Paul McKenna is an English hypnotist and self-improvement author. McKenna has written and produced books and multimedia products, hosted self-improvement television shows and presents seminars in hypnosis, neuro-linguistic programming, weight loss and motivation.
Browsing at the bookstore, I was bombarded with posters and an entire table of Paul's "Revolutionary" book. Really, Paul? Let me tell you something. If Dr. Atkins can't help the people, how can you? If The Lemon Juice Diet, You: On A Diet, South Beach Diet, The Best Life Diet, The Raw Food Detox Diet, : The Individualized Diet, The Maker's Diet, The Abs Diet, The Great American Detox Diet, The Ultimate Tea Diet, Prevention Flat Belly Diet, The Sonoma Diet, The Thyroid Diet, The 3-Season Diet, The Fat Smash Diet, The Fiber35 Diet, 5-Factor Diet, The Mars and Venus Diet, The No-Grain Diet, The Zone Diet, AND The Macrobiotic Diet have not done the trick what new scam, er, information are you bringing to the table? I see your little "workbook", Paul. Everyone has those too. And workout guides. And cookbooks.
Revolutionary my ass.
Eat less. Cut out the crap foods. (do you really need a book to tell you deep fried shit is bad?) Exercise.
I didn't want to rate this book so highly, as the title offends me! I think it sounds arrogant, and "thin" wasn't necessarily what I was looking for - just a healthy relationship with food! But the copy I have fell into my hands by accident - it got left over at a charity car boot sale I helped at, so I kept it out of curiosity, as I am interested in "Intuitive Eating" as an approach to improving ones relationship with food.
I was pleasantly surprised by the content of this book - it promotes a great attitude with food, and speaks out against the diet industry, which I passionately despise! The accompanying CD is great too, and I really do find it relaxing, and promoting of good eating habits!
So here I am, reluctantly giving this book 5 stars!
Wow, this is amazing! McKenna has four simple rules for weight loss (things like stop eating when you're full). Very easy to follow, and the quick book reinforces the rules. The book includes a hypnosis CD that is 25 minutes long. Listen to it for 2 weeks (I listened at night before bed), and his concepts are reinforced. Now I eat what I want (I can have birthday cake at a party), and just focus on stopping when I'm full. I'm amazed at how much less food I eat and am still full! I'm also in a lot better mood than I have been with other diets. McKenna does talk a lot about a positive self image, and I feel more confident (I know, that sounds cheesy!). I'm using it to lose the last of the baby weight, and so far it's working!
The premise of the book is simple... eat when you're hungry and don't eat when you're not hungry. It was almost too simple to be true. When I started doing this I realized the countless amount of times throughout the day that I ate just for eating sake... not because I was hungry. I would also eat way past the point of being hungry - not good. I've noticed a difference in my weight now and am much more calmer about food because of this book.
So, if I've told you all this why read the book? We've eaten the way we've eaten for so long that we've forgotten the skill of listening to our body's hunger cues and fullness cues. Paul McKenna will teach you the tips of how to re-learn these skills. A CD accompanies the book as well.
This is one of only 3 self-help books that I've read that actually made a difference in my life (what are the other two? The Secret and Forget Perfect)
what a fabulous system, yet utterly common sense and "duh". why didn't I think of this? IT REALLY WORKS, thats the kicker. there are no diets. No gimmicks.No shakes, no pills, no forbidden foods. follow 4 SIMPLE rules when you eat and you will automatically eat less, lose weight. eat what you want, when you want. Paul McKenna basically teaches you how to reprogram your brain and your eating habits. Eat when you are hungry and stop when you are full. DUH! I highly rcommend this book to anyone who has struggled and failed with every diet known to man. this is as simple as it gets, yet gets results. If you listen to the signals your body is sending, and stop when your body signals you to stop, you WILL lose weight.
2/14/2012 UPDATE: I have noticed that I do a lot less snacking and eat a lot slower if I remember to follow the rules. I have lost 7 lbs in about 3 weeks. I shared this book with a friend and she has noticed she also snacks less and she has lost 4 lbs in about 2 weeks. Maybe it really can work. You really have to make a conscious effort to think about food differently and not just eat without thinking.
Can it really be this simple? This was a quick read with some pretty simple solutions to those of us trying to make the best of our New Years resolutions to lose weight and be healthy. I am excited to put it to the test and will update this review if there are any results (or lack thereof). Read this out loud to my husband while on a road trip and he is up for the challenge also. While traveling we did put some of the suggestions to use. We ate our snacks slowly, savoring the flavor instead of just mindlessly shoving them into our mouths. We did eat less.
At time of writing I am on day 6 of 90 on this weight-loss journey. I will update this review following that to tell you how well it worked. Bear with me if that's what you want to know!
For me, this is a brilliant weight-loss system. The criticisms I've seen so far seem to be from people who didn't follow all the steps correctly or give themselves enough time to work with it. This is not a quick fix diet, something you can do for a week then go back to "eating normally", it's for people who need to change how they eat for good. Possibly they didn't have 'the right kind' of weight problem (I will explain what I mean about that in a bit!) I don't see how anyone can fail to lose weight if they genuinely follow all the steps - there are only 4!
Other criticisms I've seen are about the book being expensive, nothing new and 'just like any other diet book'. I agree that it could be cheaper (which is why I bought mine on ebay!) The version I have is the colour one from 2010 with the CD and DVD. As many of said, the CD and DVD are only the first part of fuller sets which is deemed "a rip off" and "a con" by some, but you don't need to buy the others - it's not essential, and you can also buy them on ebay - I got the CD set for 拢3! You can easily get along just with the first CD. The DVD is just a summary of the main points of the book for people who can't be bothered to read it - not essential. You should listen to the CD every day as part of the plan. Some people have struggled with this as his voice sounds quite funny and it can be distracting, but personally I use hypnosis CDs quite a bit when going to sleep so it was fine (although I missed Glenn Harrold!)
This version of the book does have a lot of padding - large pretty pictures, large typefaces, pages with no text at all, and there is some repetition in the text as well. In that way, it could be smaller and less glossy and therefore cheaper.
The second half of the book is a diet journal you are meant to fill in daily for 90 days. Some people find this "a con" as well. It's a very basic journal that involves minimal writing (you just tick things off a list), but it has little exercises each day designed to help you think about things and love yourself and all sorts of things. I like that part because it feels like I'm getting some therapy for my money. I believe in therapeutic journaling, so I think this is a good part of the book, and I'd say keep another journal where you can actually write more!
It is like other diet books in that they all tend to state that they aren't diet books and diets don't work. I haven't really read a lot of diet books because I do believe that they are generally a bad thing, but it seems to me that I do agree with everything PM says in here - low-fat, sugar-free 'diet' foods are the devil's work (my words, not Paul's!) and diets make people fatter. They haven't made me fatter, because I don't tend to diet, but nevertheless, I am fat because I eat too much. Or rather, I have been eating too much - I'm not now! This is where I come to being "the wrong kind of weight problem" for this book...
I think there are two kinds of fat people - people who have always been fat and people who have got fat in later life. They may look the same but they behave differently. If you have got fat because you gave birth a few times, or went out drinking a lot in your twenties, developed bad habits at university, didn't have tme to eat well looking after kids etc. you will feel differently about your fatness than someone who grew up chubby and got teased, overate for comfort after being bullied, learned how to they could best 'blend in' with the people of normal size growing up, used their fatness as armour, ate in secret, learning to move our bulk through an average-sized world without causing too much offence...that makes a different kind of fat person. Any kind of fat person can use this system, whether they have 1 stone or 400 stones to lose. Paul uses examples from many different situations. But I think the 'lifelong fatties' would probably benefit from it more because of all the work on self-esteem and body-image. If you do this properly, it is a life change and a long, slow & steady journey and that's how long it takes to make your brain adjust to being normal after a lifetime of thinking it's not. It works with the inner problems causing you to overeat, and not just on the rules of what to eat - there are no rules of what to eat!
There are also NLP techniques to deal with food cravings - not sure what I think about those because I've not tried them and haven't needed to yet. I will if I have a strong craving. Maybe it's one of those things that work if you believe it will.
I would say, buy it second-hand, follow all the steps including the CD (remember that Paul McKenna is a famous hypnotist and not a dietician, so that will be a key part of this!), give it some time and TRUST that it will work, DON'T keep weighing yourself, take or leave the DVD and NLP, keep a journal, move around more, drink water, play motivational music, eat slowly and listen to your body. The worst thing that will happen is you won't lose any weight at all, but I'd like to see you try.
This book was truly inspiring to me. Before reading this book, I struggled with getting my weight under control. I was eating out all the time, and (yes, you guessed it) - gaining weight and puttin' on the pounds.
Some helpful and encouraging notes I jotted down from this book include: 1. It's a good idea to make your first response to hunger pangs a fresh glass of water. If you're not hungry afterward, it was thirst; if you still are, dig in! 2. As soon as you've had enought to eat, you'll notice that each subsequent bit of food becomes a little less enjoyable than the one before. The more you pay attention to this phenomenon, the more obvious it becomes. 3. Fully enjoy every single mouthful.
4 Elements of the System: 1). Eat when you're hungry. 2). Eat only what you want, never what you think you "should". 3). Eat consciously and enjoy every mouthful. 4). Stop when you think you're full.
Plus, this book comes with a helpful CD with Paul McKenna taking you into a short 20-minute hypnosis session. It is a fun, easy and short read. Enjoy!
Wow! I watched his television series and was very impressed. Picked up the book on an impulse at B&N. It comes with a CD that is a self-hypnosis CD. I LOVE IT!!! This guy has SOMETHING right!!!! I have found myself moving around more today and am much more aware of real hunger versus emotional hunger. Definatly worth the read. Hoping this really helps. So far I like what it is doing.
Well this is totally unexpected, but... this guy really knows what he's doing! The problem for some people might be that he doesn't get into explaining how all of this stuff works to change your brain into functioning like a thin person's brain. I think he purposely tried to keep this very simple. So for someone like me who's not convinced about such things until she understands how they work, this book could easily be blown off as self-help hogwash. But since he takes ideas from things I've been learning about for a bit, I can see the genius behind it. I'm just not sure your average reader is going to blindly trust this method enough to really keep up with it (even though there's really not that much to keep up with).
When I picked up this book (for $1), I thought, "Yeah well sure... hypnosis is great, but EFT will REALLY get your brain on the right track." Well guess what... he teaches EFT in the book! And a variation of the HAMR technique (see about how one person recovered from MCS by using limbic retraining, EFT and HAMR), as well as NLP and some other brain-retraining techniques that I've been using from the . So if any of the folks using Gupta or brain retraining would like to tackle some issues around eating, this is a good place to start.
And I have to say, after a week of reading this and listening to the CD twice a day, I can't say that I'm really putting forth an effort to slim down, but I do find that I'm just less interested in eating things or amounts that I really "shouldn't" be eating. (Although he would say there's no food you "shouldn't" eat, I kinda think that's just a little bit of bait-and-switch on his part. You're not supposed to think that you're denying yourself your "favorites," but I think you might wind up changing your mind about how appealing your favorites really are.) Of course the additional reading that I do about what different foods/chems do to your health, or how they're slaughtered/produced, also helps me to train my brain away from craving certain things.
Of course, I obviously don't completely agree with someone who says, "Eat whatever you want." But hey... if the simple nature of this program is what it takes for it to work for people, then so be it.
ALL THAT SAID, I don't expect any magical results from this, mainly because I have trouble with two of the four rules: Eat when you're hungry, and stop eating when you think you're full. I'm one of those people he talks about who used to starve themselves and so has trained themselves to not know what hunger feels like. In addition, my MCS-related digestive pains are something I can't usually differentiate from hunger sensations. So what I'm saying is... I don't know how to tell when I'm hungry or when I'm full (until either is at an extreme, and then it becomes obvious; and then there are times when I feel both extremes simultaneously... so you can see this gets confusing for me). I've also learned, from years of having ulcers, a reflex of feeding myself to get rid of any "sick" feelings. So you can imagine that I really started putting on the pounds when I became chronically ill. This isn't directly addressed in the book, but I can extrapolate a plan for breaking that reflex with EFT and/or HAMR (we'll see if I ever actually put forth the effort, though... I've got bigger fish to fry for now). I just would get more out of this if he had a better method for teaching yourself how to learn what hungry feels like.
This is by a guy who takes behavioural cognative therapy and applies it to weight loss. Not new, not revolutionary, but why does it need to be? I think that's the problem most people have with weight loss: it's so simple, we overlook it. Let me summarize: His four golden rules are 1. Eat when you're hungry. 2. Eat only what you truly want, not what you think you should eat. 3. Eat every bite consciously, tasting and enjoying it fully. 4. Stop when you think you're full.
He also adds moving every day and drinking water, and he talks about letting go of emotional attachments to food and removing the "fixation" with food by redirecting your brain. So, this all sounds too simple. And it is! But it is not easy to truly follow these guidelines. Ugh. And I thought there was some big mystery. I really trying to give it a shot, and so far I feel a bit better every day. Wow, can it be the simplest path winds up being the most effective? If so, I am totally behind that.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
I was a little bit dubious about reading Paul McKennas books mainly because my only experience of him has been watching his stage shows. As a fellow Hypnotherapist (Clinical not Stage), I was intrigued to see what his approach was at dealing with issues that I see clients for on a regular basis. I had also been recommended it by another hypnotherapist. I was very impressed with the book. It only took me an hour to read it - has some great facts and information in there and is really easy to follow. A simple approach - Eat when your hungry, Consciously enjoy what your eating, Stop when you are full! It talks about how diets don't work and quotes some great little pieces of research. I do not need to lose weight at all so I didn't listen to the CD in the way the book suggests, although I did listen to it the once to get an idea of the content and techniques used to compare to my current approach and thought it was spot on.
I read Paul Mckenna's book several times from cover to cover,listened to the cd,and even attended his "weight-loss event";(which mainly consisted consisted of him explaining the book-presumably for people who were unable to read!) After having tried everything he suggests and following the instructions to the letter I can truthfully say: IT DID NOT WORK AT ALL for me!In fact I gained weight whilst trying to apply the principles he promotes. I sincerely believe that the "Paul Mckenna weight loss method"is just a modern day example of "The Emperor's New Clothes";hopefully people will hear my small voice of sanity and stop getting sucked in and exploited by the power of commercially motivated advertising on this charlatan's products. I know there are a lot of people who struggle with issues of weight and I think it is most unethical that this man exploits his position of minor celebrity to cash in on vulnerable consumers.
I'ts a short book and an easy read. I think he's right on with ideas about changing our relationship with food and his very simple rules. It's very "anti-diet", (yea!) and more about reprogramming habits and thoughts so that healthier eating is normal life...by choice. My girls and I are going to give it a go...I'll let you know. I already feel a difference in how I'm eating...and he insists that you eat when your hungry, and what you want, and S-L-O-W-L-Y, etc. He also includes some methods to reduce cravings and ways to deal with sabotaging beliefs. I already know the methods he teaches...kind of cracked me up actually...and yes, they work.
This book doesn't contain any real new information. Many other people out there have said what McKenna is saying. But what I found different about this book was the simpleness and how concisely he has presented his four simple rules. I felt good reading it and I am stiving to fit his philosophies into my life. Even though I've read other books saying the same thing, this was the one book that spoke to me.
As for the CD, it was quite weird to listen to at first. I didn't know what to make of it. But now, I listen often and really enjoy it.
Though I'm shriveling with shame, I am going to bravely list my latest rash of self-improvement books.
This one is ludicrously thin itself, as if the slimness of the volume will subconsciously encourage your quest, and McKenna makes my skin crawl. But his central message I can dig - eat what you want, when you want. Learn to listen to your body. Relearn what it means to be hungry.
(There really isn't very much more to the text than this. But it does have a shiny CD).
Whether it works or not remains to be seen, she says, weeping into her cheesecake like a sad, fat bird.
This whole book drags out four principles, eat when you are hungry, stop when you are full, eat what you want, and eat consciously over 100 pages. Save yourself the time and money! Nothing new in this book that we haven't heard before. Blah.
The author gives very sensible advice (though Geneen Roth gave it first - many, many years ago). However, I got the feeling he didn't REALLY mean that you could eat anything you wanted. Why else give instructions on how to get rid of a craving or stop eating a food forever?
This book has changed my relationship with food. I am down 11 pounds in 4 weeks and have not felt hungry or deprived myself of anything during this time. I will never see food the same way again. This is not hypnosis, but rather cognitive behavioral reframing and it is just powerful.
I have no idea how to rate this book. I read it because someone on Twitter said it changed their whole relationship with food. I don't think it is quite that dramatic.
There was some basic, common-sense stuff in here that I did think was useful. Eating when you're hungry and stopping when you're full is a sensible system.
On the other hand, the title and the emphasis throughout the whole book is about being thin as the end goal - having a good relationship with food is just the means to that end. I think this emphasis on appearance is a bit regressive.
I also strongly suspect that there's a lot of pseudoscience in here. McKenna mixes correlation and causation (e.g. with BMI and number of daily steps). This is not a book with a strong evidentiary basis, as far as I can tell from its contents.