Free You Can Be Thin: The Ultimate Programme to End Dieting... Forever by Marisa Peer

your habit of action is eating chocolate and your habit of thought is chocolate cheers me up and makes everything better you have to give up the thought habit as well as the action habit if you want to reach and stay at your ideal weight. Of course, thoughts don’t start off as ingrained habits but once an idea has been accepted it tends to stick. The longer it is held the more it tends to become a fixed habit of thinking. Moreover, people on diets only focus on giving up the action while still believing the same thoughts, which is why they resume overeating and regain the weight. On this programme you are totally changing your thought habits, so changing your eating habits becomes a conclusion.
    We have many thought habits that are incorrect but are still fixed in the mind. Some people believe that at critical times they must eat or have a drink to steady their nerves. Others believe a tranquilliser or cigarette is needed to calm them down. This is not necessarily true. The tranquilliser or drink they take could be a placebo, but the idea is there and it is a fixed habit of thought.
    These are fixed ideas not fleeting thoughts, but no matter how fixed the ideas are or how long they have been held they absolutely can be changed. For example, in the West we believe we need lots of milk for calcium, whereas this belief does not exist in the East and people are not suffering with osteoporosis to the same degree. In fact, they have fewer bone fractures in the East than in the West. Another example is that many of us eat when we are tired because we believe the food will give us energy. However, digesting food takes up masses of energy so eating when we are tired at night is ineffective. If you come in late in the evening and are tired you don’t need to eat anything. Just go to bed and save your eating until the morning. You won’t get any benefit from late-night eating, the food will be much harder to digest through the night and you will wake up still feeling tired because your body has been working all night to digest food it didn’t want or need.
    All beliefs can be changed if you introduce doubt. The minute you begin to question something you no longer really believe it. People in lots of countries don’t consume cow’s milk, nor do they believe it has any benefits. Many cultures don’t consume table salt or table sugar and again they don’t believe they are missing anything. I am amazed at how many of my clients tell me, ‘You need salt, it’s important’ or ‘My body needs sugar to function’, despite all the public health information initiatives over the past few years. There is so much salt in modern processed food we don’t need to add more – ever. Nor do we need sugar as we get plenty of it from fruit and other foods.
    Look at all your beliefs about food, your weight, your eating habits and your body. You can introduce doubt into any belief, conviction or opinion you have that is negative about your body. This is especially true if you have a belief that you cannot lose weight. If you became ill and could not eat for a while you would lose weight, so it’s not physically impossible.

Run Your Brain, Reduce Your Weight
    To change negative reactions in your body, i.e. overeating or continuing to eat when you are full or bingeing on chocolate, it is important to change the ideas responsible for the reaction both consciously and subconsciously. The brain and nervous system respond to mental images regardless of whether the image is self induced or from the external world. The mental image formed becomes the blueprint, and the subconscious mind uses every means at its disposal to carry out the picture. That’s why cinemas show us pictures of food and drink so we’ll want them. Every time you say, ‘I gain weight just by looking at food’ you are making your mind and body believe this thought and act upon it. Every time you say, ‘My metabolism doesn’t work properly’ or ‘I was born heavy’ you are