The different varieties of hypno gastric band once promised to revolutionise approaches to weight loss in this country. What happened?
Hello. If you’re looking for hypnotherapy in Reading, London, Oxford, Wallingford or Thame and are looking to lose some weight, to be slimmer, happier and healthier, have a read of this post before choosing a hypnotherapist.
Today we’re obsessed with the idea of weight loss jabs. Millions of people are now spending hundreds of pounds per month on the promise of easy weight-loss. All you have to do is pay the fee and the weight will just fall away without any effort whatsoever. However, I am now receiving calls from people who have no wish to continue with such jabs. The side effects are too great for some people. The fees are too high for some people. The appetite just returns with a vengeance once the jabs stop. I think that these jabs will one day go the same way as the hypno-band. Perhaps then, at least for a while, people will realise that they have to change if their weight is to change.
This hypno-band is now largely of historic interest. It stands as testament to the fact that there is no quick fix to obesity and no short cut to weight loss. There is only the next big fad or the thorough, lasting work to be done.
So what was it all about?
I remember reading about the hypno-band, in a news-paper back in about 2010. It was one of those things which caught my interest as I trained to become a hypnotherapist. It sounded amazing, to my untrained ears, and promised fast and effective solutions. I was all into those back then. I was rather impatient as a younger man.
The hypno-band approach featured the use of hypnosis to bring the unconscious mind to believe that the client’s body had undergone a gastric band operation. The stomach would then be unable to accept excessive quantities of food and the client would begin to lose weight, fast.
What a wonderful idea!
Everyone was jumping on the bandwagon and everybody seemed to be singing its praises. The person who had developed the approach carved the nation into geographical areas and sold one licence per area. Who would want to miss out on the opportunity to be Reading’s only hyno-band practitioner. Furthermore, if it was the real deal, who could afford to miss such an opportunity?
It was commercially successful. It promised to be the perfect solution to that great big obesity problem which was just beginning to hit the headlines at that time…
Everybody wants a quick fix!
Before hypnotherapists invented this ‘solution,’ the answer to a weight problem rested with will-power, any number of diets or a serious operation. Once will-power and diets had been tried, who wouldn’t choose the hypno-gastric band when faced with the steely alternative of the surgeon’s knife? Hypnotherapy might work but the hypno gastric band was the short-cut to end all short-cuts.
Clients began calling to ask if I offered the treatment. Everybody wanted a slice of this pie!
I chose to investigate the most popular varieties of hypno-gastric bands. I thought it might be useful to undertake the training in order to learn from those who had invented a very successful (in a commercial sense) product. I had my doubts as to its worth (as will be explained below) but thought that I would give the concept a hearing. A few hundred quid and a weekend of training in the company of fellow hypnotherapists? Why not?
A bunch of scripts and a couple of CDs
Well, I contacted the inventor of the field’s most prominent product and enquired as to how I might enrol. The Reading area was full, I was informed. There was no room for another practitioner in the local area.
Berkshire was completely packed out with people who had bought their own patch of territory. In your patch you’d be the only person authorised to use this product. It was the same for Oxford and Wallingford. I was too late.
What a great piece of marketing it was. Buy your own patch or someone else will! There was a scramble to be the area’s weight loss expert!
I then contacted a hypnotherapist acquaintance whom I knew had had the training. I asked him for details of the course: how much it cost and how long it took. “Oh,” he said, “it’s a bargain. There’s no course. You pay a hundred quid and they send you some CDs and a bunch of scripts.”
That hypnotherapist has shut up shop during the course of the covid 19 crisis. Perhaps he fell for the hype of such approaches, continued to use them and so failed to build up a source of referrals from genuinely satisfied clients.
You see, it’s easy to lose weight. Pretty much every overweight person has gone on a diet and met their target weight loss. It’s easy to lose weight. The real problem lies in keeping it gone.
Effective therapy doesn’t come from a script
Anybody qualified as a hypnotherapist can apply for such a course and they needn’t ever attend a single lecture on how to apply it. They bung the provider a hundred pounds and are sent scripts which are then read to those who are prepared to spend £375+ for a course of hypnotherapy.
Hypnotherapy is an unregulated profession. This means that any number of people 
can create a course and produce a hypnotherapist. There is no national standard for hypnotherapists.
I personally think it’s a scandal. I have nothing but scorn for those who deliberately choose a quick and lightweight course, thinking that they will be ready, in any shape or form, for the challenges which working with mental health issues will present.
Clients deserve a therapist with the best possible training, They deserve a therapist who is ready and able to help client to reach real solutions. They deserve therapists who have had enough personal-therapy to be self-aware.
Such therapists aren’t to be found coming out of courses which last all of a few weekends. They don’t pay a few hundred quid for useless scripts.
The NCHP, with whom I trained, presses for regulation of hypnotherapy precisely because they know that their courses merit UKCP accreditation. This means that their courses would satisfy those who may one day regulate the profession.
You deserve better!
I believe that you deserve better because you really, really do. Hypnotherapy isn’t cheap and so it needs to be worth the investment.
Click here to read my main page on how hypnotherapy could help you lose weight
Anybody can read a script. Hypnotising somebody isn’t difficult. I could teach you how in twenty minutes. You already know how to hypnotise yourself, most people do it all the time. What is more demanding is the skill of using psychotherapy and hypno-psychotherapy in order to get to the bottom of the issue and to tailor each hypno-therapeutic intervention to the needs and uniqueness of every single client.
Every client is different and no one script can hope to tailor to every individual circumstance, need and personality.
You’re unique. The reasons for your weight-gain are unique. The solution will have to be unique too!
If you’re reading this post because you’re currently overweight, let me ask you one question: why did you first begin to eat more calories than you used? If a thousand people chose to email me with their answers to this question, I would have a thousand different and unique responses.
Could a script, costing one hundred pounds, cover them all?
Hypnotherapy works at its best when practised by psychotherapists who are able to get to the bottom of the issues which every unique client brings to them. Clients achieve the best results when a skilled hypno-psychotherapist assists them in mastering their own issues and difficulties.
Weight-loss is all about taking control, accepting responsibility and understanding that we can ALL determine our own futures.
Weight-loss requires resolving those issues which lie behind its gain.
Hypnotherapy accelerates the process by which psychotherapy helps clients to achieve their goals. It is not magic and it is not a short cut.
If you’re serious about both losing weight and keeping it off then I may be the person to help you.
Take control, don’t give it away to some imaginary band!
The different varieties of hypno gastric-bands effectively told people that they can’t exercise control, that a hypnotherapist needs to take control, that you need to be led to believe in the power of an illusory belt around your stomach. It’s a quick-fix, it’s a cop-out and it’s a refusal to accept that people already possesses every strength they need with which to achieve their goals. If the client can’t see it, yet, it’s our job to show them.
And so, I never chose to offer any form of hypno gastric-band in Resolved! Hypnotherapy. Short cuts bring short-term gains. If you’re paying for hypnotherapy in order to lose weight then why not pay for effective solutions? You’ve already tried the diet which promises the world and delivers nothing, right?
What happened to the hypno-band?
Nobody talks about the hypno-band anymore. When hypnotherapists discuss approaches to helping their clients to lose weight it never comes up in conversation. I haven’t heard anybody mention it for years now. It has been left to rot and joins the long list of wonder cures which promised great things and delivered just the same old disappointments.
Someone became rich through selling it. Good luck to them. It doesn’t seem, however, to have become the standard treatment for obesity. If it had been as effective as it promised then it would have been NICE approved by now.
The lesson is clear. If you put your trust in the newest fad then you’re at risk of losing your money. Getting to work on sustainable approaches which put YOU in charge is the long term solution to slimming and to every other psychological problem too.
Why place your trust in yet another short-cut when the long term solution is just a ‘phone call away? Contact me here for more details or simply use the form below.