You Can Be Thin: The Ultimate Programme to End Dieting... Forever (3 page)

Confused? Me too, but I was the same once. When I was at hypnosis school my teacher offered to hypnotise me to stop eating chocolate and I actually refused because I liked it too much. Even when one of my back teeth broke when I bit into some hard chocolate and it cost me £400 to fix it I still didn’t link enough pain to chocolate. Here’s an example of how the pain – pleasure cues affect your appetite. If you ordered a pizza in a restaurant and were watching the waiter bring it over piping hot and smelling wonderful you would link pleasure to eating it and maybe start to salivate in anticipation. If just as the waiter put it on your table he sneezed all over it you would immediately link revulsion to eating it and would not eat it no matter how hungry you were. You have in an instant reversed what you link pain and pleasure to and this has in turn affected your appetite. The good news is that you can do this permanently with any foods you choose.

Your mind cannot move you towards your goal of being slimmer when you link pain and pleasure to the same thing, i.e. loving a huge slice of cake then hating yourself for eating it. We would hate the idea of eating grubs and insects but if we were starving out in the wilderness somewhere we would eat them, we might even eat them with relish. We might be so thrilled to find some form of food we would fight others for our share of it. In doing so we would change what we link pain and pleasure to. You can do this at any time. I read about an English girl in prison in India. She reported that the daily rice portion contained maggots which she ate as they were her only source of protein. She linked pleasure rather than pain to finding maggots in her food.

On the TV series
I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here
the celebrity contestants had to eat grubs, insects, animal genitalia and fish eyes in order to earn food for their colleagues. They ate this horrible food by linking pleasure to getting food for the other celebrities and because they knew that being seen to do this on television made them heroic to the viewers. They linked pain to failing on television, losing popularity and not getting any food for their campmates. This ability to almost instantly change what they linked pain and pleasure to allowed them to do something that was unthinkable only days earlier.

An example of a similar situation in your life would be if you hate the dentist and avoid going and then find yourself in agony with an infected tooth. If the tooth pain is bad enough you will ring the dentist and beg for an appointment. You will link pleasure to getting an appointment instead of pain. You may even thank the dentist profusely for fitting you in. You may sit in the chair and be so happy to take the injection as it is removing your pain instead of causing it. Again, you will have reversed what you link pain and pleasure to.

Only humans can choose what to link pain and pleasure to. It is a major advantage but it can also become a major disadvantage. A cat cannot choose to link pleasure to having a bubble bath any more than a husky dog could choose to link pleasure to being on a beach in tropical heat. You can choose what to link pain and pleasure to and in doing so you can succeed or fail to have the kind of body and health you want.

If you are very overweight you may need to accept that some foods are addictive and not right for your body, just as other people have to accept allergies or religious restrictions and incorporate them into their diet. It is easier and kinder to yourself because it will make you link pain to the wrong foods which in turn helps you to accept that you don’t need them, instead of linking pain to the fact that you can’t eat those foods and feeling sorry for yourself because of it. You can link pleasure to your ability to become indifferent to junk food instead of linking pleasure to eating it.

When I was in America filming
Celebrity Fit Club USA
the cook was making us all scrambled eggs for breakfast in accordance with my eating plan. One of the celebrities refused to eat them, and when I asked her why she said ‘Eggs give me gas and I never eat them while I am filming as I could not bear to get gas on set, it’s too humiliating.’ Her ability to link pain instead of pleasure to eating eggs allowed her to refuse them easily without seeing it as a hardship. She saw refusing the eggs as a better choice than eating them.

You have enormous power to choose what to link pain to. Now that you realise just how effective this power can be, use it consciously and to your advantage to link pain to junk food, sugar and fat-laden snacks as well as actually being overweight. At the same time link a lot of pleasure to being slim, having energy, refusing to fill up your body with junk, wearing the kind of clothes you want to wear and feeling sexy.

Everything we want in life, with few exceptions, is because of how we think it will make us feel. Look at the feeling you think you get when you eat junk food and realise you are eating it because you think it will make you feel good. It may make you feel good for a brief period of time when it’s in your mouth and stomach, but it will never make you feel good long term. However, you can get the feeling without the food and this book will show you how.

If you keep telling yourself you want chocolate or you need cakes it’s because you think the chocolate or cakes will make you feel good or happy or better than you are feeling without them. You can make wanting to be thinner much more important. People who successfully control their weight want to be slimmer more than they want to eat cake. Eating cake or chocolate may make you feel good momentarily whereas becoming your ideal weight will make you feel good for good. Stop telling yourself that eating junk makes you feel better as that simply is not true long term and tell yourself instead that eating selectively and being your ideal weight makes you feel amazing.

These are all emotional words. We can feel emotionally empty, starved of affection, sex starved, hungry for success, nourished by the love of our friends and family and full of love or full of resentment.

When we feel empty we eat to fill that emotional void because the stomach is the seat of all emotions. This means that most feelings originate in the stomach. We experience excitement, fear, panic, nerves, tension and anxiety in our stomachs. We have conditioned ourselves to eat to push the feelings down, to ignore them, to make them go away or because we tell ourselves that the feeling must be hunger when it isn’t. If your subconscious mind can misinterpret these words and feelings don’t be surprised that you have done the same. Instead of saying to yourself ‘I am hungry’ whenever you feel anything, ask yourself what you are feeling and deal with the feeling or accept the feeling. There is nothing wrong with feeling sad or stressed, but eating when you feel anything but hunger punishes your body and leads to more stress and sadness. Emotional eating or what I call mood food does not work. Eating when you are stressed does not end the stress, but having a hot drink is beneficial as hot drinks release endorphins in the brain and keep our moods up.

We all know that ‘we are what we eat’ but most of us don’t know that in addition we are what we speak. Our words become our reality and our mind uses the words we speak to identify what we are feeling. Your brain takes every word you say as literal and accurate, so if you say ‘I am famished’, ‘I am starving’, ‘I am ravenous’ or ‘I could eat a horse’ your brain will believe you are starving and will encourage you to overeat. We have something called an appestat that kicks in when we have eaten enough and tells us we are full. However, if you have already told your brain you are starving or famished then your body will respond by ignoring the appestat and encouraging you to overeat as if you really were in a famine or starving situation. Instead you need to use words which are much less negatively descriptive: ‘I could eat now’ or ‘I am ready to eat now’ are much better because they are neutral and don’t give your brain the intense message that saying ‘I am ravenous’ does. Your brain has to accept and act on the words and pictures you give it. The less intense the words and pictures you use are, the less intense will be your relationship with food. So don’t use words with a strong negative emotional content or words that create a negative picture in your mind because the more descriptive and negative those words are the more they will increase your negative feelings about your body and how you eat.

Whatever we tell ourselves our mind absorbs and accepts. While your mind is used to filtering and sorting information that is presented to you, it has no capacity to reason with the information or signals you tell yourself, it believes whatever you tell it. Because of this getting into the habit of telling yourself only positive things is extremely effective. You also need to get into the habit of being very aware of the language you use – the words to describe things – most especially to describe yourself, because your mind particularly responds to words and images that are symbolic. The subconscious mind loves descriptive words, words that make an immediate picture.

Here is an example: A client comes to my office and I ask her, ‘Hi, how are you?’ She responds, ‘I’m a train wreck, my bum is the size of a barn, I eat like a pig non-stop and I’m the size of a house. I’m just a hopeless mess and I can’t stop eating.’

So how much of that statement is true?

How much of that statement does her mind believe is true and act upon? Yep, every single word is accepted by her mind as a fact and now her mind is working to make that picture a reality and, because it’s such a vivid descriptive image, the mind has an easier job of it. If you say I am huge, I am a big fat pig and my bum is the size of a bus or I could eat a horse, your mind first makes a picture of what that means, and then works to have you feel and act in ways that match the picture you are causing your mind to make. You will overeat if you keep using these descriptions to tell yourself what you are feeling. One of the rules of the mind is that your body
must
act in a way that matches your thinking, it literally has no choice. Since thoughts always come first your mind always influences your body and it can never be the other way round. Language is so involved in this. When people are unhappy they use phrases like ‘I feel so low’, ‘I am so down’, ‘I am sinking’ and their body language is stooped and lowered. When they are happy they use phrases like ‘I am so up’, ‘I am on a high’, ‘I feel on top of the world’, ‘I feel brilliant’ and their body language is the direct opposite of someone who is down.

Remember, the way you feel is linked to the way you focus, and the way you focus is down to:

Don’t use negative words or pictures. You are not a big fat pig with legs the size of tree trunks and you are not going to refer to yourself like this ever again. There is probably no one in the world you talk to as meanly as you do to yourself. If you spoke to your friends like that they would be long gone. Stop punishing yourself. It is important to remember that criticism withers people and praise builds them up. Praise yourself more and you will find it easier to change.

Once you have written out your new statements I want you to think about how you are going to use them. For example, if you are about to go out to eat with friends or are choosing a restaurant, even if people around you are saying, ‘Let’s pick this one, I’m starving’, you can still make your own statement by saying ‘Let’s pick this one as I need to eat something’. In that way you are able to agree with your friends but still make a positive statement that helps you instead of hurting you. If you return home from work each evening and say, ‘I am ravenous’ as you walk through the door just change that to ‘It’s time to give my body some healthy food’. Remember, the point of this exercise is to give your body the instructions that you want it to respond to. If you hate leaving food just imagine how great it will be to feel that food has no power over you and how liberated you will feel when you state, ‘I refuse to treat my body as a dustbin. Waste food is waste, wherever it goes, it’s not going into me,’ then leave something on your plate to reinforce that power. If you say, ‘I eat non-stop’ and really consider that statement you’ll see that it isn’t true: you don’t eat while you are sleeping, showering or using the toilet, so change that statement to ‘I eat selectively’. Whatever you have been saying that is negative you can easily flip it over to find the positive and say that instead.