A lot of people have tried everything to lose weight – from diets and pills to hitting the gym. We all know how to lose weight. That’s a given. We know that eating less and exercising more results in weight loss, but the biggest problem is how do you get motivated to do that? Rena Greenberg, CEO of Wellness Seminars, Inc., has helped over 200,000 people all over the world lose weight and achieve optimal health. She joins us to talk about using weight loss hypnosis to take control of your life and your eating habits.
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Transform Your Body Using Hypnosis with Rena Greenberg
I want to introduce you to a wonderful, amazing woman that I’ve fallen in love with. Her name is Rena Greenberg. Since 1990, this Hay House author has helped over 200,000 people all over the world lose weight and achieve optimal health. Her groundbreaking wellness seminar for weight control has been reviewed and sponsored in over 75 hospitals and over 100 major corporations like Walt Disney World and Home Depot. Rena’s success has been featured in over 160 TV and news stories including Good Morning America, ABC Nightline, CNN, The Doctors Show, USA Today, Woman’s World Magazine and her PBS special. Her clients often say they owe their lives to her, which is a big statement. She finds the fastest and easiest way to help people release subconscious blocks to losing weight and finding lasting health, happiness and freedom. Rena, I’m excited you’re here. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Christy. I’m thrilled to be on your show. Thank you.
You have had some amazing success with weight loss hypnosis. How does that work? What do you do with clients? How does that even work with clients?
Most people who come to me for weight loss have tried everything. They’ve tried all the diets, the pills, the exercise equipment. These are smart, successful people. We all know how to lose weight. It’s no secret. Consciously, we know we need to eat less and exercise more. The issue is how do you get motivated to do that? How do you change your thinking so that it’s second nature? Healthy food, eat only when you’re physically hungry to be able to be turned off to harmful foods. That’s where I help people. I help people to tap into the power of the subconscious to rewrite the script and the program so we naturally prefer healthier foods without ever feeling deprived or denied, without ever feeling we’re on a diet. There’s no restriction. It’s total freedom. The weight comes off because we start to think of ourselves. We see ourselves as if we were already thin and healthy and so our behavior’s automatically thinking accordingly.
People who say it’s either diet or exercise, I feel the mind is the biggest part because you can know exactly what to do, how to do it, have every intention to do it. You find yourself eating something that you know is not going to get you to the perfect health that you want, the optimal health that you want, help you lose weight or gain muscle mass or whatever it is that you want for your body. I became aware because I’m grateful for the life I have. I lived in Arizona for half a year. I lived in Montreal for half a year. A lot of times, it feels like I’m on permanent vacation which I have designed my life this way. I also have noticed that when I go on vacation or when I’m in a social situation, I’ll completely throw out all my good intentions and have some wine or have this dessert, the things I know are not the best for me.
I’m living this amazing life. It’s almost like I’m always on a virtual vacation. I find myself more times than not following what I know is best for my body because I’m on vacation time. I know I’ve got that because I watched my mom since I was a little kid. They would go out on Saturday nights. She would eat whatever she wanted. It didn’t matter if it was bread or alcohol or dessert. Monday morning, she would start dieting again only to follow it until Saturday came. If we went on vacation, then it was no holds barred. She could eat whatever she wanted. I learned this subconsciously. My mother didn’t sit me down and saying, “When you’re on vacation or when you go out with friends, you can eat whatever you want.” I witnessed her doing that and then I became aware of myself doing that. That’s exactly what we’re talking about. Something else is running the show, even though I have the best intentions to eat a certain way.
What you’re describing is typical. It’s like there are these two parts of yourself. Part of you wants to look and feel your best. You’re either a good girl or a bad girl. On the diet, off the diet. What we have to do is we want to get away from that whole mentality because it sets up this inner conflict, this inner battle. It always makes you feel in the end, all your efforts, everything you are working towards feels like you sabotaged yourself. The only way to do that is to bring these two parts of the mind together so that there’s a new image of yourself driving you. You see yourself, healthy, slender and fit and your ideal week. It doesn’t matter where you are, who you’re with. It doesn’t matter what other people are doing because we’re such social beings. It’s like, “She took a cookie. Why don’t I?” It feels automatic.
The purpose of my program is to help people to learn a powerful form of self-hypnosis so that we’re more inner-directed. In every situation, no matter what’s going on out there in the world, we feel centered. We feel grounded. We’re in touch with what does our body need? It’s a whole different way of looking at it as opposed to what do I need to eat? What’s everyone else doing here? How do I fit in or have fun or whatever the driver of that old program is? We have a new program. Instead of looking at food, you know how you look at food and think, “That looks good. Those cupcakes look good. I’ll start my diet next week,” or, “I’m down three pounds. I might as well eat it.” Many of you eat it. You’re like, “What did I do?” You start beating yourself up and that horrible negative self-talk comes in.
It’s such a painful cycle that we’ve done that. We know what that’s like. When it happens, what my clients say to me is going through that self-hypnosis, it shifts. You can look at that food. Everybody else can be eating it whether it’s the pizza, the wine, and the cupcakes, whatever it is that you know a trigger for you. You look at it and you’re able to fast forward that movie, but it happens automatically and you immediately get to, “I’m going to feel sick. I don’t want it.” It’s not like on the diet where you’re like, “That looks so good, but poor me, I can’t have it.” Inside your thinking, “That looks disgusting. I don’t even want it.”
I need some of that because my whole deal is unlimited life. If I look at something and go, “I want to have it,” a part of me goes, “You can’t have that.” I’m limiting myself. That part of me wants it, that rebel inside of me that says, “You can’t tell me what to do.” It goes, “I want it even more.”
That’s why diets don’t work because the minute you go on a diet, all you’re waiting for is to go off it. It’s a temporary situation. We have to stay away from that whole mentality of, “Now, I’m on the diet. Now, I’m off the diet.” It doesn’t work. What we want to do is change the way we think about food subconsciously. We consistently, whether it’s Sunday or Monday, whatever day it is, feel automatically that intention’s strong. We eat to live. We don’t live to eat. At the same time, you enjoy every bite. I feel I enjoy food more now than I did when I was eating all kinds of junk 30 years ago. I don’t even want those foods anymore because your taste, your food changes when you reprogram the mind.
I was telling my husband that I’m a courageous person in life. There are a lot of things I’ve done. I’ve walked over fire, I’ve broken boards, I’ve climbed up walls, and I have come face to face with walls. I’ve built a multimillion-dollar business. I moved from the States to Canada when I was in love with my husband. I let everything go to be with him. I raised two kids, which I think has been the most courageous thing I have done. I will not try an avocado. In my head, I don’t like avocados. I’ve never tried an avocado. I told my husband this, “I need to try an avocado.” He prepared it for me, put balsamic vinegar on it. I put it in my mouth and I immediately spit it out.
I know where that comes from is that I was forced food because I was a picky eater when I was a kid. I tell myself, “I don’t like that.” If it’s the smell of something or if it’s a little loco something, I’ll go, “I don’t like that.” Eating an avocado as an example would be a good thing for me to do for my health and for my fitness and all that stuff. This is one example, but I find that a lot of us have an avocado. We’ve got something we either say that we don’t like or we are resistant or we’re repelling good foods because we say we don’t like them. If we could change that subconsciously, we would be unstoppable.
That’s the wonderful thing I hear all the time. My client couldn’t believe it. She said, “I can’t believe that I’m craving salad and craving broccoli. I never wanted to eat these foods before.” Something switched in her mind and she starts to see it differently. That’s the amazing thing about the subconscious is that our perceptions of what we enjoy and what we don’t want, they can completely switch. If you think about a lot of the things that we moved towards that we think, “This is going to make me happy. Eating this cookie here with my friend is going to make me happy.” Often, what we’re seeking if we go deeper is the heart connection with a friend. We might think, “If I go out to dinner, we have to drink wine and eat pizza.” A lot of that’s an old program and we can change these programs.
Would you have less food and feel happy and saying, “I had a couple of bites. I’m good.” Let’s push it away and feel completely content and feeling better and happier having had less food than we thought we ever would. It’s amazing how we can rewrite that script. We prefer the foods that nourish and sustain us and they give us energy. We often forget that food is our energy. Food is vibration. We start to look at the food that way and we start to prefer healthy foods. What’s stopping is the old patterns from the past, the old mental movies. We don’t have to keep seeing ourselves the way we used to be. We can evolve, shift our consciousness and it can be easy.
I hear it all the time from people that are using hypnosis, using the program and they’re saying, “I can’t believe this.” Even people like you who travel and have busy lives. I think, “How are they going to shift everything?” It’s amazing to hear the stories. I had one man flew in to see me from New Jersey in Florida and he was 80 pounds. His family couldn’t believe it. He brought his family to see me, two young boys and his wife. Together, they ended up losing over 150 pounds. You can change the way you think about food subconsciously. It’s a matter of having the tools.
Some people think of hypnosis and it’s like, “I’m going to cluck like a chicken.” It’s an old way of thinking about hypnosis. Is there anybody that can’t be hypnotized or that is resistant to hypnotism so it wouldn’t work?
When I first heard about hypnosis, I had no idea what it was. I thought, “Why would I ever try hypnosis?” People are afraid. They say to me, “I don’t want somebody to control my mind.” That is such a myth. Once I discovered what hypnosis is, I once heard everything I could about it. It’s about harnessing that inner power that we all hear about. We all know that we’re only using maybe 10% of our mental capacity. To the subconscious, it’s this huge reservoir that can help us to reach a higher level of consciousness, make changes in many areas of our lives by being able to change that mental program. It’s like creating a new pathway in the subconscious part of the mind.
Hypnosis is a natural state. Every morning when we wake up, every night when we fall asleep, we naturally pass that very pleasant state of hypnosis. We might hear something around this. The kids are quarreling in the next room or whatever is going on. You smell breakfast cooking, the dogs barking, but you’re relaxed you don’t want to move. You can get out of it if you wanted to, but you can let it stay where you are. That is an example of a light state of hypnosis that happens naturally. What we don’t often realize is that in that state, the subconscious mind is more available to suggestion. We may not realize how it happens to us, but even if you think about in your own life, someone might’ve said something to you many years ago, maybe a positive remark or something that maybe hurt your feelings. It might be many years later and you find yourself still thinking about that.
Whose voice is it? We internalize that voice since it’s receiving a new positive inner voice. The truth is we’re hypnotized all the time by politicians, by the media, advertising, the food industry and the people in our lives making strong suggestions. Sometimes saying to me like, “That I’ll never work,” or, “You can do it,” we internalize but it’s not always for our highest good. For example, the food industry is trying to convince us that to be happy you have to eat a certain way or social situations in a certain way. What I’m doing is offering a new mental program. It’s much more empowering that lets you stop and think, “What do I want? What do I need? What’s going to make me happy?” Looking at it, it creates a whole new way of seeing yourself in the relationship. It’s my passion to share these principles. I was facing death in my twenties when I discovered the power of biofeedback therapy and then hypnotherapy to change and get healthy, especially in this area. To break free from food addiction, the sugar addiction, all those negative habits, the overeating, the bingeing, the snacking. It’s very exciting for me to share the same principles that I shared in my hospital seminars that have helped many people.
I would love for you to share your thoughts, your takeaways, you’re a-has, any comments that you want to make, any questions that you have. This is your opportunity, family, to connect with me and to get your questions answered and to go further and deeper if you want to with Rena. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, Rena, for your time. I appreciate your valuable information.
Thank you so much, Christy. It’s a pleasure.
Important Links:
About Rena Greenberg
I’ve had the privilege over the last 25+ years to work with over 100,000 people in 75 medical centers.
It’s been so incredible to hear the success stories of some of the people I got to work with. When Darryl came to me in 2006, he could barely walk up a flight of stairs, weighing in at over 300 lbs. Within a year, he was running marathons, after losing 123 lbs! He’s kept it off all these years.
I created Easy Willpower with HEART because it was what I needed most when I got sick in my early 20’s. At the time, no doctor could figure out what was wrong with me. Finally, after a year of going from doctor to doctor in New York City, I walked into the ER of Brooklyn’s Methodist Hospital, where to my surprise I was immediately admitted. The ER doc told me that my heart was beating at a rate of only 30 beats per minute and that the only thing keeping me alive was my age! The Chief of Cardiology emphatically declared that I had the heart of an 80-year-old! I was 26 at the time.
When I left the hospital after a 3-week stay in the Critical Care Unit, I was determined to find health—not just in my body—but emotional, mental, physical and spiritual health.
