Dear reader,
you wanted to be thin and cancelled your fitness
studio membership, because you don't need it anyway. Now some food
for thought to add to that.
I read once that hypnosis is the best way and
one of the best possibilities to achieve that. I have no idea how
much of what I did to be thin was in a sense “hypnosis” or not.
Regardless of that I can see certain parallels between hypnosis and
successfully being thin. Many people believe that hypnosis makes you
lose your will. That's not correct. Apart from the conscious and the
unconscious, there's also a third very important instance, which is
often called “the critical factor”. It's the connection between
the conscious and the unconscious. The unconscious holds beliefs. The
critical factor checks incoming new information with the already
existing beliefs. If they are identical, they go into the
unconscious, if not they're blocked out and stay in the conscious
mind only.
Hypnosis only works when the critical factor is
levelled down. Only then are phenomenon like an immobile (cataleptic)
hand possible. Of course the person can still move their hand. But at
that moment the barriers of the critical factor are at least that
much down so what the hypnotist is saying, that the hand is
impossible to move and cataleptic, is accepted to be true. This is
enhanced even further through a chain of autosuggestion (“I notice
that I can't move my hand. So it must be true that I can't move it.
Therefore I can't move it.”) and the hand is immobilised, although
under normal circumstances, the hand would be possible to move fully
and without difficulty.
The critical factor is the reason why (New Year's)
resolutions are so difficult to do and to keep doing them. The
critical factor finds many more confirmations for the old habits and
beliefs. So they are kept in the end. So for being thin you have to
use tricks like a hypnotist.
The most important of all is:
1. State goals in the positive!
State your goals in the positive towards what you
want. Remember: if you state it in the negative with „not“,
you'll have the negative still in your head. That's not helpful in
the long run. I'm warning you, if you state in the negative, you'll
have an elephant in your head and he's so big, he'll crush all the
positive intentions.
Our brain works best with pictures. That's why
they keep saying in order to remember a string of things, to connect
them to a story. I find a whole story to be difficult and
complicated. I find it better to work with other methods and build
yourself a memory palace. Do you know the film “The Machinist”?
In it Christian Bale is a man, who's tormented with problems he
repressed, so he almost doesn't eat at all, has massive sleeping
problems and looks just the way someone would in that situation. It
certainly wasn't healthy for him as an actor to lose that much weight
for that role. Here are two picture of it:
It really does not look
healthy at all. But it gives your mind very clear images of what you
want. Only watch out, please, please, not to go just that far really.
It should only be images, with which to work on your own goal. To
have such a physique is sick and very damaging for you in the long
run! Nevertheless: overdo it with the images, which you use, be it in
your head or those you pick to remind you. (The 10th Doctor in “Doctor Who”, David Tennant, is probably more of a role
model for being thin, and very likeable, too. Although at least one
of his companions described him as “just a long streak of nothing.
You know, alien nothing.” Right she is.)
2. Find pictures
(real or in the head), which are exaggerating, to be clear on what
you want.
(Once someone wrote to
me on the internet and wanted help with hypnosis so I would make her
breasts bigger. I told her that when I wanted to be thinner, I was
thinking about Christian Bale's role in The Machinist and advised to
her to do the same. So she searched for a picture of a woman with
breasts too big, printed it out and used that image then. A couple of
weeks later she wrote to me and told me that her breasts actually had
gotten bigger. I don't know if what she said was correct. It seemed
so to me. In the end the most important thing is, that she was happy
and she seemed to be to me.)
Sometimes I tricked
myself and picked a bit wider cloths to wear, which wouldn't be so
tight on my body. That gives a feeling of being thin. At least
thinner for those cloths, which with more weight would have been
tighter. Skinny jeans on the other hand sometimes are quite
comfortable and make your thighs be a bit tighter than wider jeans
would when you sit down.
Once again English seems
to be even more extreme, once you start playing with words. To "lose
weight" is, if you're saying it out loud, very close to "loose wait". (Not tight waiting, ey?) In English I like to ask then: Waiting for
what? But even in German I don't think it's a good choice of words
for the wish of “losing weight”. Nobody likes to lose something.
You have to find the words that fit best for yourself. In the end all
I can do is make you aware that different words also have diverse
meanings that come with them.
Also don't underestimate
the support from outside. If a child is big and should lose weight,
it's best to make it a family project. It's not helping the child if
the family keeps eating fastfood as the child is supposed to eat
healthy food.
Two “tricks” I still
use now and then are the following: often we mistake thirst for
hunger and eat something. It can often help to instead first drink a
good amount. In the evening it can also help, at a certain time of
hour, to go and brush your teeth. As you know, after that you
shouldn't eat anymore. So I only drink unsweetened tea or water then.
Until next blog,
sarah
