You Can Be Thin: The Ultimate Programme to End Dieting... Forever (9 page)

Where a thought goes, energy goes with it, so changing your thinking and using different language really can change your body. Most people are fascinated by this testing, and since it’s such an interesting process I recommend you spend some time experimenting with it:

You can do this with so many beliefs, not only in the area of weight and addictions but in beliefs you have about your confidence, self esteem, habits, abilities, relationships, in fact anything at all.

Remember, these beliefs only exist in your imagination and you are free to change your thinking and your language as soon as you become aware of how limiting and destructive your language and beliefs are.

In order to be slim you absolutely
must
be able to see yourself as slim. This is not natural or easy for someone who has been overweight for a long time but you can do it with practice. Just taking five minutes a day, every day, to visualise yourself as slim, with a selective attitude to food, will work.

Scientists in many countries have now absolutely proved that visualisation skills significantly improve weight loss and its maintenance. When you see yourself as thin you send a clear message to your mind that influences your energy, your metabolism, your appetite and your attitude towards your body. These changes have a positive impact on your thoughts and feelings, which in turn reinforce the mind conditioning and your motivation.

How does it actually work? Well, thinking positively about weight reduction can activate particular neurons in the brain; these neurons can secrete hormones such as endogenous opiates which make us feel good about ourselves and allow us to stop comfort eating. Negative thoughts have the opposite effect: particular neurons are involved with producing a negative thought and they also produce negative hormones such as cortisol, which is a stress hormone, and stress leads to comfort eating and overeating. Stress leads to over-production of cortisol; cortisol aids addictive behaviour and encourages us to overeat on junk food.

Remember, habits are merely thoughts and actions that we have learned and practised, we are not born craving sugar or eating crisps when we are stressed, we learned to overeat or binge on these foods to give us a feeling of comfort. When you repeat an action you create a neural pathway to your brain that is strengthened with each repetition. This pathway is like a thread that becomes stronger every time you repeat something. When you first learned to use a computer, drive a car or operate a new mobile phone or any kind of machinery you had to repeat the actions slowly, but now, due to repetition, they are so embedded in you they are almost automatic.

When we cease the habit the pathways diminish and become redundant. I call this rewiring ourselves. We come into the world wired for success and this programme is putting the wiring back as it should be so that you can have a normal relationship with food and your body.

So the key is repetition of these positive visualisations. It takes repeating and practising something twenty-one times over twenty-one days for the brain to create new neurological habit pathways, and in turn it takes twenty-one days for those pathways to begin to diminish if you cease the actions. Various studies have shown that it takes the brain a minimum of ten days and a maximum of twenty-one days to let go of an old belief and replace it with another one. Twenty-one days of affirmations and new habits of language and beliefs will start to lock in good and positive changes for you. After twenty-one days you will also have different blood sugar and be losing the old sugar and junk food cravings. You need to continue the affirmations but eventually this will cease being what you do and become who you are, so it will be automatic. Remember you will have your audio content to use to help you even more.

Becoming skilled and adept at visualisation requires you to focus on your new positive images frequently and to use repetition until it is so easy it becomes automatic. Repetition is vital, and the more vividly you visualise the more rapidly your mind and body responds. This is exactly what you do when you drive a car or operate machinery – you visualise the actions you have to take, then take them until the process becomes almost automatic.

Every time you visualise:

Combining visualisation images with intensity of desire while telling yourself you are succeeding will increase the effectiveness.

Visualisation takes practice but remind yourself that what the subconscious sees it accepts. Your ability to visualise will have a powerful effect on you and as you visualise you will stimulate your mind and body into action. Remember, what you can hold in your mind with confidence you can achieve – athletes who visualise can stimulate all their muscles to perform at a level to meet their visualisation. Become more clear and detailed about what you want. The more you visualise the more you will believe your visualisation is possible.

Lots of very successful people visualise all the time. Great actors are by nature very visual; just as they can see themselves playing a psycho or heroine and pull it off, they can see themselves as being slim (if it’s important to them or the part they are playing) and successful and this becomes the image they hold in their mind and move towards.

We can all change our thinking and the mental pictures we make and as we improve them we improve everything. By changing your thinking and your focus and by making changes to the pictures you form in your mind and the language you use, you can change your body, your weight and your life.

If you think you can’t visualise, then you need to be aware that you are already visualising all the time. Every time you say, ‘I can’t leave chips’, ‘It’s impossible for me to refuse cake’, ‘If I go there I know I will overeat’, ‘I can’t lose weight’, ‘I can’t keep the weight off’, ‘If I look at food I get fat’, ‘If I eat one I can’t stop’, ‘Biscuits are my downfall’, ‘Crisps are my weakness’, you are already visualising negatively and it’s working, but not to your advantage! You might as well use good visualisations as your mind will believe and act upon whatever you tell it, good or bad. You have nothing to lose (apart from excess body fat) and everything to gain (apart from weight) by making the words and pictures positive.

Occasionally I come across clients who say to me, ‘I am just not visual and I can’t visualise at all’. Sometimes I tease them a bit by saying, ‘Lucky you, that’s amazing, you must never have a day’s worry in your life.’ When they reply, ‘Are you kidding? I worry about everything: my kids, my job, my health.’ I then ask them, ‘But how can you worry if you can’t visualise? that’s what worry is – visualising what could go wrong.’ We are all visual, some of us just don’t know how visual we are – but you do now.

You would never find your car in a car park if, on your return, you didn’t visualise where you had put it. When you go to a supermarket it’s your visualisation skills that take you to familiar aisles on auto pilot. When you learn to cook a particular dish, you refer to the recipe but if you cook it a lot the process will become so visual you will easily prepare it without referring to the recipe at all. If I ask you to describe the layout of your bedroom, the colour of the sheets and what’s on your bedside table, you first have to visualise – mentally imagine how they look by picturing them. We can all do this.

Many people visualise getting the weight off and stop there, they don’t make it a lifetime picture and instead they often picture how hard it is going to be to maintain their new reduced weight. While you are visualising becoming slimmer, visualise it as a way of life and see yourself staying at your ideal weight. Many people have kept off their previous excess weight, including Oprah Winfrey, Sarah Ferguson, Nigel Lawson, Jennifer Aniston, Belinda Carlisle and Sophie Dahl and they are not suffering deprivation. You can do the very same thing.

I had a battle to be slim for years to such an extent that it almost ruled my life and I couldn’t imagine not having it. Now I have been free of it for so long and I know it will never come back. My body is used to how I eat now and used to the weight I am and it will stay like that.

It’s not a good idea to keep your fat clothes just in case, what kind of message are you sending to yourself when you do that? It’s not a good idea to keep buying clothes that are bigger than you need because you don’t have faith that you will keep the weight off. Have faith, conviction and unshakable certainty that you will and you are constantly succeeding and it will happen.

You are already beginning to see the power of beliefs on the body. As you saw, believed and thought about your arm moving further, it did. Do it a few more times to prove to yourself how easy it is to influence your body using your belief system. Athletes have been using this technique for years – seeing themselves lifting a heavier weight or performing a longer jump, believing they will do it and can do it and then doing exactly that. In fact, many tests have been undertaken proving that in athletics the ability to visualise is equally as important as physical training. When an athlete visualises they can cause all their muscles to perform at a level to meet the visualisation. It is now becoming accepted that in the future it is likely that only athletes who use powers of visualisation, as well as training, will succeed because they have an edge and advantage over others.

I recently made a television documentary with some of my clients who are Olympic athletes. They were talking about how many athletes from many different countries at the last Olympic Games used the power of thought, belief and visualisation to succeed and how it gave them an advantage over those who didn’t and helped them break a world record.

You may have heard stories of people who are slightly built or unfit lifting a heavy object like a car, tree or refrigerator off their child who was trapped underneath, and then wondering how they managed it. In fact, they momentarily saw themselves performing the feat and then performed it because their mind, in that moment, believed they could and would do it. You are now ready to believe you can and will reach and maintain your ideal weight and that you will do what it takes happily and willingly and that your body is responding to your new and good visualisations.

Visualisation is not just about what you see, it’s also about what you feel and hear and say. It makes your visualisation more powerful when you activate all your senses as you visualise. The more senses you activate the more real your feeling is that you will and are already accomplishing this so while you are visualising be sure to:

At the same time as forming different pictures in your mind you must tell yourself different things. Eliminate every possible negative word, focus only on what you wish to achieve and move towards. Keep your mind on what you want and off what you don’t want. Whatever you focus on you will move towards, so thinking about how you don’t want to look and what you don’t want to eat simply puts negative words and images back into your mind. Tell yourself, ‘I feel full and satisfied’, not ‘I am not so hungry anymore’. Think, ‘I am reducing weight easily and enjoying the process’, or ‘I prefer my new food choices. I like this way of eating it works for me’ rather than ‘I no longer feel fat. I don’t want to eat chocolate anymore.’ Visualise, think and say, ‘My body is leaner and healthier’ not ‘I don’t look as overweight’. Focus your thoughts positively, ‘I feel so committed to this programme, it feels so right’ not ‘It’s not as hard as I thought it would be’.