BEFORE YOU BEGIN
Welcome To Your Guided Weight Loss Transformation
Before we begin, I want to explain what Lose For Life actually is, what you'll experience as you move through this transformation, and why I've chosen to bring together some of the different approaches you'll encounter along the way.
Because I certainly didn't start out believing in all of them.
I didn't begin this journey as a behavioural weight-loss specialist.
I began as a single mum, living on benefits in a council flat, who had spent most of her life struggling with her weight and desperately trying to understand why I kept ending up back in the same place.
I didn't come from a background where people talked about neuroscience, subconscious conditioning, behavioural psychology or nervous-system regulation.
And I'm not expecting you to have an understanding of those things either.
You don't even necessarily need to want one.
I've deliberately created Lose For Life in human language.
There is science, evidence, behavioural theory and therapeutic understanding underpinning this transformation, but you don't need to learn the terminology or understand all of the mechanisms in order to experience and apply what we're going to do together.
If you are somebody who does want to understand the deeper science behind Lose For Life, I've created a dedicated page where you can explore the research, evidence and principles that underpin this work.
I'll show you where to find that shortly.
But here, we're going to talk like human beings.
And I think it's important you know that because, when I first started exploring some of the approaches that eventually became part of my own transformation, my response wasn't exactly:
Oh yes, this sounds fascinating.
It was more:
Nah mate. That's ridiculous.
Take hypnosis.
My perception of hypnosis came largely from stage hypnosis.
People clucking like chickens, apparently having no idea what they were doing and somebody seemingly having control over their mind.
Absolutely not.
Then there was visualisation.
Breathwork.
Tapping.
Working with the subconscious mind.
Some of it sounded a bit woo woo to me.
And I'm not knocking people who are all about that life. If that's your thing, fair play.
It just wasn't mine.
I was sceptical.
But I was also desperate.
I was desperate for relief from the relationship I'd developed with food and weight, and desperate to finally break free from a cycle I'd spent so much of my life trapped inside.
And eventually I realised something.
If I was willing to become curious about my behaviour, I also needed to be willing to become curious about how I could change it.
So instead of immediately dismissing something because it didn't fit with what I already believed, I started asking questions.
What actually is hypnosis?
What happens during visualisation?
Why can breathing differently affect the way we feel?
What is tapping actually doing?
What does behavioural science tell us about the way thoughts, emotions, learned responses and behaviours can change?
And the more I learned, the more my perception changed.
I learned that cognitive behavioural hypnosis was a very different conversation from the stage hypnosis I'd associated with the word hypnosis.
Nobody was going to make me cluck like a chicken.
Nobody was taking control of my mind.
Instead, I began to understand how hypnosis could be combined with cognitive and behavioural approaches to create a deeply focused, relaxed state in which I could work with some of the thoughts, beliefs, associations and learned responses that were influencing my behaviour.
And suddenly that became very relevant to weight loss.
Because I already knew what to eat.
What I needed help with was everything that kept happening between knowing what I wanted to do and actually doing it.
I started looking differently at visualisation too.
I'd previously associated visualisation with imagining something you wanted and somehow expecting the universe to deliver it.
Again...
Nah mate.
But what I began learning about was completely different.
Visualisation could be used much more practically.
I could mentally rehearse behaviours, responses and situations before I experienced them.
I could practise seeing myself respond differently to something that would ordinarily trigger an old pattern, strengthen the picture of the person I was becoming and make the behaviours I wanted to develop feel more familiar.
That interested me.
Then there was breathwork and advanced relaxation.
For years, I'd thought about weight loss almost entirely in terms of food and exercise.
I hadn't thought much about the state I was actually trying to make those choices from.
What happened when I was stressed?
Overwhelmed?
Emotionally reactive?
Running on empty?
What happened to my ability to pause and make an intentional choice when everything inside me was screaming for immediate relief?
Learning ways to deliberately slow myself down and change my physiological state gave me something I hadn't realised I needed.
Space between what I felt and what I did next.
And then there was tapping.
I'll be honest, tapping on points around my face and body while thinking or talking about something I was struggling with wasn't exactly an obvious next step in my weight-loss journey.
It looked strange to me.
But by then I'd learned something important.
Something looking unfamiliar wasn't evidence that it had nothing to offer me.
So I became curious about that too.
I explored how tapping could be used alongside psychological approaches to work with things such as emotional distress, difficult thoughts and cravings, and I experienced for myself what happened when I stopped immediately dismissing something simply because it didn't look like the kind of weight-loss work I'd been taught to expect.
And underneath all of these different approaches was a much bigger realisation.
I had spent years trying to change my weight by changing what I ate and how much I moved.
But my eating and movement didn't happen in isolation.
There were thoughts behind my choices.
Emotions.
Beliefs.
Habits.
Learned associations.
Automatic responses.
Stress.
Cravings.
Old experiences.
The way I saw myself.
The way I spoke to myself.
The things I did almost automatically before I'd even consciously decided to do them.
So if those things could influence the behaviours that ultimately influenced my weight, surely it made sense for me to become curious about ways of working with those things too.
That was when these practices stopped looking like woo woo extras that had nothing to do with weight loss.
I began seeing them for what they could actually be:
Different ways of supporting change in the thoughts, feelings, responses and behaviours that I was trying to change anyway.
They weren't replacing nutrition.
They weren't replacing movement.
They weren't magically making me lose weight while I lay on the sofa visualising myself thin.
And they certainly weren't doing the work for me.
They were helping me work on some of the things that affected my ability to do the work consistently.
And that made sense to me.
How Lose For Life Was Built
As my own journey continued, so did my education.
I trained across weight management, nutritional therapy, NLP, CBT-OB, clinical hypnosis, EFT, advanced relaxation and advanced strategic life coaching, alongside the behavioural understanding that increasingly changed the way I looked at weight loss.
But I didn't experience those things as a collection of qualifications that sat separately from one another.
I started seeing the ways they could work together.
Something I learned through behavioural approaches might help me understand a pattern.
Something from NLP might help me look differently at the way I'd been thinking about it.
CBT-OB could help me explore the relationship between thoughts, feelings and weight-related behaviours.
Strategic life coaching could help me turn understanding into practical change within my actual life.
And some of the approaches I'd once dismissed as not for me became incredibly valuable when I finally understood what they were and experienced them for myself.
Over time, I began bringing those different principles together.
First within my own transformation.
And later, through my professional work supporting women.
So what you're going to experience throughout Lose For Life hasn't come from one theory, one qualification or one approach.
It brings together different areas of my professional training, established psychological and behavioural principles, my lived experience of changing my own life, and what I learned through years of supporting other women with theirs.
But I've deliberately kept the complicated terminology underneath it.
You get the human version.
If You Want to Understand the Science
Now, I know some of you are going to be exactly like me.
It's not enough to be told:
This might help.
You want to know:
Why?
What's actually happening?
What's the evidence for this?
Why would something like hypnosis, visualisation, breathing, tapping or behavioural work have anything to do with long-term weight loss?
And I think those are completely reasonable questions.
In fact, asking them was part of how I ended up doing this work in the first place.
But I made a deliberate decision when creating Lose For Life.
I didn't want every conversation we have together interrupted by pages of research terminology, psychological theory and explanations of neuroscience.
That isn't the experience I wanted to create.
So I've separated the two.
The transformation itself has been written in human language.
The deeper science sits behind it for anyone who wants to explore it.
On that dedicated page, you can go deeper into the evidence, theories and established principles that inform the different elements used throughout Lose For Life.
You'll be able to explore why cognitive and behavioural approaches are relevant to weight management, how thoughts, beliefs and learned behavioural patterns can influence what we repeatedly do, what hypnosis actually is outside the world of stage entertainment, and why it can be combined with cognitive and behavioural approaches.
We'll also look more closely at the principles behind visualisation and mental rehearsal, relaxation and breathwork, tapping, behaviour change and some of the other approaches you'll encounter throughout this transformation.
And where the evidence is stronger, weaker, emerging or more nuanced, I want that distinction to be clear too.
Because I don't want you to believe something simply because I believe it.
I don't want “Sabrina says it works” to be the evidence.
I want you to have the option of looking underneath the transformation and understanding why I've chosen to include what I've included.
You absolutely do not have to read the science page before continuing.
You might want to read the whole thing.
You might visit it when we reach a particular practice and think, Okay, I want to know more about this one.
Or you might have absolutely no interest in the deeper science and be perfectly happy getting on with the transformation.
All three are fine.
The science is there for those who want it.
The transformation is designed so you don't need to understand all of it in order to participate.
What You'll Experience
Throughout Lose For Life, I'm going to ask you to do more than simply read or listen.
There will be conversations that help you understand yourself differently.
There will be questions and reflections.
There will be self-led practices that help you explore your own experiences, thoughts, beliefs, behaviours and patterns rather than me simply telling you what yours are.
And there will be Exclusive Lose For Life Practices that bring together different approaches I've trained in and found valuable.
Some of the guided practices layer elements such as cognitive behavioural hypnosis, breathwork, advanced relaxation and tapping.
Others will ask you to consciously work with what you're discovering through reflection, exploration and practical application.
They're not there as little bonuses.
They're part of the transformation.
And I strongly recommend that you actually do them.
I know how easy it is when you're reading or listening to something to think:
I'll come back to that.
Especially when something has just clicked and you want to keep going.
But one of the biggest lessons I learned throughout my own journey was that understanding something and changing something aren't always the same thing.
I could understand why I behaved a certain way and still find myself doing it.
I could know a thought wasn't helping me and still think it.
I could know what I wanted to do differently and still struggle to consistently do it.
So Lose For Life doesn't stop at giving you another explanation.
We're going to work with what you discover.
Some practices may feel powerful immediately.
Others may feel much more subtle.
You may connect strongly with some and less with others.
That's okay.
You don't have to force an experience.
You don't have to perform them perfectly.
And please don't finish one and immediately start analysing whether you've done it right.
Give yourself permission to experience it.
Grab Yourself a Notebook
There is one thing I'd recommend having with you as you move through Lose For Life.
A notebook or journal.
Nothing fancy.
You absolutely do not need to buy one of those beautiful journals and then become frightened to write in the bloody thing because your handwriting might ruin it.
I've done that too.
You just need somewhere that's yours.
Somewhere you can answer questions honestly.
Write down what you notice.
Complete reflections.
Work through the self-led practices.
Record things you want to come back to.
And capture those moments when something suddenly makes sense in a way it hasn't before.
Because this isn't something I want you to passively consume.
It's a guided weight-loss transformation.
I'll guide you through it.
But there are parts that only you can do.
You know your history.
You know your life.
You know what happens inside your own head when nobody else is listening.
My job isn't to tell you who you are.
It's to help you become curious enough to understand yourself differently, give you knowledge and practices that can support change, and guide you through applying what you're learning to your own life.
And you don't have to arrive believing in everything we're going to do.
God knows I didn't.
Just try not to dismiss something solely because it's unfamiliar.
I nearly did that myself.
Instead, bring the same thing I eventually learned to bring to my own journey.
Curiosity.
Because if you're willing to become curious about why you've struggled, I'm going to ask you to be equally curious about what might help you change it.