The average weight loss should be about 2 pounds a week, but people lose weight at different speeds. Some will drop a lot of weight and then level off for a bit and then lose some more. I think the hardest thing is to not compare your own weight loss to someone elses. For instance in the audience there was one woman, who I must say was huge. She had lost the most weight over the 3/4 weeks of the show, at a staggering 27 pounds. Others had lost about 7 pounds, others around a stone…so it really does vary.

One valuable piece of advise that Paul McKenna gave was that we have to remember that it is not important where we stand but the direction that we are moving in. So as long as you are losing weight steadily, and making the changes to the way we view food then we will get there in the end. I do not expect to be down to my ideal weight instantly… but I hope that by the summer I will be nearly there.

NO I hear you cry, well it’s ok Paul Mckenna has a Weight Loss System you can buy online ( just click the picture )

You can also buy the “I Can Make You Thin” book by Paul Mckenna as well .. phew.

Well on Friday I am going to publish my results … so hold tight

Paul Mckenna made a very good point about self image, that if we critisise ourselves every day for the way we look, then all of these comments start to add up. We have to reverse this habit by creating a positive self image. He said what we need to do to start this, is when we feel ourselves wanting to say “I’m so fat and ugly” when we look in the mirror, we have to say it in a stupid voice, therefore you can’t take it seriously.

What you must therefore start to do when you look in the mirror is not to say all the bad points that you used to be able to see but, “I accept my face, I accept my chin, I accept my stomach, I accept my legs etc etc”. You must say this in an assertive voice and you will start to feel better about yourself and accept your body.

There are also other ways to improve your self confidence such as to imagine that you are inside the body of someone you aspire to, then look in the mirror. Imagine how they feel when the look in the mirror each day. One thing we must remember is that even though celebrities have very toned, trim bodies, who is to say they like themselves and have a great life. It is just how they are portrayed when they walk down the red carpet. In reality most of the top celebrities are messed up. You have to also imagine a time that you have been paid a compliment and remember how happy and confident you felt.

This is all to do with making sure that when you get up in the morning and look in the mirror that you must associate good memories and good positive feelings with who you are, rather than putting yourselve down all of the time. I’m certainly going to give this a go.

Often people who are overweight and not happy about how they look, also have low self esteem. They then help themselves feel better by eating more, therefore suffering from emotional eating. It’s a vicious circle that I want to get out of. I wouldn’t class myself as a particularly big emotional eater but I do suffer from a poor self image. I am certainly not what Paul McKenna classes as a binge eater and I don’t have the midnight feast that some of the people had on the show.

He used a technique that has been proven to be successful in treating fears and phobias, and the same technique can be used to gain control over food. It is to do with the direction that desire travels in your body and then to reverse the cycle. For instance if you see a chocolate cake the desire starts in your stomach and moves up into your mouth. This can be represented as a clockwise circle in red, spinning inside your body. Yeh I know this all sounds a bit wierd. The theory is that this red clockwise circle of desire continues spinning, but taking control you move it out of the body. You have to sort of spin your hand around with the motion of the circle. Then to regain control and to stop the binge eating you change the circle to blue and make it spin in the opposite direction. Therefore taking the desire from your mouth back to your stomach where it all started. By spinning the blue wheel faster and faster this surpresses the desire. This is an alternative technique to the tapping one that Paul McKenna shown everyone last week.

I will have to catch up with the actual process for doing this task from the book as by this point of the programme I was all a bit confused especially with all of that tapping. I may even watch the show again tonight from my Sky+ box and see if I can master this technique too.

It was definately something to do with squeezing your thumb and middle finger together while visualising happy times. This would get this thought programmed in somehow, and then you could release that happy thought again whenever you needed a boost by squeezing together your thumb and finger again?

Paul Mckenna told us all then to tap about 10 times at various points of our bodies while thinking about the desired food, starting with above the eye…tap, tap, tap. Moving down below the eye and onto the collar bone…tap, tap, tap. Then under your arm, on the side of your hand, and finally on the back of your hand…tap, tap, tap… All the while thinking about the food you crave. Then you have to roll your eyes clockwise and then anti clockwise, then look down to the right then to the left, then back to tap above your eye… ( I think that was how it went, but it was all very fast) Anyway after a few more taps… I no longer wanted any chocolate! MAGIC!

It was either me starting to change my body’s algorithm or just by concentrating on tapping it distracted me from what I actually wanted.

This technique apparently was developed by Dr. Roger Callahan PhD and has been proven as very successful in controlling and eliminating emotional stress which causes us to emotionally eat. This is where we have to change the algorithm in the body and do some diagnostic training.

The theory behind this technique sort of made sense, it is about tapping on key areas of the body’s energy meridian which is something that people have used in acupuncture for hundreds of years. It was described to us as tapping a healing code into our healing system. It did all sound slightly strange and I did wonder it it was going to have any effect. I’m not really one for all this self healing milarky.

The body’s brain is a very important factor why we suddenly have the urge to eat. If we have the overwhelming urge to eat something sweet or stodgy it is the brain that is urging us to eat foods high in carbohydrates so that it will cause the brain to release serotonin which will help us relax and feel calm. It is a vicious circle as the brain will crave certain high carb foods which will make us feel better due to the chemical released, but then we will want that feeling again.

Another chemical that is released is dopamine, the brain’s pleasure chemical, which causes us to have the great urge for ceratin foods as this can become quite addictive. This sort of answered the reason why I can eat a large bar of Dairy Milk chocolate in one go, totally unconsciously. I am obviously making myself feel better by doing this. It is something I have never really thought about before in this way, but I do have cravings in this sense.

Paul McKenna’s new diet plan is to give you back control around food, and make you feel better about yourself due to losing weight and for regaining the control.

The studio audience all had had a similar week and were very positive about the Paul Mckenna diet. Most had managed to leave food on their plate and learnt to enjoy food a lot more. It was quite a technical programme with terms such as changing the body’s algorithm, an algo I wasn’t familiar with, and the reasons why many of us who over eat suffer from emotional eating problems.

Can’t wait to get started and give it a start.

The points that Paul McKenna brought up on the show really made sense. Very simple ideas that I can see working for me.

He is either a really great showman and is actually really brainwashing the general public so that he can control our minds in the future or he has just produced the first guide to losing weight and staying slim that everyone can stick to and achieve the desired results.

Only time will tell…