KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Shellie Nelson, and executive producer at NBC Action News who is using hypnotherapy for weight loss, continues shedding pounds and gaining a new and improved lifestyle through hypnotherapy.

After two months and five hypnotherapy sessions, Shellie has lost more than 15 pounds and a dress size.

“Honestly, my knees were bothering me going up and down stairs and that seems to have subsided. That’s nice for me, and that’s more important than the numbers on the tags on the clothes, and it’s more important that the numbers on the scale,” Shellie explained. 

She decided to give hypnotherapy a try after years of unsuccessful dieting.

“I had some misgivings about whether or not this was really going to be effective as a weight loss tool,” Shellie admitted.

Her misgivings transformed into complete confidence and her weight loss is proof that hypnotherapy is working for Shellie.

But Shellie thinks her weight loss is merely the result of her original reason for beginning hypnotherapy.

We found part of the success of hypnotherapy could be tied to music.

“It’s all about relaxation, and calm and finding balance in the rest of my life, and that’s translating into the weight loss,” Shellie explained.

“I’m ridding myself of the stresses and the triggers that may lead me to make other bad decisions,” she added.

Shellie’s hypnotherapist, Valorie Wells, Ph.D., is thrilled.

“She is doing great,” Wells said.

During each of Shellie's hypnotherapy sessions, Wells uses the same background music.

“The most important part of the music is that it really does pace her breathing, and it also paces me, so that if Shellie is the sixth person I’m seeing for the day, I don’t sound rushed,” Wells added.

Wells also explains that she carefully selects which music to use for each patient.  She typically uses the same music for each hypnotherapy session for that patient.

“It helps Shellie kind of de-stress, de-brief for the day; that big, 'Aahhh'; and that beats per minute are essential. The piece that I use with Shellie has a lot of flute sounds in it,” Wells continued.

Music therapist Janalea Hoffman composed the music used in Shellie’s hypnotherapy sessions.

“It’s called entrainment, when your body tries to synchronize to this external rhythm,” Hoffman explains.

Hoffman composes, plays and has recorded dozens of CDs she describes as rhythmic music.

They can be used for general listening and relaxation as well as hypnotherapy.

“So, a lot of my CDs are exactly 50 beats a minute for an hour and 5 minutes,” Hoffman continued.

“One of the most important elements is a really slow rhythm that’s repetitious enough; not something that’s kind of up and down,” Hoffman explained.

Hoffman plays the Native American flute.

She uses all natural instruments which she believes have a better effect on the body and the brain than synthesized instruments.

“There is something magical about real wood and real strings; nobody has been able to reproduce that.”

Shellie enjoys hearing the music while she’s being hypnotized.

“It’s very calm, it’s very peaceful," Shellie explained, “It’s sort of incidental noise, it’s not real prominent; but it’s most definitely there."

Dr. Wells believes the music is much more than incidental.

Wells says the music during hypnotherapy helps motivate Shellie and other clients to achieve their goals.

“Recently, Shellie said she’s motivated to exercise but she’s not getting up off the couch,” Wells said.

During hypnotherapy, Wells will make suggestions during a specific segment of the rhythm in the music.

When the flute begins playing, Wells tells Shellie, “Hear the sounds of the flute behind my voice and let that clear out all of the doubt and all the despair and all of the guilt and shame.”

Wells believes Shellie connects the sound of the flute with making a positive choice instead of a negative choice.  Wells calls the negative choices "dust". 

“It helps in the weight loss because we all have those nagging, ‘What if’, ‘I could’, ‘I should’, ‘I ought to’.  So, if we can say, 'That’s just like dust, let’s just open up and blow that away. That’s clear music, because there’s no dust in the way. So let go of all that dust',” Wells explained.

Some clients purchase the hypnotherapy music and play it in their homes.

“That way the positive suggestion associated with the music is always in the client’s mind,” Wells concluded.

Shawnee Mission Medical Center in Shawnee, Kansas embraces the concept of music therapy as beneficial to patients.

Shawnee Mission medical officials hire Janalea Hoffman to come into the hospital monthly and play her music for patients.

Shellie is enjoying her new relaxed lifestyle and her new slimmer figure.

“Seeing some weight loss, and now going from one size that was barely fitting me and that was pretty snug, to a size smaller -- and that one I’ll be out of pretty soon,” Shellie added.

She is embracing a new confidence that could mean she will soon be ready to go solo, without regular hypnotherapy sessions.

“I’m getting to the point where I’m sort of coming down the home stretch, where I’m going to be able to continue on my own,” Shellie explained.
 
Shellie is also blogging about her hypnotherapy and weight loss experience.