My best friend (who I now live away from) told me that she was enlisting the help of that smarmy hypnotist Paul McKenna to lose weight, and I confess, I rolled my eyes. Three weeks later I returned to my hometown to see her, and she not only looked fantastic, she told me she'd lost "ELEVEN POUNDS IN TWO WEEKS!!!!" That was pretty much all the encouragement I needed to jump on Amazon.co.uk and order my own copy of the book and CD, as it's been reduced now it's been around for a couple of years.
Reading through the book on Tuesday, everything seemed pretty feasible, if not noticeably similar to a book my mum already owns called On Eating by Susie Erbach (I think that's her name.) The four main principles are the same: eat when you're hungry, eat the food you want to eat, savour the food, and stop as soon as you're full.
This all sounds very simple, but over the past couple of days I've really had to concentrate hard to establish my own hunger levels. I'm a person who eats breakfast at breakfast time, lunch at lunch time and dinner at dinner time. I simply eat at mealtimes and clean my plate each time unless something is absolutely disgusting. I eat quickly, in front of the TV or walking around, and each Friday I binge on Pizza and fizzy drink with my boyfriend for a treat and eat any leftover pizza for breakfast on saturday morning. So actually having to consider if I'm actually hungry was strange to me. The feeling of hunger is sort of abstract - often when I sit, waiting to get hungrier so I know I definitelty need to eat, it goes away again. Sometimes just general movement in the stomach area feels like hunger.
I also have to keep reminding myself to CHEW SLOWLY. I'm a scoffer. A wolfer. If something is nice, I hoover it up as fast as I can. Now I have to slow right down, put my cutlery down, and experience it. It still feels strange. The final thing is actually eating whatever I fancy. This was also strange - I walked around Asda with an empty basket for a long long time, because I was baffled by choice rather than just buying what I always buy. All I had in there was a newspaper and some Brie for the longest time.
So that's the eating part, which is taking more concentration than I've given it since I started on solid foods, but there's the other 'distinctly McKenna' part, concerned with changing the way you think. The book contains exercises to improve self esteem, thoughts about food and your body and a very bizarre way to get rid of cravings which I can't get my head around yet.
The CD is surprisingly short, and McKenna just eases you in, tells you you can do it and tries to eliminate the stress associated with food and body image, while encouraging you through the power of suggestion to eat less and more healthily. BUT I don't think I can let him into my mind. Someone tried this before; a teacher in one of my seminars at university took the whole class into a sort of memory trance, and everyone couldn't believe how he'd helped them remember something so vividly, but I felt myself 'going under', panicked, and blocked it out. They say only the believers are susceptible to this kind of thing, which I think is true, and I really want to go into the state where it's easier to take on board the suggestions but I keep overthinking it! I start counting backwards and then I'm like, 'is this it now? Am I hypnotised?' I expect I can't possibly be hypnotised if I keep digressing in my own mind!
I'll work on it...anyway, here's hoping for an 11 lb loss in two weeks....
Thursday, 22 May 2008
Monday, 31 March 2008
Lucky
Every so often you get talking to someone and it takes you by surprise. There are a few people who almost make a point of talking to strangers, but I'm not one of them - there's been a sort of change in Britain whereby people are almost a bit scared if someone unknown to them starts a conversation up. This is how my boyfriend and I felt when a man sat behind us on the train and began to make determined conversation.
In the end, we gave in, and he proceeded to tell us his life story, in a nutshell, and he chose to begin with the enormous scar on his arm, which stretched from his wrist right into his bicep, where it indented the muscle sharply. Most of it was healed but there was still some gauze, so I assume that the skin had recently split. Being hungover, I couldnt look at that scar for too long, but at the same time, the morbid side of anyone wants to know details. At first, we didnt know whether to believe him, because he said 'this will freak you out. It happened because I fell asleep on my arm.' He'd found, when he woke up, that his arm was swollen and that he couldnt control it, so he was taken to hospital, and they'd had to operate. He showed us other scars under his arm and on his shoulder. It was shocking. It transpired that to get the use of his arm back he'd undergone a lot of physiotherapy and an awful lot of pain.
'My friends call me Lucky,' he said, 'because everything always happens to me.' If the story he gave us afterwards is true, that's a fair statement. 'We've gone past it now, but I used to live under a bridge along here, when I was homeless,' Lucky said. 'I was addicted to crack and heroine, and at my lowest point, I lived under there.' He went on to say that that made his tolerance to morphine extremely high, so the pain of the operation had probably been worse. 'I stole to buy drugs,' he admitted, but then said, 'but I would never have taken anyone's wallet, or stolen from a small family-owned shop. I couldn't steal from people who needed the money. I used to shoplift from big companies, but I got caught, and had to go to prison for about a month. And because there was some confusion about rehab programmes and drug-replacement, I didn't get anything stronger than a paracetamol for hours, so basically I was coming off drugs cold turkey.' My boyfriend and I were both pretty interested by this point.
'Is it really like in trainspotting?' I asked him, having basically nil experience with drugs.
'Oh yeah, it's agony,' he replied. 'You don't halluscinate babies on the ceiling; that's poetic licence, but it's horrendous all the same - you think you're going to die, and it's like this paradox because to live you have to take more of what's done this to you in the first place.'
He was an incredibly astute man, and very intelligent - after we'd talked about drugs he and my boyfriend started talking about architecture and bridge structures and all sorts of things. I suppose, despite his scar, and his struggle to overcome addiction, and the homelessness and prison, he was lucky. His brain had been left intact, and so had his body, for the most part. He was clean, and he had a house, and was working on getting a job. He still had friends, and he had a lot to say. He's lucky to be alive. He got off the train at Cheltenham and we said goodbye to him. The train announcer asked someone to marry him over the tannoy, and then said,'tell me at Birmingham.' It was later announced that she'd accepted. It was a very odd and heartwarming journey.
In the end, we gave in, and he proceeded to tell us his life story, in a nutshell, and he chose to begin with the enormous scar on his arm, which stretched from his wrist right into his bicep, where it indented the muscle sharply. Most of it was healed but there was still some gauze, so I assume that the skin had recently split. Being hungover, I couldnt look at that scar for too long, but at the same time, the morbid side of anyone wants to know details. At first, we didnt know whether to believe him, because he said 'this will freak you out. It happened because I fell asleep on my arm.' He'd found, when he woke up, that his arm was swollen and that he couldnt control it, so he was taken to hospital, and they'd had to operate. He showed us other scars under his arm and on his shoulder. It was shocking. It transpired that to get the use of his arm back he'd undergone a lot of physiotherapy and an awful lot of pain.
'My friends call me Lucky,' he said, 'because everything always happens to me.' If the story he gave us afterwards is true, that's a fair statement. 'We've gone past it now, but I used to live under a bridge along here, when I was homeless,' Lucky said. 'I was addicted to crack and heroine, and at my lowest point, I lived under there.' He went on to say that that made his tolerance to morphine extremely high, so the pain of the operation had probably been worse. 'I stole to buy drugs,' he admitted, but then said, 'but I would never have taken anyone's wallet, or stolen from a small family-owned shop. I couldn't steal from people who needed the money. I used to shoplift from big companies, but I got caught, and had to go to prison for about a month. And because there was some confusion about rehab programmes and drug-replacement, I didn't get anything stronger than a paracetamol for hours, so basically I was coming off drugs cold turkey.' My boyfriend and I were both pretty interested by this point.
'Is it really like in trainspotting?' I asked him, having basically nil experience with drugs.
'Oh yeah, it's agony,' he replied. 'You don't halluscinate babies on the ceiling; that's poetic licence, but it's horrendous all the same - you think you're going to die, and it's like this paradox because to live you have to take more of what's done this to you in the first place.'
He was an incredibly astute man, and very intelligent - after we'd talked about drugs he and my boyfriend started talking about architecture and bridge structures and all sorts of things. I suppose, despite his scar, and his struggle to overcome addiction, and the homelessness and prison, he was lucky. His brain had been left intact, and so had his body, for the most part. He was clean, and he had a house, and was working on getting a job. He still had friends, and he had a lot to say. He's lucky to be alive. He got off the train at Cheltenham and we said goodbye to him. The train announcer asked someone to marry him over the tannoy, and then said,'tell me at Birmingham.' It was later announced that she'd accepted. It was a very odd and heartwarming journey.
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