Ronald Glassman - The Alpha Solution for Permanent Weight Loss: Harness the Power of Your Subconscious Mind to Change Your Relationship with Food—Forever

Contents

Chapter One
Thin Is a State of Mind

Chapter Two
The Solution Is Not in the RefrigeratorIts Within You

Chapter Three
The Alpha Solution

Chapter Four
Change Your Mind, Change Your Body

Chapter Five
Place Settings

Chapter Six
The Release

Chapter Seven
The Alpha Solution Inventory

Chapter Eight
Script I: Drawing a New Blueprint

Chapter Nine
Recording Script I

Chapter Ten
Script II: Writing Your Future

Chapter Eleven
Recording Script II

Chapter Twelve
Back It Up

In Honor

This book is dedicated to Meryl, my wife and best friend.

I also dedicate this book to every person who has ever struggled with their weight.

In Memory

Moe Doc Leff
Stuart M. Corsover
Alma Berkowitz Corsover Goldberg

The brain is the only programmable organ in the body.
Choose the direction you want to program yours
and enjoy the journey.

Ron Glassman

Acknowledgments

I could not have made my way to this place without the following individuals and institutions providing inspiration and support through the journey. Words to express my heartfelt appreciation dont yet exist.

Dr. Albert Einstein; Rutgers, Columbia, and Harvard Universities; Dr. Milton Erickson, the father of medical hypnosis and neurolinguistic programming; Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz; Dr. Daniel Amen; Dr. Herbert Spiegel; Dr. David Spiegel; Dr. Ben Carson; Dr. Herbert Benson of the Harvard Medical School Mind-Body Institute; Dr. Joy Hirsch of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons; Dr. Jack Elinson of Columbia University School of Public Health; Dr. Dave Thomas and Dr. Sherry Gorelick of Rutgers University; Dr. Zita Norwalk Polsky; Dr. J. Paul Teusink; and Dr. Jamie Feldman.

Special appreciation goes to Meryl, who inspires me daily; Mollie Doyle, the best writer of all; and Brian DeFiore, the greatest literary agent of all. I also sincerely thank K.K., who referred A.T., who referred R.L., the person who said to me, You know, Ron, you really should write a book and ultimately got Brian and me in the same room. I also thank everyone at Random House Publishing, especially Ann Campbell, my extraordinary editor, and her always-on-top-of-things assistant, Laura Lee Mattingly.

And finally, my wonderful office support staff in the New Jersey and Manhattan offices, without whom I would not know whether I was coming or going!

Thin Is a State of Mind

Chapter One

Even when I was little, I was big.

William Refrigerator Perry,
Chicago Bears defensive tackle, on his weight, quoted in Life, January 1986

F at is not our destiny or our destination, but for many of us it feels like it is. I should know. I was 75 pounds overweight and struggled with food for the first twenty years of my life. It was an endless and losing battle of trying to gain control over what I was eating and how I was eating it. I now know that I was not alone. Nor are you. According to the Centers for Disease Controls National Center for Health Statistics, more than 66 percent of Americans are overweight. And about half of this group have graduated to qualify as obese.1 In 2005, 112,000 people died due to a poor diet and inactivity.2 In fact, being overweight or obese is the second leading cause of preventable death in the United States.3 And more than 50 percent of U.S. adults did not engage in physical activity at the minimum recommended level.4

These are big numbers, but nothing like the whopping $30 billion the American Obesity Association reports that we Americans annually spend on weight reduction products, services, and programs to try to get help.5 Clearly, the struggle to gain control over our expanding waistlines is hugeeconomically, mentally, physically, even spiritually.

To make matters worse, gaining weight is incredibly easy. Just add a Starbucks Venti Caff Mocha Espresso, which is 290 calories (with low-fat milk and no whipped cream), to your daily intake for twelve days and you can gain a pound.6 But burning the necessary 3,500 calories to lose this pound is hard work. The average person would have to rigorously walk for twelve and a half hours to burn these twelve mochas off.

And, as you know, there are tens of thousands of diet books, programs, philosophies, tapes, and camps that promise to help people lose weight. But, as you also know, these programs and books rarely, if ever, work to achieve healthy, safe, and long-term weight loss. In fact, hundreds of studies by venerable institutions such as the Federal Trade Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Association of Attorneys General have shown that 95 percent of people who use weight-loss programsfrom books and tapes to medical approacheswith some success cant keep the weight off for more than a year. And the 95 percent who gain the weight back, more often than not, gain back more than they lost.7 The truth is, not one single diet, diet book, diet program, diet tape, or diet camp does for the overweight person what he or she really needs to do: establish a different relationship with food.

Why dont these programs work? Because they deal only with the food were eating, not the person eating the food. They dont address the hardwired psychological desire to overeat, the cravings for feel-good foods, or the urge to snack when theres no real need for actual sustenance. If eating were just a biological matter of fueling our bodies the way we fuel up our cars, wed all be thin. But for most of us, eating to supply our bodies with energy is secondary.

Eating is a cultural event. We go out to eat, seeking new and unusual experiences.

Eating is social. Its an arena where we relate to others and they relate to us.

Eating is psychological. Its a way for us to relax, soothe, and reward ourselves for a job well done or another day survived.

Eating is pleasurable. Its an instant jolt to the brains pleasure center, which for many of us is powerful, bordering on addictive.

As a result, many of us wind up eating more than we need to, and we gain weight. Then we try to lose it. If we do lose it, most of us gain the weight back. And then we try to lose the weight again. This psychological relationship with food choreographs an endless and tortured dance in which food is our friend, then our enemy, then our friend, and on it goes. According to the American Obesity Association, 40 percent of American women and 25 percent of American men are actively trying to lose weight at any given time.8

The Solution to Our Weight Problems Lies in Our Minds

As a visiting scientist and guest lecturer at Columbia University Medical Schools Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, I have the unique opportunity to view the working human brain as it thinks. After studying thousands of brains and the way they process thoughts, I can say with confidence that the answer to the struggle with food and weight lies between our ears. The answer to our fat problem? Rewire our brains. We get fat because our minds think fat.

In our evolved society of social and psychological eating, our subconscious mind has been conditioned (like any muscle or organ in our body) to tell us to eat more than we need to. Our brains have been supersized. So we overeat, crave foods, and snack unnecessarily. And if our subconscious mind has been trained for this behavior, no matter what diet or exercise regime we embrace, the subconscious mind will always override our conscious, logical desire to be thin.