Weight & Eating

Hypnosis for keeping weight off

Settle into the body you have reached, so maintaining it stops feeling like a diet that never ends.

Keeping It Off is a session for the time after a diet ends, when the real work begins and holding on feels harder than losing it did.

It repeats the feeling of living in your current shape without the constant watchfulness and the fear of returning to the start. The practice moves the focus from effort to simply being.

Reaching the number on the scale was difficult, but staying there feels like a second job that never ends.

Every meal arrives with a calculation, and every day is spent waiting for the moment when the control breaks and the old weight comes back.

It is hard to feel at peace in a body you treat like an opponent you have to keep beating down.

What’s in it

A steady weight that holds without constant vigilance, and freedom from the fear of it all coming back.

Why do it

A few quiet minutes move you from effort to identity, which is what actually makes it stick.

Theme
Weight & Eating
Delivery styles
3
Lengths
Quick ~10mStandard ~20mDeep ~45m
Ends
Calm and present
Stages
4
On this shelf
11 sessions

Timeline: Start to Finish

The middle of this session settles you into the body you have reached. It focuses on what it feels like to live there now, repeating this sense of stability until it feels like a fact you already know.

3 of the 4 stages are named techniques with a published origin, credited under each.

  1. InductionStage 16 min

    Progressive Muscle Relaxation

    A classic head-to-toe relaxation. Tense and release, or simply soften, each muscle group in sequence.

    After Edmund Jacobson PMR (1929); Dave Elman Hypnotherapy · what progressive muscle relaxation is

  2. DeepenerStage 23 min

    Staircase Descent

    Visualized stairs descending into a deeper level of trance. Each step takes you down.

    After Ledochowski, Deep Trance Training Manual

  3. Suggestion ScriptStage 310 min

    Keeping It Off — Balanced

  4. AwakeningStage 42 min

    Calm Alert Awakening

    Awake and present, but calm rather than energized. Good for evening or pre-meeting use.

    After Yapko, Trancework

Three ways to say it

The same goal, written three ways. You pick the one that sounds like something you would believe — and you can hear a different one tomorrow without rebuilding anything.

Balanced

Settle into the body you have reached, so maintaining it stops feeling like a diet that never ends. The default.

Future self

Meet the version of you who is someone who simply lives at this weight now.

New identity

Step into being someone who simply lives at this weight now, starting now.

Where it sits

Appetite, habit and body image, worked as behaviour rather than willpower.

Before you press play

  • Not the right session right now if any of these are live for you: eating disorder history; under clinical dietary supervision.

Hypnosis is not for everyone. If you have epilepsy, a psychotic illness, or you are under psychiatric care, talk to your clinician before using this — here or anywhere.

Why this works — and what the research actually says

Group-level, not session-level: no study has tested this exact session, and we will not pretend otherwise. Every source below was opened and read on 2026-08-25 before it was quoted.

Why do it as hypnosis?

Holding a line through willpower alone always runs out, because it is a fight that requires you to win every single day.

This builds the sense of the body you have reached as a settled fact rather than a temporary state.

The rehearsal is aimed at how it feels to live at this weight, letting the stability of it become familiar without the constant vigilance.

The closest study to what we actually sell — and it found nothing

Most hypnosis research studies a person in a room with a therapist. This one tested a 15-minute audio file, listened to nightly — which is almost exactly what a session here is.

Over three weeks the hypnosis group lost about two thirds of a kilogram and the placebo group lost none, and that gap was not statistically significant. Neither was the main thing the trial set out to measure.

  • 46 people, a 15-minute audio file nightly for three weeks
  • Hypnosis group −0.63 kg, placebo group 0.0 kg — not a significant difference
  • The trial's own primary outcome also came out null

Worth knowing: The authors are direct about why this is not the last word. "The study's low sample size is one of its most significant limitations."

And "based on the actual achieved sample size, the achieved power is 49%" — roughly a coin-flip chance of detecting a real effect even if one existed.

They also note COVID-era recruitment problems, a predominantly educated female sample, and that it "does not generalize to other forms of hypnosis".

The exact wording and figures

In a randomised, double-blinded controlled trial, 46 participants listened nightly for three weeks to either a 15-minute audio self-hypnosis file or a structurally identical placebo file.

Mean weight change was -0.63 ± 0.43 kg in the hypnosis group against 0.0 ± 1.5 kg in the control group (p = 0.148, not significant).

The primary outcome, progression through Transtheoretical Model stages, was also not significant (X²(2,46) = 1.909, p = 0.580).

Published in PeerJ. Included because it is the closest published test of the format this app actually uses, and because a null result in the most relevant study is exactly the thing a reader deserves to see.

Antoun J, El Zouki M, Saadeh M (2022). The use of audio self-hypnosis to promote weight loss using the transtheoretical model of change. PeerJ.
open access (CC BY 4.0)

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