The Ornish Diet is a low fat, vegetarian diet plan. Proper use of the nutrition plan, exercise, and stress-management techniques of this program results in weight loss and greatly improved health for most people. Although this program takes much more dedication than a lot of other diets, and often requires big lifestyle changes for the dieter, research indicates that it is good for both losing weight and helping to reverse heart disease. With its focus on stress-management and making healthy food choices, this diet is also an ideal candidate for use in conjunction with hypnosis.
The Ornish diet is available in two slightly different forms, a Reversal diet and a Preventative diet. The Reversal diet is formulated for people already afflicted with heart disease who are looking to reverse the symptoms of the disease and reduce their risk of having heart attacks. The Preventative diet is excellent for people who want to lose weight and lower their risk for heart disease. It is also ideal for people looking to lower their cholesterol levels.
Both versions of the Ornish diet recommend a diet plan that is made up of 10% fat, 20% protein, and 70% complex carbohydrates. Under the diet, all meat, fish, and poultry are to be avoided. All oils, nuts, fats, and seeds are also banned. Refined carbohydrate foods such as white flour and sugar are also banned, but whole grain pasta and bread, beans, and legumes are allowed.
Foods allowed in restricted amounts include egg whites and fat free dairy products such as fat free cheeses, yogurt, and milk. Most processed foods are not allowed, since any processed foods with over 2 grams of fat per serving are banned.
The diet lets you to eat whole grains, fruit, vegetables, and beans at each meal until you feel full. The good thing about this diet is that since you are permitted to consume as much as you want of allowed foods, you can feel full and satisfied all the time. This diet, unlike some others, is not based on unsafe "starvatio
" techniques.
In addition to the diet plan, another essential component of the Ornish diet is stress-management. There are many stress-relieving techniques you can use, such as meditation, yoga, and hypnosis. Hypnotherapy is ideal for relieving anxiety and tension while supporting natural weight loss. Hypnotic techniques work by guiding your unconscious mind to having positive thoughts instead of negative thoughts when you start to feel stressed. These techniques are quite effective in reducing stress levels.
While the Ornish program is healthy and effective for most dieters, it can be hard to follow because it involves many restrictions. This diet and others like it often fail because people are unable to stay on them. Many people struggle with
dieting because they suffer from an out-of-control appetite, irresistible food cravings, compulsive overeating, or a simple lack of motivation to stick to a weight loss program. These obstacles keep many hard-working dieters from maintaining their diet and achieving long-term success. Hypnosis therapy helps you beat these obstacles, and is an excellent complement to the Ornish diet plan because it offers motivation to stay on a weight loss plan.
Hypnosis works to control and regulate the appetite by "reprogramming" the unconscious mind to eliminate and replace bad habits with good ones. A lifetime of unhealthy eating habits such as "emotional eating" can cause people to eat compulsively, even when they are not truly hungry. Hypnotherapy breaks unhealthy associations with food and our feelings to end 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 feeling urges to overeat, you will have the motivation 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 gai
" in the form of a sense of safety or emotional protection. For instance, many people with low self-esteem fear rejection, so they use their extra weight as a reason to believe that other people will dislike them. Through hypnosis, we can think more positively and focus on improving our health instead of feeling overcome by such anxieties. We can use hypnotic therapies to boost our self-esteem, to clearly see our self-worth and commit to our personal health.
Hypnotherapy offers a powerful, natural combination of stress-management, motivation, and behavior modification to encourage weight loss and help you follow your diet of choice. Using hypnotherapy with the Ornish program is particularly effective, but hypnotherapy is great for helping dieters stay committed to any diet plan. Hypnotherapy promotes the success of weight loss diet programs as well as natural weight loss so people can enjoy long-lasting results.