zealand, sugar addiction seems to be a very common problem. Excessive sugar is highly addictive. Happily, this problem too can readily be overcome by hypnotherapy.
Chris rates the reverse psychology involved in dieting as also damaging.
“The trouble with diets is that they focus on the negatives, like depriving ourselves, from the outset. They also accentuate an obsession with food – while they might push us to replace ‘bad’ foods with ‘good’ foods, they still have us focusing on eating all the time,” she said.
“In my opinion, this is why most diets aren’t sustainable in the long term. While the most successful ones might see us lose weight and achieving our weight loss goals initially, we’ll eventually fall back into our old ways. This is because dieting does not address the fundamental mind-set causes of our tendency towards over-eating.”
The first step towards developing a long term, healthy relationship with food, is to re-set our subconscious to do away with such ingrained behaviour. It is this focus that makes the Ntrance Clinic’s Virtual Gastric Band programme so successful.
Virtual Gastric Banding (VGB) has achieved worldwide recognition since Sheila Grainger first developed the programme in the UK seven years ago. Thousands of people all over the globe now benefit from the programme. Most participants in the programme, when they follow Sheila’s simple advice, implanted by the hypnotherapist, steadily lose weight at approximately a kilo a week, until arriving at their target.
Instead of expensive and often painful, invasive bariatric surgery, in which the surgeon physically restricts the size of the stomach, VGB alters peoples’ attitudes to food so that they no longer eat more than their well-being requires.
“It’s about snapping out of ‘trance eating’ – while driving, or sitting at your desk, for example – to consciously eat the right things, in the right quantities at the right times, throughout the day.
“I often hear comments such as ‘for the first time in forty-five years, I’m no longer constantly thinking about food and I am coping with my life so much more easily, without stress’. Another, chocolate addict, tongue in cheek, complained that I had ruined her life, as she now found chocolate inedible!”
People undergoing the ‘VGB’ programme participate in a series of four to five individually tailored, hypnotherapy sessions. These employ the latest mind management techniques to help people change their habits and, in this case, develop a new relationship with food.
