What Fad Diets promise is a “quick and painless” way to shed unwanted pounds. What they never address is keeping off the pounds, once you lose them.

Red flags of Fad diets:
- They help you Burn off excess calories without exercise
- They will change your Body Chemistry to lose weight.
- You eat only one type of food. You recall the “Grapefruit Diet”?

The way a person can lose weight is to eat smaller portions of healthy foods. And MOVE! Walk or do any form of exercise. Keeping this up allows you to eat “normally” and achieve and maintain a Healthy Weight and an attractive body.

Neurolinguistic, refers to the way the brain stores memories and experiences in consistent detectable patterns that are either constructive or destructive.

Programming is how these patterns are understood, recognized and acted upon by the human brain.

The contention of NLP is the human beings think and act based on there internal represetations of the situation itself.

NLP techniques can quickly change your eating habits by placing new images of the food you eat into your subconscious mind. The images in your mind change your physical actions.

These techniques are safe and very effective.

Your Slim Vision was produced using this technique to change behavior in a constructive way.

And, what can create those good feelings when we can’t have the external pleasures? FOOD!

Simple hearty food is what we fondly call “comfort food’. But is food necessary to feel good? Does our mind need the food to feel, happy or comfortable?

Not really, and, we can be satisfied without high calorie, high fat food too.

The non-food answers to those needs can be exercise, yoga, meditation and a warm bath, can be non food answers. You also need to separate real hunger from appetite or just the desire to eat.

If you are losing weight not eating comfort foods is the key. You derive your comfort from the food you don’t eat.

The first “red light” is any food that is “hearty and sticks to your ribs” or fat laden and fills your very soul. It is usually means some kind of meat, usually red meat. Most often, with a sauce, or gravy, never on the side. If there are any vegetables on the plate, they are never green! Fried potatoes, pork and beans, and macaroni and cheese are great examples of the artery clogging comfort foods. And of course, let’s not leave out two favorites, ice cream and pizza.

At meal times the following choices are examples, that should be avoided:

• At breakfast, pancakes with a side of bacon or sausage.
• At lunch time, a hot open faced turkey sandwich, with gravy and dressing.
• At dinner, a nice juicy marbled steak with a loaded baked potato.

Most of the comfort foods have lower fat and lower calorie versions, but we would all be a lot healthier if we satisfied our need for comfort mentally instead of physically.

• Begin by understanding to lose weight you must use more calories than you take in.
• Eat only when you are hungry. Hunger is the need to eat, appetite is the desire to eat. Ask yourself am I hungry, that is, feeling hunger pangs or general hunger or do I just want the food, because it gives me good feelings?
• If you enjoy the smell of fresh baked cookies and there is a plate in front of you, right after you have finished a full meal, WAIT! If after 15 minutes you still want the cookies because you are still hungry, take one.
• Start moving. The first step in a new exercise program does not require a marathon. You can start with a moderate walking program and once you start to feel the benefits of getting your body moving, you can add to it.
• Remove all the ‘goodies’ from the house. The holidays are over and you need to rid the house of “trigger” foods”. Those are foods that are difficult to eat in moderation such as chips, baked goods and candies.
• Spend time with people who are active and supportive of a healthy lifestyle.
• When you go shopping, stick to the outer aisles of the grocery store. The meat, dairy and produce are kept there. All of the goodies are in the center of the store.
• Remember, that small changes are easy to make permanent, so the crazy fad diets that promise to make you lose 20 pounds a week always have the disclaimer, “results not typical”. Sure, that’s because they don’t work for most people. Moderation and healthy food choices works.
• Finally, don’t set yourself up for failure, use your mind to make wise food selections and allow yourself an occasional “treat”. It takes one day at a time to move forward, but as the days pass, new habits will replace old and you will see the weight drop steadily.

Here’s to your weight loss success in 2009!

This will affect our appetite, even when we are full and not truly hungry. It will make us salivate, and even if we have just eaten a full meal, we will want that particular food.

Large family gatherings and happy occasions, usually involve food and the strong connection to the good feelings that we felt at those times. We want to recreate those good feelings. That is one of the reasons that these are called “comfort foods”. Eating those particular foods and experiencing those good feelings, are some of the keys as to why smells trigger our appetites.

For Example:
When you were a child your mother baked chocolate chip cookies or spice cookies with you on cold winter days. The scent of those cookies today, trigger the memory in your subconscious mind of the good feelings that were associated with that time and you crave the cookies that you smell. The intent is to duplicate those good feelings by eating the cookies.

Another smell that is enticing to some individuals is the smell of turkey and stuffing. The richness of the experience is connected to the richness of the smell of the food. The connection to our subconscious, good memories of Thanksgiving dinners or holiday gatherings triggers our appetite to eat.

Who hasn’t walked through the mall and the smells in the food court hit you like a ton of bricks. You may have walked in with the intention of eating a salad for lunch, but when the smell of pizza hits you, your subconscious minds steers you to the pizza stand. Wouldn’t we all love to have the smell of lettuce, and carrots and cucumbers trigger the subconscious desire to eat a salad? All those good times that you enjoyed pizza with friends left you with good feelings. Your subconscious mind wants to duplicate those feelings and you interpreted that consciously as the desire to eat pizza and not salad.

So next time you smell that irritable smell of buttered popcorn you will understand that particular smell triggered a subconscious memory of a good feeling, one you would like to duplicate here and now.

What is hunger and what is appetite?

Hunger is when your body needs to eat.
Appetite is the desire to eat and that is where your sense of smell is a key component.
•    Appetite, stimulated by the smell of your favorite foods, rather than hunger can cause you to over eat.
•    To avoid overindulging, allow yourself small tastes of your favorite foods.
•    Choose filling foods to avoid that “empty feeling”.
•    Never starve yourself before a holiday meal.
•    Let your body decide if you are still hungry. Wait 15 minutes before reaching for another helping or for more food than you actually need.

1) Eat a healthy, well balanced diet.  Smaller amounts at regular intervals keeps your body functioning optimally.

2) Get plenty of rest to avoid using food to increase your energy when your body is actually craving sleep due to exhaustion.

3) Exercise on a regular basis.

4) Set realistic goals for yourself, both personally and professionally.

5) Mentally prioritize things on your daily to do list.  Prepare in advance to the best of your ability for events you know may be stressful.

6) Take ‘mini’ breaks throughout the day.  Simply sit quietly and breathe deeply.  This will instantly relieve discomfort in your body.  This will also help you to distinguish stress induced desire to eat from actual hunger.

7) Look at change as a positive challenge instead of a threat.

Listen to music during stressful periods.   Its soothing abilities help increase ‘feel good’ endorphins and lessen the chance of reaching for a chocolate bar for the same feeling.

9) Allow yourself to participate in non-stressful, fun activities such as sports, social events or hobbies.

We need to teach our children better eating habits and how to make better food choices when they are out with their friends.  We need to act now, before its too late!  One way to teach your teens these healthy habits is to use the Your Slim Vision program specifically designed for children ages 12 and up.

You can read the full story about teen obesity here.

Q:  Does everyone respond to hypnosis?
A:  It’s estimated that approximately 85 percent of people in all age groups will willingly respond to hypnosis.

Q: How does hypnosis work?
A: The subconscious mind is the foundation of our problems and self images, where we store our beliefs, habits and behaviors, so it is the best source of our unrecognized and unused strengths and knowledge.

Because the subconscious mind responds in a manner that reinforces patterns of past experiences, our thoughts, beliefs, and memories motivate our unintentional responses.

Q:  Can children be hypnotized?
A:  Yes, but young children don’t yet possess the filter that accepts or rejects information. Everything communicated to them enters their subconscious and becomes their perception of reality and forms their conditioning through positive and negative suggestions that often act as a self-fulfilling prophesy.

In other words, negative behavior develops from harmful suggestions planted in their earliest years. This explains how our conscious mind might retain no memory of an event, yet it will continually act the way we do regardless of its effect on our wellbeing.

Q:  So does the conditioning of our childhood, if negative, cause us to exhibit negative or harmful behaviors throughout our lives?
A: Yes. But the good news is that there are many ways to reverse and replace these negative suggestions and rearrange information in the subconscious (like reprogramming your computer). While in a trance like hypnosis, you can access this information, reorganize and rearrange it, so it has a positive and constructive effect.

Now, think of a computer. You put information – thoughts, pictures, memories, ideas, needs and desires – into the computer. That information stays in your computer (your subconscious mind) exactly as you’ve programmed it until you decide to change the data. If you want to, you can erase it – or you can keep the information in your computer’s memory forever.

Change the programming to change your life. Your subconscious mind, in fact, controls your entire life, because your hard drive holds all your habits and determines how you respond to things. It’s all in there.

So, when you learn to change the programming you are able to change your life.

The lucky people who have learned self-hypnosis (and it’s far easier than you may think) tend to be very successful, healthy and very skilled at improving their lives and overcoming bad habits.

Now here are answers to some of the most basic questions about just how to grab hold of the power of the subconscious mind.

Q: Exactly what is hypnosis?
A:  Hypnosis is simply an altered state of consciousness, usually characterized by a very pleasant state of relaxation. During hypnosis, the conscious, rational part of the brain is temporarily bypassed, making the subconscious receptive to therapy.

Q:  When people are hypnotized aren’t they turning over control to others?
A: People cannot be hypnotized against their will and even under hypnosis, they still remain in complete control of any suggestions given.

Q: Why do people choose to be hypnotized or learn self hypnosis?
A: The entire goal of hypnosis is to take back control of habitual responses that have resulted in a problem…things like overeating, smoking, alcohol or drug consumption.