You Can Be Thin: The Ultimate Programme to End Dieting... Forever (2 page)

Many of the mental changes I will introduce can be reinforced when you are lying in the bath, travelling to work, even when you are cleaning your teeth. Since you spend all day thinking and communicating with yourself you are going to continue doing that, only so much more productively. This may be a hypnosis book but it isn’t going to send you to sleep, it’s going to wake you up.

What drives us to overeat are feelings: I need it; I must have it: this food will make me feel better. Diets don’t stop the feelings. They can only ever briefly suppress them. Since the feelings will always win (one of the rules of the mind is that feelings will
always
overcome logic as they are so much more powerful) it stands to reason we have to change the feelings rather than the diet. This is exactly what you are going to learn to do, by changing the feelings around food and the association certain foods have, those foods will cease to be of interest to you. The opposite of love in this case is not hate, it is indifference – you can become indifferent and uninterested by the very foods that used to run you. You can have a normal relationship with food and a normal body weight for good. You won’t have to resist the urge as the urge will no longer be there. You won’t have to fight cravings as they’ll be gone. It is so empowering to not even want or think about food all the time.

I spent my teens and twenties obsessed with food and preoccupied with trying to be slim but never quite succeeding. Then, when I began to study hypnotherapy while living in Los Angeles, I discovered there is another way, an easier way. Through the ground-breaking discoveries I made over more than twenty years of working with overweight clients, first in gyms as a personal trainer and nutritionist, and later as a therapist on television, the radio and in my own clinic, I devised a better way to show people that they don’t have to be overweight and they don’t have to be miserable by taking up one diet then another with no end in sight. You will find my methods very different – you will also find that they work.

It is an unfortunate truth that to be overweight you not only have to have a lifestyle that supports it but also a belief system and convictions about your weight which are keeping you the wrong shape and size. These need to be broken. We are all programmed to act and react in certain ways, human behaviour is not random, it’s quite predictable. You are simply going to reprogramme your attitude to food so that it is the one you were born with, not the one you have acquired through bad habits and even ignorance in some cases. You were born able to leave food, able to say no to it, able to stop as soon as you were full; regaining that ability is exciting and liberating.

When you were a baby you loved to feed – all babies do – however, babies only eat when they are hungry. If they are tired, unwell or irritable they won’t eat. Small children almost never finish food. If you go to any infant school at lunchtime or to a toddlers’ tea party you will notice how much food is left uneaten and has to be thrown away. At every small child’s party each plate will have on it a half-eaten sandwich, some crisps and a cake that has had only a few bites taken out. Even when you give small children ice cream or chocolate, when they have had enough they will hand the remains back to you.

You did this once. You may not remember, but you did. You came into the world with normal eating habits, free from addictions to sugar, fast food, junk food, sweets and crisps and free from overeating. By being made to finish everything, by being rewarded and consoled with food and by eating the wrong food you have established a negative pattern. You have become conditioned to link food to comfort, love and to feeling good, and you might link guilt to leaving food, but you can undo this quite easily. Your mind remembers how to eat normally and you can reactivate and recreate that through this programme. Since you were born with a healthy and selective attitude to food you don’t have to learn anything new, you just need to relearn habits that already exist within you and once you have reactivated them you can keep them for ever.

When you question a belief you start to doubt it and no longer hold it to be true. When working with overweight patients I look at their beliefs. The same beliefs come up over and over again:

Very rarely are these beliefs true, but if you continue to talk about yourself like this then you are continuing to be a part of the problem instead of being part of the solution. Even if they were true you can change a belief which in turn can change your body, because our beliefs affect the physiological processes in our bodies. Every thought we think creates a physical change in our bodies. Thoughts can affect blood flow, blood pressure, heart rate and your thoughts can affect weight. Channelled properly, motivational thought processes can be more powerful than pharmaceutical drugs. I am going to show you how to change the images, words and beliefs you run in your head on a daily basis and how this in turn is going to change your body and your entire relationship with food.

Telling yourself you have been on millions of diets and nothing ever works for you is not true. No one has been on millions of diets.

You have not been on this one before because it is not a diet. And it absolutely will work for you. Permanently.

All diets are flawed and none can be sustained long term so if you have failed on any diet, join the club. It is not your fault: 98 per cent of all diets fail which means that only 2 per cent, a staggeringly low number of people, can maintain the weight loss by going on a diet. If diets did work, new ones would not constantly crop up to replace the old ones that promised everything and did not deliver or were just too restrictive, rigid and difficult to stick with. Keeping the excess weight off can be as hard and for some people even harder than actually losing the weight. While most dieters lose weight only to gain it all back again, many also gain additional weight too because they resume their old bad habits. They veer from the low-fat diet to the no-fat diet, the low-carb to the no-carb diet. The Cambridge eating plan is superseded by the Australian one, then the French, then the Japanese. Confusing isn’t it?

When I became a fitness instructor in 1982 gyms and exercise classes where a new phenomenon. Today there are more gyms, classes and exercise DVDs than ever before, there is more diet advice and yet there are more overweight people than ever before, so something isn’t working and that something is dieting. We usually change our eating habits for only as long as it takes to lose weight and frequently give up before we have reached our target. But you can stay at your ideal weight for life if you welcome the changes and feel pleased about your new mindset. By changing from the inside and changing your relationship to food you are much more likely to succeed.

The first stage in changing our attitude to food is awareness that nothing in life
ever
influences humans more than what they link to pain and pleasure, and then using this information to our benefit. Moving towards pleasure and away from pain is a survival instinct. This means that every single time you experience pleasure your subconscious searches very fast to find the cause of it, your brain then stores the cause of that pleasure and reminds you of it next time it becomes aware you need to feel pleasure. When you experience pain (any pain, physical or emotional) your mind searches even harder for the cause of the pain. It locks onto and remembers that cause (even if you don’t) and then does everything it can to stop you moving towards that pain again.

Your brain is programmed to constantly move you towards pleasure and away from pain and it will always do more to avoid pain than it will to find pleasure, because avoiding pain is how we survive. Just think of how nature works with our instincts by making old food lose its appeal when it goes mouldy because it looks so horrible with fluff and mould growing on it that we link pain rather than pleasure to eating it.

If you have ever had food poisoning from eating bad food, in the moment when you are kneeling over the toilet vomiting you will link absolute pain to the food that caused it. You will say things to yourself like, ‘Never again. I will never eat shellfish again.’ You may even voice this to other people. By this point your brain has clearly linked huge pain to shellfish, and guess what, next time you even so much as smell some it may turn your stomach. Some people can never again look at, smell, touch or be around a food that made them ill.

When I was small if I had a cold my grandmother made me a hot toddy with whisky and encouraged me to drink it down. It was the most disgusting thing. I absolutely loathed the taste of it and to this day I cannot bear the taste of whisky. I would never drink it. If I pour one out for someone else and get any on my fingers I wash it off immediately as I also hate the smell.

When you were eating as a small child you were already setting up pain and pleasure cues with regard to food, and these will still be influencing you as an adult. You will have been rewarded with certain food as a treat and made to eat some food you hated even though you did not consciously choose to link pain and pleasure to them.

I want you to think of a food you simply could not eat and think about why you can’t eat it. As you think about why, you will find that in your mind you link pain to eating that food. Since you can already do this you are going to learn to do this with any food you would prefer to be free of. Celebrities, for example, link huge pain to looking fat in photos or on screen and that pain gives them the resolve to eat differently. They link enormous pain to not getting work because they don’t look slim. Because they link pain to being seen as fat they also link pleasure to eating selectively and as a result are able to control how, what and when they eat very successfully.

I have been on many shoots and always find the celebrities stay well away from the canteen or the catering trucks. They will request that their food is sent to their trailer or dressing room and avoid being around the huge fry ups and high-calorie food available for the crew. They will request the type of food they want and if it is not on set they will send someone out to get it or bring their own food with them. They avoid temptation because they link pain to looking fat and pleasure to looking slim and this becomes so ingrained in them that they are able to avoid foods that would lead to weight gain. When celebrities are being filmed in their underwear or swimwear or the Oscars are looming and they want to look particularly good they have even more resolve that allows them to restrict how they eat in order to look amazing. The looking amazing is more important to them than eating junk food. You don’t have to be so extreme but changing what you link pain and pleasure to will change your whole attitude to food permanently.

It isn’t just stars who do this, vegetarians clearly link pain to eating meat and there is no dilemma for them. If they were on a long flight and only meat was available they would eat nothing rather than eat meat. They might improvise with other foods but they could not and would not eat any food they linked pain to. Muslims are taught that pork is dirty so they link pain to it and do not eat it. Orthodox Jews will not eat shellfish for the same reason. The footballers I work with all have a huge enough discipline not to eat stodgy food before a match as it slows them down. They simply link pain to not performing at their best during the game and the pain is linked to any food that could have this effect on them so even if they are around it they won’t eat it.

The problems begin when we link pain and pleasure to the same thing. This causes huge problems for our mind; it is confusing for our brain because it can’t do what it is designed to do. It can’t move us towards pleasure and away from pain when they are linked to the same thing simultaneously. So when you eat sweets and say, ‘These are delicious but I shouldn’t have them because they make me fat,’ you are linking pain and pleasure to the sweets simultaneously, likewise when you eat a cake and say ‘This is yummy but it’s going straight to my hips’. When you link pain and pleasure to the same item your brain becomes like a spin-dryer going round and round and getting nowhere. This confusion will affect your mindset. If you don’t run your brain and take charge of it, your mind will be influenced by advertisers and food manufacturers.

Anorexics and bulimics are affected by exactly this confusion, because what they love they also hate and what they hate they also love. That thing is, of course, food. Anorexics like shopping for food, reading about food, even cooking for others, but they won’t eat much at all. I have anorexic clients who go to the supermarket every day and spend hours looking at all the different food and getting pleasure from it, but they always buy the same items: some lettuce, an apple and some tomatoes, because they link pain to eating food that is high in calories. If I ask a bulimic what he or she loves they will say ‘I love food, I love junk food, I love eating it, tasting it, smelling it, bingeing on it.’ When I ask them what they hate they reply ‘I hate having food in my body, I hate being full, I have to make myself sick because I hate it so much.’

I have similar conversations with my clients who are simply overweight. ‘What makes you happy?’ I ask them. ‘Eating, especially eating ice cream and puddings,’ they reply. ‘So what makes you unhappy?’ I continue. ‘Well, come to think of it eating ice cream and puddings is making me unhappy. I mean, look at the size of my stomach. How can I be happy with that?’ they reply as they prod it in mock horror. ‘Well let’s get you to stop eating them.’ ‘Oh no, I don’t want to do that. I would miss ice cream so much. I couldn’t enjoy going to the cinema without ice cream.’ ‘So what do you want?’ ‘I want to be thinner that would make me happy. But I don’t want to give up my treats because that would make me unhappy. Have you got any other way?’