Related Articles

The Ornish Diet is a low-fat, vegetarian diet plan. Correct application of the eating plan, exercise, and stress-management techniques of this diet plan results in weight loss and improved health for most dieters. Although this program requires much more dedication than many other diets, and often requires major lifestyle changes for the dieter, studies have shown 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 an ideal candidate for combined use with weight loss hypnotherapy.

The Ornish diet can be in one of two, very similar formulations, a Preventative diet and a Reversal diet. The Reversal diet is designed for people already afflicted with heart disease who want to reverse the effects of the disease and reduce their risk for heart attacks. The Preventative diet is ideal for people who need to lose weight and lower their risk for heart disease. It is also ideal for dieters wanting to reduce their cholesterol levels.

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

Foods allowed in limited quantities include egg whites and nonfat dairy products such as nonfat cheeses, yogurt, and milk. Most processed foods are banned, since any prepackaged foods with more than 2 grams of fat in one serving are banned.

The diet lets you to eat vegetables, whole grains, beans, and fruit at each meal until you feel full. The good thing about this diet plan is that since you are permitted to eat as much as you want of permitted foods, you can feel full and satisfied all the time. This diet plan, unlike many others, is not based on unsafe "starvation" methods.

Combined with the nutrition plan, another important key to the Ornish program is stress-management. There are a wide range of stress-reducing techniques you can use, such as yoga, meditation, and hypnosis. Hypnotherapy is ideal for alleviating anxiety and tension while promoting natural weight loss. Hypnotherapy works by helping your unconscious mind focus on having positive thoughts instead of negative ones when you start to feel anxious. These techniques are quite effective in reducing stress levels.

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

Hypnosis works to control 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 impulsively, even when they are not hungry. Hypnotherapy breaks unhealthy associations with food and our feelings to stop this conditioned response and stop emotional eating. Hypnotherapy can further influence dieting success by replacing the overeating response with another activity, such as exercise. This way, instead of having the urge to overeat, you will feel motivated to engage in healthy physical activity.

Hypnotherapy 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 have a fear of people not liking them, so they use their extra weight as a reason to believe that others will dislike and reject them. Through hypnotherapy, we can think more positively and focus on improving our health instead of feeling overwhelmed by such anxieties. We can use hypnotherapy to improve our self-esteem, to clearly see our self-worth and commit to our personal health.

Hypnotherapy offers a strong, natural combination of stress-management, motivation, and behavior regulation to encourage weight loss and help you follow your diet plan of choice. Using hypnotherapy with the Ornish diet plan is particularly effective, but hypnosis therapy is excellent for helping people stay committed to any diet plan. Hypnotherapy promotes the success of diet programs as well as natural weight loss so dieters can enjoy permanent results.

Alan B. Densky, CH has invested over 30 years specializing in weight loss. He offers several ways to lose weight, including NLP CD and hypnosis to lose weight DVD. Visit his CD for self-help website for Free hypnosis videos, newsletters, and downloads.