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"  For the past 21 days, I&amp;#039;ve been on a health kick\u2014one that doesn&amp;#039;t require fluorescent-lit gyms, Spartan meal plans, or lumpy Lycra. This time around, I put up my feet, breathe deeply, and envision myself, or rather, a leaner, more chiseled me (we&amp;#039;ll call her &amp;quot;Maggie 2.0&amp;quot;), loping, serene and gazellelike, on a treadmill\u20142.0 just loves to run. Afterward, I watch as she rewards herself with a modestly portioned, healthy meal. Maybe even a cookie. No\u2014half a cookie. She&amp;#039;s one of those. (Occasionally, the real me walks into the picture and socks 2.0 in her self-satisfied jaw. But that&amp;#039;s a different story.) Maggie 2.0 is not some specter of metabolic mind control. She&amp;#039;s an attempt to fix a lifestyle problem where it began: in my head. For while I have long possessed the tools\u2014gym membership, yoga mat, elasticized wardrobe\u2014to get in shape and the good carb/bad carb know-how to eat healthily, I suffer from a paralyzing lack of motivation. Go to the gym? Eh. I don&amp;#039;t feel like it. Elect to eat only half a cookie? As if.  There&amp;#039;s no such thing as an easy, flip-a-switch lifestyle change. I know this. But when a stack of CDs labeled Performance Hypnosis showed up in my office, my customary skepticism was momentarily suspended. These 20-minute recordings are designed to help you curb a sweet tooth, get fit, manage stress\u2014all in a matter of weeks, if not faster. Which would have sounded like a total crock, had I not heard that newly svelte British popster Lily Allen said a \u00A3300-an-hour Harley Street hypnotist had reprogrammed her to &amp;quot;just want to go to the gym every day.&amp;quot; It wasn&amp;#039;t the weight loss I envied, exactly\u2014actually, I preferred the authentic, pre-makeover Allen\u2014but the feeling. Never in my life have I &amp;quot;just wanted&amp;quot; to work out. Or, for that matter, to settle for half a cookie. Could the backwaters of my brain hold a solution? In honor of ELLE&amp;#039;s make-better blitz, I gave myself 21 days to subconscious success. If hypnosis sounds like a hokey Victorian parlor trick or a 1930s tent-revival gimmick, that&amp;#039;s because it&amp;#039;s been both. In late-1700s Vienna, physician Franz Mesmer cured mysterious ailments by waving magnets around subjects who had drunk an iron-laden potion, infusing them with what he called &amp;quot;magnetic fluid.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Mesmerization&amp;quot; was eventually discredited, but it did establish the idea that the mind could be manipulated to affect the body. What we know as &amp;quot;going under&amp;quot; started in 1841, when Scottish surgeon James Braid entranced patients by making them fixate on objects. Braid popularized the term hypnosis after Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep.  Stage performances, in which eerily submissive subjects are made to quack like ducks, give the impression that the process turns otherwise freethinking adults into automatons. But practitioners say it&amp;#039;s closer to the sensation of daydreaming, an activity at which I happen to excel. In this relaxed yet highly focused state, we tend to be more suggestible, less critical or disbelieving. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a reduction in peripheral awareness that we call `dissociation&amp;#039;\u2014you tend to be more responsive to social cues, verbal input,&amp;quot; says David Spiegel, MD, an associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine. &amp;quot;The brain is active and alert, not asleep. The parts that help focus attention, such as the frontal cortex and the cingulate gyrus, are working.&amp;quot;  Georgina Powell, the Navarre, Florida, certified hypnotherapist who founded Performance Hypnosis, is a former doctor&amp;#039;s office administrator who first experimented with the technique when she was looking for a holistic method to ease the birth of her second son. &amp;quot;I won&amp;#039;t say it was completely painless,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But at 10 pounds, 13 ounces, he was a breeze compared to my first.&amp;quot;  Powell explains that the mind has two components. The conscious mind makes logical decisions and holds on to short-term memories, beliefs, and values. The subconscious, like a computer mainframe, controls heart rate, respiration, metabolic processes, and digestion. When we consciously decide to walk across a room, the subconscious tells us which muscles to fire. The subconscious is also &amp;quot;like an idiot savant, so childlike. It&amp;#039;s absolutely brilliant but doesn&amp;#039;t know the difference between fantasy and reality,&amp;quot; Powell says. Becoming deeply engrossed in a movie or book is actually a light hypnotic trance; when your heart thumps and your palms sweat as if the zombie in Hellraiser III were really coming for you, it&amp;#039;s because your subconscious thinks he really is. In medicine, hypnosis has slowly gained steam since the 1950s as an alternative therapy for ailments such as chronic pain, asthma, and irritable bowel syndrome. In a study at New York City&amp;#039;s Mount Sinai School of Medicine, 100 women undergoing procedures such as a breast biopsy or lumpectomy were hypnotized for 15 minutes just before surgery to envision a calmer, less traumatic experience; the other 100 spent the same amount of time with a psychologist. Afterward, the hypnosis group reported significantly less pain, nausea, fatigue, and emotional upset than their counterparts. Interestingly, they had also required measurably less anesthesia during surgery (presumably, say the study&amp;#039;s authors, because they exhibited less pain and restlessness), resulting in quicker procedures and lower operating room costs. The practice is additionally proven to help a host of emotional issues. A meta-analysis published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology reviewed 18 separate hypnosis studies and found that patients who receive cognitive-behavioral therapy plus hypnosis for conditions such as obesity, insomnia, anxiety, and hypertension show greater improvement than at least 70 percent of those who undergo therapy alone. In a study Spiegel published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, of 226 smokers who were taught self-hypnosis, half quit right away and half of them didn&amp;#039;t touch a cigarette for three years, resulting in one out of four long-term abstinents after a single session. Still, after a week of 20-minute at-home listening sessions, I was left wondering: Is this hypnosis? When Powell&amp;#039;s pleasant, modulated voice informed me that I was &amp;quot;very, very calm&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;very, very relaxed,&amp;quot; I felt the exact opposite. Maggie 2.0 had been mildly entertaining, but I felt certain she was a product of my conscious mind\u2014had I really gone under to create her? Part of the problem was that I wasn&amp;#039;t all that sure I really want to be &amp;quot;suggestible.&amp;quot; After all, did that mean being mentally flexible\u2014or just a sucker? When I mentioned my new plan at an office editorial meeting, several colleagues gasped, totally fascinated, but others immediately cried bullshit. &amp;quot;It doesn&amp;#039;t work on me,&amp;quot; declared one editor. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m completely unhypnotizable!&amp;quot; Perhaps, like me, she wanted to believe she was too smart, too cerebral, to let her subconscious\u2014that internal, gullible idiot\u2014take the wheel. Spiegel says about 15 percent of adults are highly hypnotizable, while two thirds of the population is at least somewhat susceptible. &amp;quot;High hypnotizables rate themselves as being more trusting of others. They&amp;#039;re intuitive; they&amp;#039;re the kind of people who sit down to work on a project and look up and it&amp;#039;s three hours later,&amp;quot; he says. Those who are less hypnotizable tend to value logic over emotion\u2014hello, journalists?\u2014and to be more structured and controlled.  With two weeks to go, I gave up on DIY and enlisted hypnotherapist Sera Lavelle, a sleek twentysomething with a snug, metronome-free office in SoHo. Lavelle&amp;#039;s initial session begins with half an hour of talk therapy: What are you hoping to address? What are the underlying issues? I wanted to work out more, of course, but since this was a personalized session, I was hoping we would focus on short-circuiting my sweet tooth. Why resist chocolate&amp;#039;s 4 P.M. siren song when I could just press MUTE? No dice. &amp;quot;If I told you to hate sweets, you might just find something else to crave, like cigarettes,&amp;quot; she says. Instead, she aims for moderation. &amp;quot;I try to make people very aware of how they feel. You feel okay after the first cookie, but after the third? Not so good.&amp;quot; Similarly, for exercisephobes, she aims to override preworkout dread by instilling a heightened sense of exactly what motivates most naturally athletic people: how healthy and strong they feel after working out. Eventually, Lavelle began to slow her cadence and draw waves and circles in the air with her fingers; this, combined with the soporific setting\u2014the room was slightly overwarm, with faint, spalike music\u2014made me instantly drowsy. I fell into a prolonged version of that surreal moment right before sleep, when limbs feel leaden and thoughts begin to unspool, making less and less sense. Every time I tried to follow the lilt of Lavelle&amp;#039;s voice\u2014which got weirdly slow and almost gravelly, like a record being played on the wrong speed\u2014I could only hook the beginning of a sentence. Her words seemed to drift farther and farther apart, just out of my grasp.  This is a trick of Lavelle&amp;#039;s preferred technique, Ericksonian Hypnosis. &amp;quot;Most of my clients are highly cognitive, highly analytic,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I use a confusion technique, plays on words, analogies, so that people ask themselves, Why is she saying that\u2014does she mean this or does she mean that?&amp;quot; Telling a smoker to envision a person in another poisonous situation, such as a house that has carbon monoxide gas, supposedly distracts the conscious mind\u2014that vigilant gatekeeper\u2014while allowing the subconscious to absorb the underlying message: Don&amp;#039;t smoke.  When I opened my eyes, I was disoriented. Why had we only done 15 minutes? Surprise\u2014it was 40. I had little memory of what Lavelle had said. If she had indeed reprogrammed me, she must have buried the information deep.  But later that week, I found myself eating half a sandwich and abandoning the rest. At a friend&amp;#039;s baby shower, I popped a few M&amp;amp;amp;M&amp;#039;S but no more. I made it to the gym (though my gasping and sputtering was nowhere near 2.0&amp;#039;s graceful trot). &amp;quot;How can I be sure that&amp;#039;s hypnosis, though?&amp;quot; I demanded at my third and final session. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not like I floated into the gym in some kind of fog.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I hear that all the time,&amp;quot; Lavelle said. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re not denying yourself, so you feel like you can&amp;#039;t be losing weight. But you&amp;#039;re making small changes little by little. Ignoring the bread basket and skipping one H\u00E4agen-Dazs night per week is enough to lose, say, half a pound a week. People call me a year later and they&amp;#039;ve lost 20 pounds.&amp;quot; So, did I become 2.0 in 21 days? I guess only time will tell. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/beauty/health-fitness/advice/a9603/out-of-body-284157/>