One of the homework assignments I give clients in the early stages of my program is the creation of a target picture, making a composite picture of your face on a desired body. It sounds silly. It doesn’t sound like it would really help. But it works like magic. It’s one of the most important tools in my toolbox of Therapeutic Psychogenics.
It’s one of the assignments that people resist. For many of us, it’s impossible to imagine ourselves different. We can’t believe it can happen. And that mind-set paralyzes us. In the early days of The Anderson Method, clients would “forget” to do that assignment. Something inside them fought it, had difficulty believing a thinner self could really be. They were attached to the old fat self-image and could not imagine anything different. They were stuck. So, I got in the habit of doing it for them.
As soon as they saw their face, trimmed down, on a healthy body, you could see the resistance melt. Where they had been unable to imagine it before, now they could not only imagine it, but they wanted it. They had been unable to let go of the old self and body image, but now, in seeing what they knew would happen if they were to undereat as the method teaches, they wanted to shuck it and get to the new body asap.
Because our method is based on irrefutably reliable science, they knew that if they followed the method, they would burn off as much excess fat as they wanted, no ifs, and or buts. Their skeleton was not much different than anyone else’s, so when they burned off the excess and deflated the bulk, a thinner body, like others’ who are thinner, would result. They knew that under the puffy fat in their face, their nose, eyes and mouth would remain in their fixed positions, and the trimmed down face would look just like the trimmed down photo. When they looked in the mirror they started wondering how it would look if this part or that part melted off. And now that they could vividly imagine it, they felt a desire for it they had not felt before.
These techniques I call Therapeutic Psychogenics may seem silly or non-scientific, but they are state of the art reprogramming techniques, known to draw on powers of the psyche that we all have but rarely use in the right way.
If you want to solve your weight problem, tonight, use your computer and printer/copy machine and make a composite of what you’d be like if you got rid of your excess weight. Take a current picture of your face and trim it down. Get some body pictures from magazines or the Internet. Use the zoom on the copy machine to match the head in size to the body. It doesn’t need to be great art. It can be crude. Black and white may even work better than color. Your mind will pick up what is presented and form an even better image in your imagination.
If you want to solve your weight problem, do this little exercise and see what happens. You may discover the power of visualization, target pics and Therapeutic Psychogenics.
