Don E. Gibbons, Ph.D., NJ Licensed Psychologist #03513
This Blog is published for information and educational purposes only. No warranty, expressed or implied, is furnished with respect to the material contained in this Blog. The reader is urged to consult with his/her physician or a duly licensed mental health professional with respect to the treatment of any medical or psychological condition.

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Friday, February 8, 2013

How to Get Thin and STAY Thin

 

Being overweight can be caused by a number of factors. When it is simply due to the habit of making bad decisions concerning food, then an approach such as the one described here may be useful. However, you should not make any changes in your regular eating habits without first consulting with your physician.  

A married woman in her mid-forties sought my help in order to lose weight. She had obtained clearance from her physician to proceed with a weight loss program, along with a recommend diet; and she was not currently taking any medication. She described her relationship with her husband and children as warm and affectionate, and told me that her life was fundamentally happy, with no major stressors which might serve to distract her from her weight loss goal.    

Her anniversary was some eight months away. She was going to surprise her husband by arranging a getaway weekend for him at a hotel. Her plans included dinner at a stylish restaurant where she would like to be able to once more wear a treasured dress which she had saved from her honeymoon.

I taught her how to to hypnotize herself by using the Best Me Technique and to pre-experience the attainment of her weight loss goal, using the anniversary restaurant dinner as one of the settings in which she could enjoy the multi-modal dimensions of its fulfillment. 
Belief systems involving suggestions of a change in place and time at the completion of the induction prepared her to pre-experience the anniversary dinner as if it were already taking place. 
Suggestions of Emotion included responses to both her husband’s admiring glances and the increasing physical attraction they felt towards each other as the evening wore on. 
Suggestions of many different Sensations and physical perceptions heightened the reality of the experience still further: the lighted candles on the dinner table, the soft music, the sight and smell of a bouquet of flowers, the taste of the dinner wine, etc. 
Thoughts and images included suggestions of the couple sharing their mutual declarations of love as they looked deeply into each other’s eyes. 
Motives became stronger as the evening wore on and their warmth became desire. 
Their Expectations for the rest of the night increased apace as the couple hurriedly paid their check and made their way out the door and took an elevator to the hotel room in the same building which she had rented for the remainder of the evening. . . . 
The client had a rich imagination and that she responded well to suggestion. Once she had mastered the technique of multimodal suggestion using the Best Me Technique for preliminary scenarios such as the one just described. To increase her motivation still more, she was able to devise multimodal autosuggestions for much more intimate experiences during the remainder of their anniversary evening without additional coaching from me. She reported that these were also highly effective in maintaining her motivation to diet at a high level.

Follow-up sessions were scheduled at progressively greater intervals as her self-imposed deadline drew near, to ensure that her progress continued and that her goal was satisfactorily reached, which it was. 


The secret of her success was that she was not just "fantasizing in a vacuum." She was selecting visualizations which would increase the meaningfulness of her life story as it unfolded.  These were changes that she could not merely believe, but that she could also believe in


Whatever personal goal you have set for yourself, look for ways to incorporate it into your own life story in such a way that you can believe in it as well as merely believing it.  If you can believe in it with your entire being, using a systematic, comprehensive method such as the BEST ME Technique, you can make it happen!