Aspiring Spirit

The Ornish Diet is an extremely low fat, vegetarian diet plan. Combining the eating plan, exercise, and stress-management techniques of this diet plan results in weight loss and improved health for most dieters. Although this diet plan takes more dedication than many other diets, and often requires dramatic lifestyle changes for the dieter, research shows that it is good for both weight loss and helping to reverse heart disease. With its emphasis on stress-management and making healthy food choices, this diet is also a great candidate for use in conjunction with hypnosis.

The Ornish diet can be in one of two, very similar formulations, a Reversal diet and a Preventative diet. The Preventative diet is excellent for people who need to shed pounds and lower their risk for heart disease. It is also excellent for dieters trying to lower their cholesterol levels. The Reversal diet is formulated for people already afflicted with heart disease who want to reverse the effects of the condition and reduce their risk of having heart attacks.

Both types of the Ornish program recommend a diet plan that is composed of 10% fat, 20% protein, and 70% complex carbohydrates. Under the plan, all meat, fish, and poultry are avoided. All nuts, seeds, fats, and oils are also not permitted. Refined carbohydrate foods such as white flour and sugar are also not allowed, but whole grain pasta and bread, beans, and legumes are permitted.

Foods allowed in restricted amounts include egg whites and fat-free dairy products such as fat-free cheeses, yogurt, and milk. Most processed foods are not permitted, since any processed foods with over 2 grams of fat per serving are not permitted.

The diet allows you to eat fruit, whole grains, vegetables, and beans at every meal until you feel full. The benefit of this diet program is that since you are permitted to consume as much as you want of allowed foods, you can feel full and satisfied all the time. This diet program, unlike some others, is not based around unhealthy “starvation” methods.

In addition to the nutrition plan, another key aspect of the Ornish diet is stress-management. There are numerous stress-relieving techniques you can use, such as meditation, yoga, and hypnosis. Hypnosis is ideal for reducing anxiety and tension while promoting natural weight loss. Hypnotic techniques work by guiding your unconscious mind to having positive thoughts instead of negative thoughts when you start to feel anxious. These techniques are quite effective in reducing stress levels.

While the Ornish diet plan is healthy and works for most people, it can be difficult to follow because it involves many restrictions. This diet and others similar to it often fail because dieters are unable to stay on them. Many people struggle with dieting because they suffer from an out-of-control appetite, uncontrollable food cravings, compulsive overeating, or a lack of motivation to stick to a weight loss program. These obstacles keep many hard-working dieters from maintaining their diet and achieving long-term success. Hypnosis therapy helps you beat these obstacles, and is an effective complement to the Ornish diet plan because it offers motivation to stick to a weight loss plan.

Hypnosis works to regulate the appetite by “reprogramming” the unconscious mind to eliminate and replace bad habits with good ones. A lifetime of unhealthy eating habits such as “emotional eating” can cause people to eat compulsively, even when they are not hungry. Hypnosis breaks unhealthy associations with food and our emotions to eliminate this conditioned response and stop emotional eating. Hypnosis can further influence dieting success by replacing the overeating response with another activity, such as exercise. This way, instead of feeling the urge to overeat, you will feel motivated to engage in healthy physical activity.

Hypnosis can also be used to eliminate the emotional anxieties that keep you from losing weight. For many people, being overweight provides a “secondary gain” in the form of a feeling of emotional protection or safety. For example, many people with low self-esteem are afraid of rejection, so they use their extra weight as a reason to believe that people will dislike and reject them. Through hypnotherapy, we can think more positively and focus on improving our health instead of feeling overcome by such anxieties. We can use hypnosis therapy to boost our self-esteem, placing more value on ourselves and our own health.

Hypnosis therapy offers a powerful, natural combination of stress-relief, motivation, and behavior regulation to promote weight loss and help you follow your preferred diet plan. Using hypnosis with the Ornish diet plan is especially effective, but hypnosis is ideal for helping people stay committed to any diet plan. Hypnosis promotes the success of weight loss diet programs along with natural weight loss so dieters can enjoy long-lasting results.

Alan B. Densky, CH is an NGH Certified Hypnotherapist. Visit his hypnotherapy website for Free hypnotherapy downloads, videos, and newsletters. He offers several ways to lose weight, including NLP for weight loss DVDs and weight loss self-hypnosis CDs.

- Alan B. Densky, CH