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The Ornish Diet is a low-fat, all-vegetarian diet plan. Combining the nutrition plan, exercise, and stress-management techniques of this program results in weight loss and greatly improved health for most dieters. Although this diet program takes much more dedication than many other diets, and often requires big lifestyle changes for the dieter, research shows that it is good for both weight loss and helping to reverse heart disease. With its focus on stress-management and making healthy food choices, this diet is also a great candidate for combined use with hypnotherapy.

The Ornish diet can be in one of two, slightly different formulations, a Preventative diet and a Reversal diet. The Reversal diet is formulated for people already suffering from heart disease who want to reverse the symptoms of the disease and cut their risk for heart attacks. The Preventative diet is perfect for people who need to lose weight and lower their chance of developing heart disease. It is also a good plan for dieters trying to reduce their cholesterol levels.

Both forms of the Ornish diet recommend a nutritional approach that is made up of 10% fat, 20% protein, and 70% complex carbohydrates. Under the plan, all meat, fish, and poultry are to be 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 fine.

Foods allowed in limited amounts include egg whites and fat free dairy products such as lowfat cheeses, milk, and yogurt. Most convenience foods are banned, since any prepackaged foods with over two grams of fat per serving are banned.

The diet allows you to eat vegetables, beans, fruit, and whole grains at every meal until you feel full. The good thing about this diet 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, unlike some others, is not based around unhealthy “starvation” techniques.

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

While the Ornish program is healthy and works for most dieters, it can be difficult to follow because it involves many restrictions. This diet and others similar to it often fail because dieters are unable to stay on them. Many people struggle with dieting because they suffer from an uncontrollable appetite, irresistible cravings, compulsive overeating, or a 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 beat these obstacles, and is an excellent complement to the Ornish diet because it provides powerful motivation to stay on a weight loss plan.

Hypnosis works to regulate the appetite by “reprogramming” the unconscious mind to eliminate and replace bad habits with good ones. Years 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 emotions to eliminate 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 urges to overeat, you will feel motivated to exercise for your health.

Hypnotherapy 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 rejection, so they use their extra weight as a reason to believe that other people will dislike and reject them. Through hypnotherapy, we can think positively and focus on improving our health instead of becoming overwhelmed by such anxieties. We can use hypnotherapy to boost our self-esteem, to clearly see our self-worth and commit to our personal health.

Hypnosis offers a powerful, natural combination of stress-relief, motivation, and behavior modification to encourage weight loss and help you follow your diet program of choice. Using hypnotherapy with the Ornish program is particularly effective, but hypnotherapy is perfect for helping dieters stay on any weight loss plan. Hypnotherapy promotes the success of diet plans 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 dieting CDs and hypnotism to lose weight DVD. Visit his CDs for self-help website for Free hypnosis newsletters, videos, and downloads.

- Alan B. Densky, CH