How The Ornish System Works

The Ornish Diet is an extremely low fat, vegetarian diet program. Proper use of the nutrition plan, exercise, and stress-management techniques of this diet plan results in weight loss and improved health for most dieters. Although this diet takes much more dedication than a lot of other diet programs, and often requires crucial lifestyle changes for the dieter, research shows that it is effective for both weight loss and reversing heart disease. With its focus on stress-management and making healthy food choices, this diet is also a great candidate for use in conjunction with hypnotherapy.

The Ornish diet is available in two very similar forms, a Preventative diet and a Reversal diet. The Preventative diet is perfect for people who wish to lose weight and lower their risk for heart disease. It is also suitable for dieters wanting to reduce their cholesterol levels.

The Reversal diet is formulated for people already afflicted with heart disease who are looking to reverse the effects of the disease and reduce their risk for heart attacks. Both versions of the diet recommend a diet plan that is made up of 10% fat, 20% protein, and 70% complex carbohydrates. Under the plan, all meat, fish, and poultry are avoided. All fats, nuts, oils, and seeds are also not allowed. Refined carbohydrate foods such as sugar and white flour are also banned, but whole grain bread and pasta, beans, and legumes are allowed.

Foods allowed in restricted quantities include egg whites and fat-free dairy products such as fat free cheeses, milk, and yogurt. Most convenience foods are not allowed, since any prepackaged foods with more than 2 grams of fat in one serving are not allowed. The diet lets you to eat fruit, vegetables, whole grains, and beans at every meal until you feel full. The good thing about this program is that since you are permitted to consume as much as you want of permitted foods, you can feel full and satisfied all the time.

This program, unlike many others, is not based on unhealthy "starvation" methods. Along with the nutrition plan, another key aspect of the Ornish diet is stress-management. There are many stress-reducing techniques you can use, such as yoga, meditation, and hypnosis.

Hypnotherapy is ideal for reducing 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 begin to get stressed. These techniques are quite effective in promoting relaxation. While the Ornish diet plan is healthy and effective for most dieters, it can be difficult to follow because it has many restrictions.

This diet and others similar to it often fail because dieters cannot stick to them. Many people struggle with dieting because they suffer from an uncontrollable appetite, irresistible cravings, compulsive overeating, or a simple lack of motivation to lose weight. These obstacles keep many hard-working dieters from maintaining their diet and achieving permanent weight loss. Hypnosis therapy helps you overcome these obstacles, and is an ideal complement to the Ornish diet program because it offers powerful motivation to stay on a weight loss program.

Hypnosis works to regulate 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 compulsively, even when they are not truly hungry. Hypnotherapy breaks unhealthy associations with food and our emotions 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 getting the urge to overeat, you will have the motivation to engage in healthy physical activity. Hypnosis can also be used to quell the emotional anxieties that keep you from losing weight. For many people, being overweight provides a "secondary gain" in the form of a sense of emotional protection or safety. For instance, many people with low self-esteem are afraid of people not liking them, so they use their weight as a reason to assume other people will dislike them. Through hypnosis, we can have more positive thoughts and focus on improving our health instead of becoming overwhelmed by such anxieties. We can use hypnotic therapies to improve our self-esteem, to clearly see our self-worth and commit to our personal health.

Hypnosis therapy offers a powerful, natural combination of stress-relief, motivation, and behavior regulation to promote weight loss and help you follow your preferred diet program. Using hypnotherapy with the Ornish diet plan is particularly effective, but hypnotherapy is perfect for helping dieters stay on any diet program. Hypnotherapy promotes the success of diet programs as well as natural weight loss so dieters can enjoy long-lasting results.

Alan B. Densky, CH has invested over 30 years specializing in weight loss. He offers several ways to lose weight, including weight loss CD and hypnotherapy for losing weight DVD. Visit his CD for self-help website for Free hypnosis videos, newsletters, and downloads. http://www.neuro-vision.us/