The Self-Hypnosis Diet

Use the Power of Your Mind to Reach Your Perfect Weight
– By Steven Gurgevich, Ph.D. & Joy Gurgevich


The Self-Hypnosis Diet: The Essential Ingredients

You control the essential ingredients that make self-hypnosis work for you. Actually, these are the same ingredients that create your experience of success in any goal you choose. Let us look at each element and how you may use them to perform for you.

Motivation is the energy of your desire, of what you want. Wanting is a feeling that you can control. For most of your life you have mainly controlled your desire or wanting by limiting it or denying it. You may be very good at controlling your desires and wanting in some areas and weak or unpracticed in others. Since this is a "diet" book, you may have already prepared yourself to hear that this "diet" will be like the others that have told you what you must deny or limit. That is, the other diets have told you what not to want, and the emphasis may have been about "not wanting" some foods that you have grown to love. Welcome to a new way of treating yourself; we will encourage you to get even better at "wanting." Denial is not included in "The Self-Hypnosis Diet." Your motivation is a key factor, one of the basic and essential ingredients. We want you to focus your energy of WANTING, not toward food but toward the motivation that clearly tells your mind-body what you want it to create: perfect weight. We encourage you to get really good at wanting your perfect weight. Here is an example. Let us say that you are in a swimming pool and suddenly you breathe in a mouthful of water. In that moment you only want one thing, a breath of air. It feels like life or death, and a breath is the only thing in your mind at this time. The wanting is so intense and powerful that it overshadows all other thoughts and propels you to do whatever it takes to get that breath of air. That is how much we want you to want the weight and body image that you desire.

Beliefs are those thoughts and ideas that are true for you. They do not have to be scientifically proven for you to know them to be true for you. Whether you are aware of it or not, your actions, both consciously and subconsciously, are based on your beliefs. Even though your beliefs are in the form of thoughts and ideas, they shape your experience by affecting your actions in life. If you believe that animals make good companions, you probably have a cat, or dog, or parrot, or ferret or two. If you believe that coffee keeps you awake at night, you probably do not drink coffee before bed.

The power of believing lets you influence your body in ways that might seem astounding. Placebo responses, where individuals respond to an inert substance as if it were the real medication, are common examples of how beliefs are experienced in the body. If a person really believes that they will get well when they take a certain medication, it will happen whether the tablet contains medication or is simply inert. In the same way, if a person really believes that they can achieve high grades in college, they will.

If a person really believes that they can have their perfect weight, they will. As we asked you in the introduction, remember your make-believe games as a child. Your ability to pretend is just as good now as when you were very young. It may be a little rusty and you may need a bit of practice, but when you allow yourself to pretend and let yourself believe in what you are pretending, you will discover a very powerful tool. You will discover that this is a wonderfully effective way to deliver your intentions, those messages of what you want, to all of the cells and tissues and organs of your body, which respond to bring that intention about for you. We can't say this enough -- thoughts are things. The thoughts, the pictures, the ideas you put in your mind, become the messages your self-hypnosis conveys to your mind-body, ultimately turning your perfect body into a reality. Pretending is choosing what to believe and becoming absorbed in those ideas. Just as a magnifying glass can focus the rays of sunlight, you can focus your mental energy to make your thoughts, ideas, and beliefs real for your body.

You may not always get what you want, but you do get what you expect. Expectations contain the energy of beliefs and become the results of what is believed. Here is an example of how to "expect." When you sat down to read this book, you did not examine the chair or sofa to test its ability to hold your weight. You just sat down without thinking about it. You did not have to think about it, because a part of you is confident, and has so much faith in the chair that you just "expected" it to hold you. That is how to expect the perfect body weight you desire. Be mindful of what you say to yourself and others regarding your body weight expectations. "I always gain weight over the holidays." "Last night I ate two pieces of cake, and this morning I was two pounds heavier."

Each of these essential ingredients can produce powerful results when focused within the mind-body. However, when these ingredients are aligned properly within the process of self-hypnosis, their effectiveness is magnified a hundredfold. It is a process for creating your reality. You might think this sounds magical or too good to be true, but that is relative to what you have experienced up to this point in your life. These ideas may be very new to you. Here is an example of the "relative" nature of new ideas. Imagine that you are given a private jet airplane which is beautifully outfitted with luxurious appointments and a well-trained crew. It is a wonderful gift, and you get to show this engineering marvel to some individuals that have never seen anything like this. Let us say that your pilot flies you back in time just before December 13, 1903 to the time before the Wright brothers announced their first flight with the "Kitty Hawk." You are eager to show this wonder of engineering to the Wright brothers that greet you. What might happen? Perhaps they would be scared and not believe that it is possible to fly in a metal bird. You could offer them a ride, and they might choose to run from you. People can resist or
reject new ideas, even when they are wonderful. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, "Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world." Stretch your view and allow yourself the opportunity to become familiar with the ideas of self-hypnosis.

In "The Self-Hypnosis Diet," we are offering you ideas that may stretch your imagination and shrink your clothing size. To say that self-hypnosis is a process by which you create your reality. This may seem too good to be true or even unbelievable right now, maybe as fantastic as a time machine for some. That is fine, for right now, but open your mind and imagination to the possibilities that this gives you to have your perfect body weight. Let yourself believe that this process is real and true, because it is and it relies upon your belief to become true. Your subconscious (mind-body) uses the combination of what you want (motivation), what you believe, and what you expect as a blueprint for action. The results are achieved by your mind-body (subconscious), and not by "thinking" or analyzing. If a person touches a cold surface which they believe is very hot, they can produce a blister or burn response. Conversely, a person touching a very hot surface thinking that it is cool may not produce a burn response. Much like individuals who walk over hot coals while believing in imagination that they are cool, they may have a thermal injury (some minor scorching on their soles), but their immune system does not respond with a burn (blistering, pain, etc) because their mind is telling their body how to react. Again, it is the alignment of all three of these essential ingredients that make this possible:

* wanting to do it
* believing it possible
* expecting to be successful

This is the key to success. Your body carries out your beliefs -- your beliefs direct your actions -- which, in turn, shape your experience. Some describe this process as creating your success or creating your experience in life. In our culture we see this described within the motivational and positive mental attitude literature. It can be seen in many areas of metaphysics. You can also look back to the ancients and see it described in terms of the respective historical period. A person much wiser than us said, "It will be done unto you according to your belief." In the present age of integrative medicine and psychology we call it self-hypnosis or mind-body medicine. There are now numerous scientific studies that demonstrate amazing results for pain control, wound healing, physical alteration, and much more that we previously thought were impossible.

About the Author:

Steven Gurgevich, Ph.D. is a health psychologist specializing in mind-body medicine. He is a faculty member at the University of Arizona's College of Medicine, where he teaches mind-body medicine to physicians at Dr. Andrew Weil's Program in Integrative Medicine, and he is a Fellow and Approved Consultant of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis. Joy Gurgevich is a behavorial nutritionist, specializing in helping people make wholesome food choices for a healthy lifestyle. She is a preceptor at Dr. Andrew Weil's Program in Integrative Medicine and the Behavioral Nutrition Expert at both of Dr. Weil's websites.