News Articles » – THE SKINNY ON HYPNOSIS

St Petersburg Times (reprinted)

THE SKINNY ON HYPNOSIS

By Sheryl Kay, Times Correspondent St. Petersburg ]

She won’t put you in a zombie like trance, but she might just relax your mind enough that it craves health, not sloth.

The lights dimmed and with no sounds other than her slow, unimposing voice, Rena Greenberg addressed close to 50 listeners.

“At the count of three I’m going to ask you to close your eyes,” she told them. “One, two, three. Close your eyes, and just listen to the sound of my voice.

“Thoughts may come into your mind, you may be distracted by certain sounds, but you just bring yourself back to the sound of my voice. My voice will relax and soothe you and soon you will be able to go deeper and deeper into a state of peacefulness.”

Is this what health care has come to?

It has, and it isn’t new.

For 16 years Greenberg has been hypnotizing audiences like this one at University Community Hospital to help them lose weight.

“How can you change what’s going on with your body if you don’t change what’s going on inside?” said Greenberg, who is based in Sarasota . “Hypnotism is a method to help change what is inside, and then we naturally start to do new behaviors that are healthy behaviors.”

Some say forms of hypnosis date back thousands of years in the form of meditation and chanting. Modern-day hypnotism evolved in the mid-1800, but only in the past two decades has it been embraced by psychiatry, dentistry and medicine.

Greenberg has performed similar seminars to help people stop smoking, but she is especially proud of her weight loss program because she faced eating issues as a child.

An addiction to food is one of the hardest to correct, she says. A person can walk away from alcohol, cigarettes or gambling, but everybody has to eat.

She divides her $69 workshop ($59 if your register online) into two parts, an informational presentation and then the hypnotism. Participants remain fully awake—there is no Hollywood-style trance. Instead, they focus on her common-sense suggestions: Eat less, choose the right foods and exercise more often.

“You are now attracted to healthy, nutritious foods,” she tells them. “You begin to know which foods are healthy foods for you. Imagine tables of foods that are not healthy…processed foods…foods that are poisonous foods…foods that will make you gain weight. Now imagine yourself pushing away these foods, right off the table.

“You love your life. You love feeling healthy. You love fitting into your clothes. You love being able to move…”

When it’s over, she instructs the group to “come back,” in essence to become fully conscious. The lights are raised and the session ends. Everyone is encouraged to attend future presentations at no additional cost. They also get a home reinforcement audiotape and a behavior modification booklet.

Darryl Shumacher, 52, attended a recent session, his third. He first went in January and said he had lost 35 pounds so far. Having tried diets with no success, the TECO supervisor was thrilled.

“I needed something to make it stick,” he said. “Whatever happened here made it stick.” He couldn’t remember exactly what happened during the hypnosis. What mattered were the results. “I’m just making the right decisions now.”

Such success stories are why Greenberg has a standing invitation at the hospital.

“Our overall mission is to promote community wellness,” said Diana Funk, nurse manager for Health Source at University Community. “Hypnosis, as far as weight loss goes, does work for a certain portion of the population…we actually had one of our nurses go through it and she lost 30 pounds.”

For more information, see Greenberg’s web page at www.easywillpower.com.