Many hypnotists offer weight reduction programs, but it's my experience that most clients don't know how hypnosis will help them lose the weight. There are different approaches to this.

The first approach would be to focus on the future, and working with hypnosis to make healthy behaviour the habit instead of bad habits of overeating and no exercise. A part of this proces is getting the subconscious mind to accept a weightloss. You probably know someone who can eat and eat and eat again, and never seem to gain a pound. Almost all people will argue that this is genetically determined and therefore these people are just fortunate with their genes. Personally I'm not sure that this is the entire truth. I believe the unconscious mind has a lot to with losing weight or not. Therefore I believe that going on a diet is the worst thing you can do, because when you install the belief in your mind that "as long as I eat this, and only this, I will lose weight". This belief does you no good, because it implicit installs the belief that "if I eat ANYTHING besides my diet, I will gain a lot of weight". This could explain why people on diets lose a decent amount of weight, but as soon as they divert from the diet, they gain more than they lost. Hypnosis should help you install good and healthy habits, and focus less on food and weight. By living the healthy habits, the weightloss will eventually come.

Another useful part of hypnosis for weightloss is the identification of feelings that are suppressed by eating. Loneliness and hunger is often felt in the same area of the body (the stomach), and that can mislead some people to think that eating is the way to settle that unpleasant feeling. This is not the case, since the feeling doesn't stem from a lack of food. You could actually say, that the feeling will only get stronger the more you eat, unless you are in a very non-judgmental environment. It's not an easy task for the obiese person to be very social. So that's another use for hypnosis to lose weight; gaining some insights into the feelings and actual needs of your body.

Sometimes it can be necessary to dig into past events in the life of the obiese client. In the literature there is an excellent example of how past events builds up to an unconscious part that protects the individual by prohibiting weightloss. The case can be read in "Analytical Hypnotherapy" by Edgar A. Barnett. Babara - as is the name of the client - has had bad experiences with the opposite sex two times when she has lost weight. Some part of her unconscious mind decides to prevent this by making it impossible for Barbara to lose weight, the same part almost prevented her to show up for her second session of hypnotherapy. After resolving this issue and finding different ways for this part to protect Barbara, she started to lose weight.

This is some of the useful ways hypnosis can help you lose weight. Other hypnotists that have specialized in weightloss with hypnosis might have other ways to use hypnosis, therefore I will encourage you to look around the webpages of other hypnotists.