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The Ornish Diet is an extremely low fat, vegetarian diet plan. Combining the nutrition plan, exercise, and stress-management techniques of this diet results in weight loss and improved health for most people. Although this diet takes more dedication than many other diet plans, and often requires major lifestyle changes for the dieter, research indicates that it is good for both losing weight and reversing heart disease. With its focus on stress-reduction and making healthy food choices, this diet is also a great candidate for combined use with hypnosis treatments.

The Ornish diet comes in two similar types, a Preventative diet and a Reversal diet. The Preventative diet is excellent for people who need to shed pounds and lower their chance of developing heart disease. It is also excellent for people wanting to lower their cholesterol levels. The Reversal diet is formulated for people already afflicted with heart disease who are looking to reverse the effects of the condition and lower their risk for heart attacks.

Both versions of the Ornish diet recommend a nutrition plan that is composed of 10% fat, 20% protein, and 70% complex carbohydrates. Under the plan, all meat, fish, and poultry are to be avoided. All nuts, oils, seeds, and fats are also not permitted. Refined carbohydrate foods such as sugar and white flour are also banned, but whole grain bread and pasta, beans, and legumes are allowed.

Foods allowed in limited portions include egg whites and nonfat dairy products such as fat-free cheeses, yogurt, and milk. Most convenience foods are not allowed, since any prepackaged foods with over 2 grams of fat per serving are not permitted.

The diet lets you to eat beans, whole grains, fruit, and vegetables at each meal until you feel full. The good thing about this diet program is that since you are allowed to eat as much as you want of allowed foods, you can feel full and satisfied all the time. This diet program, unlike many others, is not based around unhealthy "starvation" methods.

In addition to the nutrition plan, another important key to the Ornish diet program is stress-management. There are many stress-relieving practices you can use, such as yoga, meditation, and hypnosis. Hypnotherapy is ideal for alleviating anxiety and tension while supporting natural weight loss. Hypnosis works by helping your unconscious mind focus on having positive thoughts instead of negative thoughts when you start to feel stressed. These techniques are very effective in reducing stress levels.

While the Ornish diet is healthy and effective for most dieters, it can be hard to follow because it has many restrictions. This diet and others like it often fail because people are unable to stick to them. Many people struggle with dieting because they suffer from an uncontrollable appetite, uncontrollable cravings, compulsive overeating, or a lack of motivation to lose weight. These obstacles keep many hard-working dieters from maintaining their diet and achieving permanent weight loss. Hypnosis helps you beat these obstacles, and is an ideal complement to the Ornish diet because it offers motivation to stick to a weight loss plan.

Hypnosis works to 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 impulsively, even when they are not hungry. Hypnosis breaks unhealthy associations with food and our emotions to eliminate this conditioned response and prevent emotional eating. Hypnosis can further influence dieting success by replacing the overeating response with another activity, such as exercise. This way, instead of getting the urge to overeat, you will have the motivation to engage in healthy physical activity.

Hypnotherapy can also be used to eliminate the emotional anxieties that keep you from losing weight. For many people, being overweight provides a "secondary gain" in the form of a feeling of safety or emotional protection. For example, many people with low self-esteem fear people not liking them, so they use their weight as a reason to believe that others will dislike them. Through hypnosis, we can think positively and focus on improving our health instead of feeling overcome by such anxieties. We can use hypnotic therapies to improve our self-esteem, placing value on ourselves and our own health.

Hypnosis offers a powerful, natural combination of stress-management, motivation, and behavior modification to promote weight loss and help you follow your diet program of choice. Using hypnosis with the Ornish diet is particularly effective, but hypnosis therapy is ideal for helping dieters stay on any weight loss plan. Hypnosis promotes the success of weight loss programs along with natural weight loss so people can enjoy long-lasting results.