Self Help Blog

It seems that part of the reason why it is difficult to take on such a big task as the lifestyle change required to lose weight is that people adopt a belief system that a certain food makes the person happy, calms a craving or satisfies a need.  Some people tell me that they crave sweets, or that they will drink a milkshake and cannot stop themselves, or that they favor crunchy and salty things, and just cannot stop crunching.  Others are just “bread people”…cannot give it up. One way to get around this would be to be open to learning about the many new varieties of things which are available that can potentially replace those things.  There are many sweetened beverages which use sucralose (aka Splenda) or erythritol (aka Truvia) as the sweetener.  This cuts out not only 200 calories per beverage, but, it also has the potential to reduce risk of type two diabetes.  A digestive disorders specialist featured on Dr. Oz comments that more than two sodas per WEEK has been shown to increase the rate of pancreatic cancer by 80 per cent!! Green tea is a good choice, as it has been shown to increase the metabolism and…

Well, I think it only makes sense to realize that you have to do something different to get different results, pretty much in anything that one does. My first teacher of hypnosis used to say, “Hypnosis will not quit your smoking, but it will make your decision to quit so much easier!”  Conscious and subconscious awareness work together. You can do your own behavior modification program.  Does that sound complicated?   Well, I studied learning psychology and behavioral principles in all the textbooks;  they are pretty simple.  I will outline some basics here for you for weight issues. The simplest of tricks is to not have “bad stuff” easily available to you.  Before embarking on your weight loss program, and lifestyle change, you may want to empty your cupboards and refrigerator of carohydrates, cake mixes, sugary and starchy packages such as cake or brownie mixes, macaroni and cheese mixes,  pancake mixes, sugary pancake syrups, and all the like.  If you cannot bear to give or throw them away, then consider a week of eating them or having one big carb party to get these out of your house.  If you live with others, they will also benefit from these changes.  Even…

A quite well-known author and psychotherapist is named Bill O’Hanlon.  He is the author of about twenty five books.  He gained some recognition some time ago for teaching therapists how to do ” brief therapy” , that being to help someone create change in a few sessions.   Another therapist , a psychiatrist, named Milton Erickson, M.D, amazed his colleagues in the sixties with his ability to create great change in one session, using hypnosis.Bill O’ Hanlon wrote one book called, Do One Thing Different.  I like this concept, even as it applies to weight loss.  I think that people who desire to lose significant weight feel overwhelmed by the whole idea of a massive change in their lives, not knowing where to begin, not understanding what eating changes they must undertake, and they feel that there’s a long, painful process ahead of them.  So, they put it off, and things get much worse.  There seems to be a little demon on the shoulder telling them to go ahead and eat the bad stuff.There is a saying,  “How do you eat an elephant?  Answer: One bite at a time!”So to apply this to the topic of weight loss, one thing to…

A number of years ago, I was conversing with a local health foods store owner.  A former nurse, who had restored her health after a debilitating illness, she started talking to me about how a main stately she had used was to eliminate all white sugar, white flour and cow’s milk from her diet. I was intrigued, but could not imagine how I could live that way.  Well, now I have learned the true benefits of this approach… I have since learned that cow’s milk has little or no benefit to anyone over the age of two.  And furthermore, in the U.S., most milk contains BGH, bovine growth hormone, which is used on cows to increase milk production.  It is outlawed in many other countries, BGH has what is called an estrogenic effect, which is contributory to early sexual maturation in girls and hormone imbalances in older males and females.  Now, there are many tasty subtitles for cow’s milk, many of them with less fat, fewer carbs and less calories.  I have happily experimented with almond milk, soy milk and coconut milk. Now for the other whites common in the American diet:  white sugar and white flour.  Both contribute to…