Why Was It So Darn Hard to Lose Weight in the Past?
After her children went to sleep, Susan sat on the couch and scrolled through countless TV channels. It took her so long to choose what to watch that her husband, Jim, gave up and went to bed in a huff. Susan wondered if she was indecisive because she knew it annoyed Jim. Because she wanted to have some control in “his” house.
But deep down, Susan knew the scrolling numbed her. That’s what she wanted. If she was too alert, too aware, the thoughts would come: Is this all there is? Will I always feel like this? Always look like this? Am I passing this on to my kids?
Susan felt riddled with guilt. Why wasn’t she grateful? Her three kids, twelve-year-old Sammy, eight-year-old Josephine, and six-year-old Michael, were healthy and happy. Jim had a steady foreman job that more than covered their bills. Susan got to be a stay-at-home mom and volunteer on the weekends. What more could she ask for?
Yet she had felt defeated physically, emotionally, mentally, and even spiritually for a long time. She felt like her body was a silent enemy she’d carry around forever. The extra seventy-two pounds, aching joints, rolls, sciatica, diabetes, and high blood pressure tormented her. She didn’t want to think about them. So she scrolled and scrolled . . .
One night, in the middle of her channel-surfing routine, Susan saw a book on the coffee table out of the corner of her eye.
“Susie, just read it!” her sister-in-law had exclaimed as she thrust the book at her earlier that day. “I’m down eight pounds, and it hasn’t been a month. Don’t roll your eyes at me. You’ll love it.” And she had tossed the book onto the coffee table on her way out the door.
Susan sighed. Nothing to watch. What do I have to lose? She picked up Close Your Eyes, Lose Weight, pulled her blanket closer, and began to read . . .
You are no doubt holding this book in your hands because you have been struggling to lose weight. Because nothing else has worked with the lasting results you desire. And you’re not alone. Over the years, I have worked with thousands of clients with all sorts of goals—to run a 5k, to feel more confident in the boardroom, to land an audition, or to stop being so triggered by other people’s opinions . . . Of the myriad areas they would like to work on, nearly 90 percent of my clients say, “Oh, and if I could lose an extra ten pounds, that would be great.” In other words, no matter what my clients came to me for, nine out of ten also wanted to lose weight as a “cherry on top.”
Of course, there are also clients who come to hypnosis specifically to lose a significant amount of weight, even a hundred pounds or more.
What this indicates is that almost no one is happy with their weight.
Almost no one is happy with their size.
Almost no one is happy with their body.
While the body positivity movement is thankfully gaining strength, there are still millions of people, mostly women, diagnosed with anorexia, bulimia, or disordered eating each year.
According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders (ANAD):
•At least thirty million people of all ages and genders suffer from an eating disorder in the United States.
•Every sixty-two minutes at least one person dies as a direct result of an eating disorder.
•Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness.18
And the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry states, “In the United States, as many as 10 in 100 young women suffer from an eating disorder.”19
The Importance of Body Positivity
Even though I have helped thousands of clients and customers lose weight with hypnosis, I was nervous about writing this book. I was nervous it might appear that I believe—or that this book might contribute to the cultural discourse and belief—that one has to look a certain way to earn love and acceptance. I do not believe that, not for one second. I believe that being healthy, happy, and free is the goal. This can be achieved in so many shapes and sizes. Feeling unhealthy, depressed, and caged in is causing human beings to live less fulfilling lives than the ones they deserve to live. The only thing I want is for you to learn how to access your subconscious mind so you can do and think and feel what you want to do and think and feel. To reject what others want for you and what their conditioning is keeping you from experiencing—your freedom.
I hope you want to fall in love with your magnificence, which is not something you can buy, because you are already magnificent. Hypnosis can help you to accept and own that truth. I hope you want to stop hiding for fear of judgment, for fear of attention, for fear of being too much, for fear of being not enough. Hypnosis can help you do that by building up your self-worth, self-love, and self-confidence, which are your birthrights. I hope you want to stop feeling like you have to apologize for being who you are. Hypnosis can help you do that by reinforcing that your uniqueness (including your physical body) is your superpower. I hope you want to experience what mental freedom is and know that you are worthy and deserving of having it. Hypnosis can help you experience these things because each and every one of them live in your subconscious mind, and hypnosis is the most natural, noninvasive, and effective way to access your subconscious.
My interest is not in weight loss per se. My interest is you being in control of your life, your thoughts, your emotions, your body.
I share this because first and foremost I want to lift humanity up, not participate in rhetoric that drags us down, and a culture obsessed with impossible beauty standards drags us down.
I’ve noticed that over the past two years, although I have as many clients who want to lose weight as before, quite a few of my clients now express shame for wanting to lose weight at all. In desiring to honor all things wonderful and woke, something developed for many of my clients: they came in experiencing shame for having a body that was bigger than they thought it should be, but they now also had the added shame for wanting to lose weight at all. To even desire to lose weight now felt like a betrayal toward all the wonderful body positivity progress that had so painstakingly begun to make headway.
I’ve had clients tell me they feel trapped inside a body that isn’t theirs, that the extra weight they carry is an emotional burden as much as it is a physical one, and that they want nothing more than to be free from this “prison” they live inside. Weight loss for them is an act of empowerment, of self-love! I’ve also had clients who say they want to lose fifteen pounds because their boyfriend keeps telling them they look fat when they are objectively thin. There is no way weight loss would be empowering for this person; it would add physical injury to what are emotionally abusive relationship and low self-esteem issues. The self-love, hydration, reward, and other aspects of this book would still be healing for that client, but for her, deciding she doesn’t need to lose weight at all is where she will find her power. Everyone’s reasons for being here are different. The ways you’ll integrate the information found on the following pages will be different, too. Perhaps you desire to lose over a hundred pounds because three generations of women in your family have been morbidly obese and you want to break that chain. To shed all the physical and emotional challenges that have come along with all that extra weight for generations and to free future generations from the same challenges. If that’s your motivation, that is beautiful, and you are worthy and deserving of not only pursuing it but of succeeding at it! Your success will lift you up, both internally and externally, emotionally and physically, consciously and subconsciously, mentally and spiritually.
Or perhaps as you work your way through this book and learn to fall in love with your body, your initial goals will change. For example, at the start the conscious mind (which has been conditioned by weight loss culture) could be saying it needs to lose fifty pounds to be worthy of love and respect. (Which is bs. You are worthy of love and respect, right now, at any size, every minute of every day, forever.) As you read this book, that old goal might shift as you come to these realizations:
1.I notice I feel sluggish, and I want more energy.
2.I know deep down in my soul that at least thirty pounds on my body are emotional, and I don’t want or need to carry around that emotional baggage anymore.
3.I’ve been eating foods I don’t want to eat because I didn’t know how to process my emotions. I want that to stop.
It would be disempowering not to transform all of the above, even though, yes, you are worthy of love and respect just as you are right now. By reading this book, you’ll make sure that, however much weight you desire to lose, the reasons for why you’ll desire to lose them will finally be coming from a subconscious place of empowerment rather than a place of shame or societal pressure.
So let’s draw the line in the sand here because no shame, old or new, is allowed from this point forward (and I’ll help you release it). You’re holding this book because you’ve decided you want to lose weight, and since your opinion is the only one that matters, your decision is an awesome one. Because you want to lose weight, we are going to pull out the stops and do whatever it takes to help you get the relationship with food, exercise, and self-love you deserve to have. Now, let’s work together to make sure you’re doing it for the right subconscious reasons (for you, from an empowered place), in a way that will have a lasting impact and that will leave you feeling happier and more in love with your own magnificence.
Weight Loss Problems Your Subconscious Mind Can Fix
Problem #1: Certain foods are naturally or have been engineered to be addictive
Certain foods release neurochemicals in your brain that make you feel oh-so-happy—oh-so-momentarily. This is why emotional eating, or eating your feelings, is the most prevalent challenge expressed by my weight loss clients. When you feel sad, you unconsciously seek out foods that will briefly release the same “feel-good” neurochemicals as addictive drugs.
According to a study by researchers at the University of Michigan, these are the top eighteen foods that participants reported as prompting the most addiction-like eating behaviors:20
1.Chocolate
2.Ice cream
3.French fries
4.Pizza
5.Cookies
6.Chips
7.Cake
8.Popcorn (buttered)
9.Cheeseburger
10.Muffin
11.Breakfast cereal
12.Gummy candy
13.Fried chicken
14.Soda (not diet)
15.Rolls (plain)
16.Cheese
17.Pretzels
18.Bacon
Do any of these look familiar, particularly when you’re feeling emotional? The solution to overcoming this problem resides in your ability to reprogram your subconscious mind to process your emotions in ways that are healthy and which promote genuine long-term contentment, rather than an artificial and fleeting dopamine spike that triggers a never-ending cycle of wanting more. To break this cycle of craving foods that have been engineered to be addictive, the subconscious mind has to decide that these foods are not rewards and to not seek them when celebrating, looking for refuge, or to feel better. We will cover this in depth in chapter ten.
Problem #2: Stress makes it extremely difficult to release weight
Researchers from Yale University discovered that the “stress hormone” cortisol triggers excessive abdominal fat deposits. Stress has long been known to trigger the desire to eat more, which exacerbates weight gain by increasing caloric intake, but these findings showed, for the first time, that the secretion of cortisol was associated with both chronic stress and an increase of abdominal “belly fat.”
Chronic stress also slows fat metabolism and makes it difficult to lose weight because of the production of betatrophin, which inhibits an enzyme required for fat metabolism.21 So stress triggers us to eat more, increases belly fat, and blocks the body’s ability to burn fat.
If that wasn’t daunting enough, unfortunately, stress is on the rise.
According to the American Psychological Association (APA), “most Americans are suffering from moderate to high stress, with 44 percent reporting that their stress levels have increased over the past five years. Concerns about money, work and the economy top the list of most frequently cited sources of stress.”22 In a 2018 study, the APA found that stress levels among those from Generation Z (i.e., currently aged fifteen to twenty-one, who are typically in high school or college) are notably high: “Results indicate that almost a third are stressed about basic elements and necessities of life such as money and debt, housing stability, and hunger, too. Over 90 percent of respondents had stress symptoms with over half being depressed and lacking both energy and motivation.”23
The good news is, hypnosis drastically decreases stress and anxiety levels, no matter what you’re working on during your hypnotherapy session. While you’ll be focused on losing weight, simply by being in the theta brainwave state (return to page xxi of the preface for a refresher on the theta brainwave state), your stress levels will decrease dramatically. Long-term use of hypnosis rewires the brain to not get as stressed in the first place, thus ending stress-related eating, belly fat, and impaired fat metabolism (more on this in chapter eight).
Problem #3: When people subconsciously hate themselves, they take actions all day long to punish themselves, because that’s what they subconsciously feel they deserve
People who love themselves naturally and intuitively have a desire to take care of themselves through helpful choices. That doesn’t sound like a problem, right? Except, how many people do you know who act like they love themselves? Not an egoic, overcompensating, outward display of confidence but a genuine, down-to-earth feeling of love and compassion toward oneself? Having worked with thousands of individual clients, I can tell you that it would be rare for someone to arrive to their first session with genuine self-love. After a lifetime of being hard on yourself, cultivating kind, helpful, and loving habits in the subconscious mind will have a dramatic impact on more than your health improvement goals; this will drastically improve your entire life.
How, When, and Why Did the Problems Begin?
Your subconscious mind has been imprinted with information on how to survive in this world since you were a child. The problem with this, of course, is that the information you were provided with as a child was incomplete. It was mostly given to you by people who also were never taught to upgrade the subconscious programming that was given to them by their parents, and their parents’ parents, and so on, for generations back. It is important to understand that the subconscious always believes it’s helping you, whether or not it is.
The following examples represent experiences and themes that I’ve seen again and again with my hypnotherapy clients over the years.
•At thirty-five-years old Karyn was worried she wasn’t skinny enough and she would audibly express this in front of her then-five-year-old daughter, Alice. Now, Alice is thirty-five years old, and in recent months has developed an obsession over the idea that she is not skinny enough. She has no idea that she’s expressing a subconscious belief she learned as a child that “thirty-five-year-old moms in our family aren’t skinny enough and should stress about it out loud.” Alice’s subconscious is simply parroting what she learned from her mother and “provided” that extra weight right on cue at age thirty-four and a half so Alice would have it there to complain about by age thirty-five.
•Tim’s dad drank beer every weekend for his entire life. Now Tim wants to stop drinking empty calories, and he’s tired of feeling hungover on Monday mornings, but he feels guilty not drinking beer with his dad. He wants to continue bonding with his father on the weekends and doesn’t want his dad to feel like he’s judging his behavior.
•Jocelyn’s grandmother was the only unconditionally loving person toward her in her family, and they would bake cookies together at the holidays. Now, whenever Jocelyn feels sad, she “inexplicably” takes a trip to the bakery a few blocks away.
•Everyone in Doug’s family ate fast while growing up. No one ever chewed their food thoroughly. Even though his new girlfriend points out how fast he eats at every meal, he feels like it’s out of his control.
•Everyone in the Johnson family is overweight and, perhaps as a response to the bullying they themselves received as children, now often put down and make jokes about skinny people. For a member of the Johnson family, it would be a subconscious betrayal to become one of “them.” How do you think that makes the youngest Johnson feel? He wants to grow up and be a dietitian. He’s motivated to help his family, but his subconscious is terrified of being kicked out of the “tribe” for being different.
Do any of these resonate with you? If beliefs or experiences like these live in your subconscious mind, know that it is not your fault. They were put there by someone else whose subconscious mind also picked them up from someone else, likely when they were under the age of seven. In hypnotherapy we don’t waste precious time pointing fingers. It’s not your fault that limiting beliefs exist, but it is your responsibility to learn how to access your subconscious mind so you can change and upgrade these limiting beliefs, since you—and you alone—are the only one who can do anything about them. In other words, no one else can upgrade your subconscious mind for you.
That being said, I’m here to help as your guide, and I’ll stand beside you and hold your hand as you make these powerful and lasting changes for yourself. Now it’s time to get to the good stuff . . . the solutions.
The Solutions
These are the subconscious solutions you will master through this book:
1.You will stop living at the mercy of the neurochemicals released in the brain by foods that have been engineered to be addictive. When you use what you learn here to recondition your subconscious mind, emotional eating will cease.
2.You will release emotional weight because you will learn to turn off the flight, fight, freeze survival mechanisms (i.e., stop living in a perpetual state of stress and fear) and because you will learn to let go of shame.
3.You will learn to intuitively make the right food and lifestyle choices because you will learn to fall in love with yourself. When you love and respect yourself, subconscious self-sabotage and punishment through unhelpful choices stop.
Homework
Before moving on to chapter two, your homework is to master a technique I will refer to throughout this book. It is my favorite way to catch old negative thoughts and defuse their power.
It’s simple: If you catch yourself thinking an unhelpful thought, immediately say or think, “Cancel, cancel!” Follow it with a thought that moves you in the direction of your desired life.
For example, Julie has the thought, “Ugh, I’m so fat! I look so ugly in this. I don’t even want to go to this stupid event.” To defuse the power of these words and to stop them from strengthening the neural pathway of this belief in the brain, Julie will say, “Cancel, cancel! I am so grateful for my beating heart, for my eyes that can see, for my ears that can hear music. My body truly is miraculous. I’m excited to dress it up tonight with an outfit that feels great.”
Now, it’s your turn:
1.Imagine an unhelpful thought.
2.Quickly say or think, “Cancel, cancel!”
3.Think a thought that represents how you want to feel or what you want to think instead. Make it believable. For example, switching from “I look fat” to “I look gorgeous” might not feel at all believable in the moment, but switching from “I look fat” to “I am so grateful for my beating heart, my body is truly miraculous” would likely feel true and empowering.
This “Cancel, cancel!” tool will help you clean your mindset of all negative thoughts and fill it up with thoughts that are in alignment with the life you desire to create. To upgrade the impact of this pattern interrupt, add a hair tie around your wrist and anytime you think an unhelpful thought, snap the band (not too hard! you’re interrupting a pattern, not punishing yourself), say or think, “Cancel, cancel!” and then immediately think a helpful thought that supports you. I am constantly using “Cancel, cancel!” A negative thought rarely lingers long enough for it to stick in my mind. This homework assignment will do the same for you.
Susan’s Story, Continued . . .
Three months had gone by since Susan first read Close Your Eyes, Lose Weight. That first night, which had started off in such a bleak yet predictable manner, had ended with Susan feeling something she hadn’t felt in decades: hope. Now when Susan asks herself, “Is it possible to have more?” the answer is an emphatic yes!
“Is it possible for me to feel good?” Yes!
“Is it possible for me to feel confident?” Yes!
“Am I worthy of having more than this?” Yes!
And because her answers had changed, her actions had, too. She realized she had never taken pride in much of anything her entire life, always wanting to be humble and not braggadocious. But upon some digging into her subconscious, Susan had learned she did in fact have one area that generated all her self-respect: cooking. It was the only time Jim or the kids showed her any appreciation at all. She had been self-sabotaging her ability to make even the slightest headway into a healthier lifestyle because her sense of self-worth was tied to heaping plates of carbs and cheese and meat, deep fried or lathered in butter or sugar. The issues she had with her body and weight ran so deep that the answer wasn’t simply exercising and eating less. She had to disconnect her sense of self-worth from cooking these meals that had been passed down to her from her mother and her mother’s mother. In these three months, she’s lost twenty-four pounds and has stopped scrolling through the TV at night. But more important, Susan now feels courageous and inspired. At night she now reads travel guides because she’s got a new long-term goal—to taste-test “helpful” cuisine all over the world and bring those recipes back for her friends and family to enjoy.
18 “Eating Disorder Statistics,” ANAD, https://anad.org/education-and-awareness/about-eating-disorders/eating-disorders-statistics/.
19 “Eating Disorders in Teens,” American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, March 2018, www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Families/FFF-Guide/Teenagers-With-Eating-Disorders-002.aspx.
20 Erica M. Schulte, N. M. Avena, and A. N. Gearhardt, “Which Foods May Be Addictive? The Roles of Processing, Fat Content, and Glycemic Load,” PLoS One 10, no. 2 (2015), www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25692302.
21 Christopher Bergland, “Why Does Chronic Stress Make Losing Weight More Difficult?,” Psychology Today, January 8, 2016, www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-athletes-way/201601/why-does-chronic-stress-make-losing-weight-more-difficult?amp.
22 R. A. Clay, “Stressed in America,” American Psychological Association 42, no. 1 (2011), www.apa.org/monitor/2011/01/stressed-america.
23 Thomas G. Plante, “Americans Are Stressed Out, and It Is Getting Worse,” Psychology Today, December 3, 2018, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/do-the-right-thing/201812/americans-are-stressed-out-and-it-is-getting-worse.