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

doing the same thing.
    People with weight issues frequently say, ‘I can’t leave food’, ‘I can’t say no to it’ or ‘I don’t know when I have had enough, I don’t know what full is.’ Slim people will say the opposite: ‘I can’t finish it’, ‘I have had enough’ or ‘I couldn’t eat another mouthful.’ Just as some people eat when they are upset as they believe it will comfort them, others cannot eat when they feel upset because they don’t hold that belief. You are able to choose what you say and to choose how you eat. Changing your eating habits is not enough, you must change your thoughts, beliefs and words as well.
    Work through the following quick exercise to see the power of your thoughts.
    As you read through these next few lines just imagine that you are standing in your kitchen and you are holding a lemon that you have just taken from the fridge. It feels cold in your hand. Look at the outside of it, the yellow waxy skin that comes to a small green point at both ends. Squeeze it a little and feel its firmness and its weight. Imagine raising the lemon to your nose and smelling that unique fresh lemon smell. Now imagine cutting the lemon in half and inhale it. The smell is stronger. Now imagine biting deeply into the lemon and letting the juice swirl around in your mouth. Taste the sharpness, the fresh citrus flavour. At this point, if you have used your imagination well, your mouth will be watering.
    Consider the implications of this. Words, mere words, affected your salivary glands. The words did not even reflect reality, but something you imagined. When you read those words about the lemon you were telling your brain you had a lemon. Although you did not mean it your brain took it seriously and said to your salivary glands, ‘she/he is biting a lemon, hurry, wash it away’. Your glands obeyed.
    If something as simple as imagining you were eating a lemon can cause your body to react physically then something as simple as imagining you are eating selectively and shedding weight can and will cause your body to react physically too.
    Words do not just reflect reality; they can create reality – like the flow of saliva you just caused by doing the exercise. The subconscious mind is no subtle interpreter of your intentions, it receives information and it stores it, it believes without question everything you tell it since its job is not to question but to act immediately on your instructions, which to your subconscious mind are commands. Tell your subconscious mind something like ‘I am eating a lemon’ and it goes to work. That experiment was neutral, so physically no good or harm can come from it, but good as well as harm can come from many of the words we use.
    If you are on an aeroplane waiting to fly to California you may be filling your mind with images of the shopping you are going to do, the beaches you are going to visit, the weather you are going to enjoy and you will respond to those images. The person next to you may be filling their mind with images of fear. They may believe that some of the passengers look like terrorists and as they focus on the fact that the plane may crash they will respond to those images by becoming agitated and nervous. So two people on the same flight are responding differently because of the words and images they are creating.
    The way we feel at any given time is due to what we focus on and what our focus comes from:
    • The pictures we make in our head.
    • The words we say to ourselves.
    The good news is that we can change those words and pictures at any time and we can learn to make them more positive all the time.
    Scientists and doctors have noted that patients respond very well to positive suggestions. They reason that each of us has two selves – a conscious and a subconscious self. The conscious self that you are aware of has an unreliable memory, whereas the subconscious self has an amazing memory. It registers without our knowledge the