Hypnotized To Lose Weight

As a true believe in diet and exercise as the way best way to lose weight and keep it off, when I read about people who go to extremes like getting hypnosis to hoax them into believing they had gastric band surgery, I am quite the cynic. Seriously, put down the bacon cheeseburger, buy a treadmill, and walk on the damn thing. But rather than taking the proven route to successfully losing weight, one Daily Mail writer chose to go to Spain to undergo the new weight loss treatment known as the Gastric Mind Band.

Over the course of three treatments with the use of sound effects, aromatherapy and hypnosis, patients are led to believe their stomachs have been reduced to the size of a golf ball with no surgery at all. But like the actual surgery, hypnosis patients must return eight weeks later for a check up to see if the mind band needs to be adjusted depending on whether they are losing weight too rapidly or slowly. Additionally, once the patient hits their target weight goal, they must again undergo therapy to have the mind band removed. Unlike the real surgery which costs approximately $13,000, the mind band therapy is 1/10th the cost.

So does it work? Well, mind band therapists claim they have an 80 percent success rate, which is 10 percent more than having the actual surgical procedure. As for the patient who wrote the article, ten days post-surgery, she had already shed seven pounds. While she swears she’s just not hungry, to me it sounds like she’s starving herself. Laziness is not the way to healthiness, no matter how many pounds you lose. [Daily Mail]