It is a year since I first started listening to my Slimpod – a Thinking Slimmer download.
This time last year, as I was chatting on Twitter I heard talk of a product that you listened to every night and you lost weight. Scam! I thought. But the people talking about it were friends and people I knew, not actresses, actors or PR companies. And when curiosity got the better of me I discovered I could buy the CD for only £29.99 and that was it.
So I bought it. Even at the time it seemed like a bit of a no brainer.
I had a *lot* of weight to lose.
I had been on the Tesco Diet with some success but diets are just not sustainable longer term. I knew I could lose weight. I also new I would put it all back on…and some. This product claimed to change your thinking. It claimed that you wouldn’t need willpower. You can see why I thought it was a scam can’t you?
I was on it about 4 days and I posted on Twitter that I didn’t think it was going to work for me. I had emotional connections with food from my childhood and was sure that this product wouldn’t work. People talked about how quickly they fell asleep listening to it. I was wide awake all through. People talked about forgetting what the voice on the track said. I argued all the way through. I couldn’t see myself slimmer as the track suggested. I disagreed with pretty much the whole track as I listened.
And yet it did work.
I just refused to weigh myself at the start because I didn’t want to know. I did know that I was mostly wearing size 22 clothes and some of them were too tight. I didn’t take a “before” picture because I didn’t believe it would work.
The Sandra, the CEO and cofounder of Thinking Slimmer gave me a call and offered to help. Sandra is unique. She cares about everyone who buys Thinking Slimmer. She wants every individual to have every chance of success even though she knows it won’t work for everyone. After all, she came up with the idea for the product because she didn’t think it was fair that only people who could afford Harley Street fees could benefit from this approach to weight loss.
She reassured me it should work but also got me connected with Trevor and my journey of improvement started from the inside out at about the same time as outside in! But that’s a whole other story
Soon I started noticing differences. I stopped snacking. I started leaving one of the two pieces of toast I had for breakfast. Then one day, I ordered a frappuccino from Starbucks (my absolute favourite ever) and I couldn’t face drinking it.
For a while I was upset. This was not on! But I was losing weight. Clothes were getting looser, pounds were disappearing from the scales. I lost a stone very quickly.
And then I started running. Because there is something about listening to the Slimpod that just makes you want to do more. Pretty soon I was running daily. The weight stopped but the size kept on changing.
I stopped using the scales as a gauge because they didn’t reflect what was happening with my clothes. I took 6 bin bags of clothes to the charity because now I am a size 14.
I got a chance to run the London Marathon and under a year after starting Thinking Slimmer I ran the London Marathon in 6 hours 21 minutes
But to train for the marathon I had to come off listening to my Slimpod. Because I needed to be able to eat freely and while listening to the Slimpod I couldn’t. Not being able to face breakfast before a 3 hour run is not good. In fact, I barely ate before the marathon day and that was not good.
So anyway, you might at this point think “Hang on, if this reprogramme’s your thinking, how come you could "’stop’ it?”
You’d be right.
You see I have an emotional connection with food. I have used food as a weapon my whole life. Where most people scoff when depressed or stressed, I stop eating. I punish myself by removing food. And that needed a little more to fix than the Slimpod.
Frankly it’s a miracle it has worked this well. And a credit to Trevor and Sandra in an amazing product.
So in my last session with Trevor Silvester, founder of Cognitive Hypnotherapy and voice of the Slimpod, the work we did broke that emotional connection. I am now free around food. And initially this has meant that as I am no longer using food as a punishment, I’m eating in a very unconstrained way.
So I’m back listening to the Slimpod at least once a day. I have a goal to get to a size 10/12 and at the moment I am a size 14 and not even close to a 12.
I will get there though.
And I will never be obese again. Because I’m not on a diet. I just eat differently these days.
You can read my whole journey here (you’ll have to keep scrolling back to start at the start)
