Get a little help with those resolutions

By Sam Harvey
Staff Reporter

Weight problems aren’t just affecting these Americans individually. Associated health problems are creating a major strain on the national health care system – and the same goes for smoking (although tobacco use is actually on the decline in the U.S.).

Whether people have the national health care system or their own best interests at heart, many will doubtless resolve to make a change this New Year’s holiday. No one’s saying it will be easy — but there is help available.

Already tried all the diets and pills (or nicotine patches and gum)? Several local practitioners offer another alternative, for the open-minded — hypnotism.

Anne Connor of Bethany Massage and Healing Arts noted the success rates in her own hypnotherapy practice — as high as 80 percent for smoking cessation.

“The person has to want it, though,” Connor emphasized. “They can’t be doing it for anybody else. Not their husband, not their wife, not their children.

“If they’re not ready, I’ll tell them, ‘You’re not ready,’” she said. She said she tries to weed out the people who aren’t really ready, and that is why she is able to boast of high success rates.
But when they are ready, she said, hypnosis works like a charm. “Takes all the pain out of it,” Connor affirmed.

Here’s an added incentive — she’s running a special right now, $100 until the end of January (more than half off).

Weight loss is much more difficult, Connor emphasized, and she didn’t claim any specific success rate. She said people with weight problems fall back into their old patterns much more frequently than former smokers.

“Our lives are stressful — we’re going too fast all the time,” Connor reflected. “We use food like cigarettes.”

She said she believes there is far more involved in tobacco addiction than a mere dependence on nicotine — and that is doubly true for people with weight problems, she said.

There are emotional issues at play, Connor pointed out, and she always regresses her clients, trying to find the source — hurt feelings, anger, unwillingness to speak up.

Many people have formed associations between feelings and food, she said. That, and the very nature of America’s fast-paced culture, leads many to take comfort in, or at least push down their stress levels with, food.

And it is a lot easier to justify eating than it is smoking, Connor noted — “You have to eat, right?”

Just as she screens people to see if they are ready for smoking cessation, she said, she would not practice hypnotherapy for weight loss until her clients recognize they have an “emotional eating problem,” as she described it.

Connor admitted there is no magical solution. “It’s all behavior mod(ification),” she said.

But who knows — hypnosis could be just the nudge needed to make the old resolutions stick this year.

Connor has practiced in alternative therapy for more than 25 years, locally for 18 of them. For more information, call Bethany Massage and Healing Arts at (302) 537-0510.