The biggest single mistake in losing weight is to presume that willpower is important.

When I told my doctor about my success in losing weight he immediately said: “That’s impressive - how have you managed to do that?”
It is interesting that people don’t really listen to my answer. Or, at least, they don’t really hear what I say. I know this because when I have finished speaking, they often say something along the lines of: “You must have a lot of willpower.”

So let me make it quite clear – I do not believe that willpower works for weight loss, or for many other things for that matter.

It is my experience that imagination and autosuggestion are far more important than willpower. I have found this to be true both for myself and for my clients in many different fields of personal performance.

Why Willpower Sucks

The word willpower suggests the use of power or force. What people mean by willpower is, “forcing yourself to do something against your will.”

It seems to me using force against yourself is contrary to nature. Why would you want to do something against your will? This cannot be a good way to achieve any objective.

It is a law of nature that force creates opposite force or resistance. The more you try to force yourself to do something the more you will resist you own efforts to force yourself.

Dictatorships who seek to force people to obey their will inevitably cause resistance groups to spring up against them. Bullies who try to force others to obey them are hated with a passion by those they bully who resist them in every way they can. If you try to force a lock you are in danger of breaking the key. Try to force a car to go faster than it wants to go and you blow the engine.

Force is not nature’s way. So to try to force yourself to lose weight by using the force of willpower is not natural and therefore likely to fail.

If Willpower Won’t Work, What Will?

Many of my clients have achieved success using what the French psychologist Emile Coue called optimistic autosuggestion.

This requires that you condition your mind by using positive suggestions. You do this by repeating words or images to embed them into your subconscious mind.

Coue’s famous phrase, “every day, in every way, I am getting better and better,” is a prime example of the type of self-conditioning that can help greatly with weight loss.

This article is titled, “every day I get slimmer and slimmer” and I do. The evidence is in the diary I publish on my web site.

Most people go wrong right at the start of their weight loss campaign when they have some doubts about their ability to succeed. Such doubt is fatal.

You must believe that you can get slimmer and, let’s face it, millions of people have, and keep telling yourself that you can.

Is it really as simple as giving yourself positive instructions?

If you fill your mind with the thought that you CAN lose weight, you will get slimmer.

So what do you do when temptation strikes? Say you suddenly find a bar of chocolate in our hand.

You ask yourself this question: “will this chocolate bar make me slimmer?” When you answer, “no,” you will understand that the right course of action is to put the chocolate bar down and move on.

The important point is not what anyone else says or does but what you think. The moment you doubt you will fail. The more you keep telling yourself you can succeed the more successful you will be.

Beyond Positive Thinking

What I am suggesting here is beyond mere positive thinking, it is continuous positive programming. What is so powerful about this concept is that the longer you go on planting positive suggestions in your mind the more of a habit it becomes; and we all know how hard it is to break habits.

As part of my own slimming programme I have trained myself to eat only low fat yoghurt for dessert. I happen to like yoghurt and it comes in a variety of flavours, so it’s no great hardship to eat it everyday. I have been doing this now for over two months. The other day at a party I approached a dessert table groaning with a wide variety of delicious desserts. There were strawberries, chocolate gateaux, meringues, a pavlova, sticky toffee pudding, treacle tart and goodness knows what else. Without thinking I found myself filling my plate with fresh fruit salad and yoghurt. The programming had worked.

It is no coincidence that Coue used hypnosis on his patients. It helped them embed positive suggestions into their subconscious minds more quickly and deeply. I have certainly found self-hypnosis a great help. That is why I include elements of hypnosis and autosuggestion in all the slimming videos I broadcast around the Internet.

To work with Susanne and I personally to become a master of using self-hypnosis and positive autosuggestion visit Elite Slimmers.

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