McKenna and Me

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....