"This book is full of common sense and good advice on how to change one's life permanently to overcome all the habits that produce obesity. I will certainly recommend it to my patients."
Dr Tom Smith

Contents

Foreword
About the author
Introduction

• Making a change
• Helping yourself
• Ten steps to freedom
• Tricks your mind plays
• Your conscious mind and your subconscious mind
• The power of self-hypnosis
• Reprogramming your subconscious computer
• Self-hypnosis scripts
• Using the CD or your own cassette
• Fighting resistance
• Case histories
• Other uses for self-hypnosis
• Conclusion

Useful addresses
Food consumption charts
Further reading

 Introduction

I used to be a nurse, and often wondered why some patients would have illness after illness, often different illnesses, and yet others would never visit a doctor or hospital from one year to the next. I also used to wonder why some people would put on weight while others seemed to be able to eat anything in sight and never gain an ounce.

I once asked a doctor why, as our bodies were made in the same way, one person would become fat and another would remain slim, even though they ate relatively the same amounts and types of food. He explained about metabolic rates, enzymes and other things. I questioned him further and asked, 'But why would the enzymes in one person function differently from those in another?' This is where the conversation came to a halt. It seemed there was no answer. I was told it was 'just one of those things', 'something one was born with'. I found this most unsatisfactory, as I still had no idea why one person should be born with a different metabolism from another.

I later found that this was not the case.

I came to the conclusion that it must be something in the mind rather than the body that caused certain people to gain weight or fall ill more easily than others. I subsequently discovered that, more than anything else, weight is controlled by the way people think: their belief systems, attitudes and character.

The mind is inextricably linked to the body. The two cannot be separated. Anything that affects the mind must have an impact on the body, although some doctors (fewer these days) still see us as a load of spare parts that need servicing, and seem to ignore the part played by the mind.

The side-effects of some of the drugs used were causing more problems in some cases than the illnesses they were supposed to treat.

My discoveries led me to a search for more effective remedies to combat illness, based on the link between the body and the mind.

In those days I specialized in cancer therapy. In my search for the psychological reasons behind why some people would manifest physical problems while others developed psychological symptoms (such as phobias, panic attacks, eating problems and so on), I discovered some amazing facts.

It became clear to me that obesity had little to do with bad eating habits. It had more to do with other factors in the subconscious part of the mind, which began in infancy. Babies cry for many reasons, but it is usual for food to be offered as a first resort. The subconscious part of the mind then links emotional stress - feeling ill, feeling lonely, or needing a cuddle - with consuming food. When the baby is being fed he experiences the human contact he needs - which results in his no longer feeling lonely, afraid or abandoned. This, then, is a demonstration of an early erroneous belief being programmed into the mind which then causes a problem of being overweight in later life.

I then trained as a psychotherapist and hypnoanalyst, as these skills focus on an understanding of how the mind works. I have been an analyst for the past 14 years. The majority of clients who come to me have a weight problem. They are disillusioned from trying diet after diet and getting nowhere. After therapy, many of them use terms such as 'revolutionary', 'miraculous' and 'mind-blowing' when they lose pound after pound easily and naturally, without dieting or spending hours jogging round the park in the early hours. They have asked me to put the help I give them into a book. So here it is. Enough about me! Now let's discuss your problem.

There are many reasons why one individual will pile the weight on just by looking at a chocolate bar and another can eat everything in sight and never gain an ounce. You will be one of the latter group. What you will read in this book could change your life. You won't go on that eternal yo-yo of gaining and losing weight, only to find that after yet another diet, you weigh even more than you did before you began. You won't feel the sense of failure when, after deciding you would 'really stick to it this time', you find it 'impossible'.

Diets do not work.
Let's go a stage further.

Diets make you fat!
You start to diet with great determination, and you begin to lose weight. But your protective mechanism - or, called by another name, your subconscious mind (which is the part of your mind that works on auto-pilot) - gets anxious and protects you by going into starvation mode, storing up any excess fat it can find. Inevitably, the weight loss stops. The dreaded plateau has been reached and you get disheartened. You then abandon the diet, and the pounds pile back on.

Your subconscious, meanwhile, remains a little anxious, in case the same thing happens again. It fears there may be another famine. So it keeps watch on the proceedings and maintains a little of the starvation mode. You start the next diet, and your subconscious snaps into a more severe starvation pattern.

Each time you go on a diet, your protective mechanism goes a little deeper into the starvation mode. You lose some. You gain some. You lose some and you gain even more. Eventually you have more excess fat than you had before you ever embarked on any diets. Your self- esteem is at rock bottom because you have proved to yourself again what a failure you are.

Diets really don't work. If they did, there would be no overweight people. The moment you tell yourself that you shouldn't eat some thing, you increase your desire for that very thing. Human nature being what it is, you crave that which you think you can't have.

People continually seek pleasure and avoid pain. We are programmed to do this, as a survival instinct. If we associate more pain than pleasure with dieting, we will inevitably abandon any diet. The survival instinct dictates that we will never achieve the perfect body- weight/height: ratio if it is based on how much pain we experience by depriving ourselves of something we want and which we would normally associate with pleasure (for example, chocolate).

This is what I mean by a belief system. If we can turn this around, and find ways of associating pain with eating that chocolate and becoming fat, and pleasure in being the perfect body weight and full of energy and vitality, and having high self-esteem, then we are on the way to achieving our goal. You will be shown how to do this later in this book.

When you cut down the amount you eat, for a while (and because the pleasure of being the ideal body weight is high at this point) you lose weight. But then you reach that plateau when you seem to be eating no more than would keep a fly alive but still those pounds won't shift. You lose heart (in other words, associate more pain than pleasure with depriving yourself) and away you go on a binge of chocolate or whatever your particular bag is. On go the pounds again. Eventually you weigh more than before you started the damned diet. That's the bad news. Now for the good news.

Stop doing what does not work!
If you have now accepted totally that dieting does not work, I can show you something that works extremely well. The first thing you must do is give up on all those diets - unless you have a medical problem and are on a particular regime under medical supervision.

Abandon the search for the perfect diet. It does not exist. Tell yourself that you can eat whatever you wish from now on. If you follow the suggestions in this book - and it doesn't take one ounce of will-power on your part - you will discover, to your delight, that you just do not want to eat the amounts or the same things that you did before, and your weight will slide off without effort. You will also find that you can maintain your perfect weight - and it will be easier than you ever thought possible.

You will be unlikely to find the information contained in this book anywhere else, as so many organizations have a vested interest in keeping you overweight.

Does this sound too good to me true?
Then read on!

About the author
Pat Walder moved to London from Newcastle at the age of four. Her education included time at Hurlingham Technical College and Hammersmith College Of Art. After spending four years as a Dental Nurse she then trained as a Nurse doing maternity and geriatric nursing. Pat then trained in Hypnotherapy & Psychotherapy at the National Council of Psychotherapists and then continued her training at The International Association of Hypno-Analysts. Following her training Pat became a founder member of the Wiltshire Academy of Hypnotherapy and Psychotherapy, this is a degree training course.