An attractive professional woman in her thirties purchased my hypnosis weight control program, because she had decided shed a few extra pounds. When asked what she wanted to look like when she was at her target weight, she said, “I want to be gaunt.” Then she sucked in her cheeks.

So I mirrored that back to her. “You want to be gaunt.” And, I sucked in my cheeks.

Her eyes got wide and she said, “That’s really crazy, isn’t it?”

I widened my eyes, nodded, and said in a similar tone of voice, “Yeah, it is.”

This was a turning point for her. My client now had to create a new weight/body image goal for herself. The old one was just too crazy to keep.

Then I asked her, “According to whom are you supposed to look gaunt?”

The answer was her mother and her sister, both of whom have thin frames. My client said that they had both been criticizing her weight “all her life”. My client had a heavier frame, and was never going to have the figure of a Vogue model, or of her mother or sister, no matter what she weighed.

So, the logical next question was, who was going to make the decision about what she should look like and how much she should weigh, herself, or her mother and sister? When my client chose to decide for herself, she changed a lifetime habit of responding with feelings of frustration and inadequacy to her mother and sister’s criticisms of her weight and appearance.

I had established good rapport with my client’s unconscious mind by this time. And, since she had already slipped into a light stage of hypnosis, I directly asked her unconscious mind to show my client’s conscious mind what she would look like at her healthiest and most attractive weight. And, it did. My client then decided to make the new, unconsciously generated image her goal. So, from that moment on, she really had something better in mind for herself.

This was an important step in the process of my client transforming herself physically. I was very much aware that if she had kept “gaunt” as both her unconscious and conscious ideal, that because of her heavier frame, she would have tended to always be dissatisfied with her weight.

It is important to have a realistic and healthy goal image to achieve long term success with weight control. And, hypnosis makes it much easier to effectively create and sustain that new and healthy self image.