I Hired a Weightloss Hypnotist and Here’s What Happened.

Spoiler alert: being Type A didn’t help.

January is usually the peak time for gym memberships, hard-core dieting, and a fresh start of new personal health and fitness goals and routines, ripe for the breaking. However, what if there was an easier way?

What if you could lose the weight and get in tip-top shape without months of dreading the gym and limiting your daily intake to celery, protein, and more celery…

Well, that’s exactly what I was hoping for when I sought out a weightloss hypnotist to help me shed those pesky 10–15 pounds I couldn’t seem to lose. Money may not buy health and happiness, but with the prospect of a one-hour (nonsurgical) journey to the perfect body, I figured it was worth a try, so I ponied up the cash.

I found my hypnotist in Los Angeles, the land of the beautiful, skinny, and devastatingly rich, so the prices I was quoted may be higher than you’ll find in other states, but here’s what I found:

Most of the local (Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, etc.) weight-loss hypnotists were charging between $175 and $275 per session, which usually ran for 45 minutes. This was a few years ago, so it’s possible prices have changed a bit since.

Some of these hypnotists do offer multi-session packages at a discount, but in my experience (getting quotes from a handful of hypnotists and seeing two in-person), those packages still equated to at least $125 per session, and you weren’t getting out of there spending under a thousand dollars.

Let’s talk about choosing the right hypnotist (or at least how I went about it):

I did not choose my hypnotist based on price, since they were all pretty comparable. I did consider their credentials, but it was hard to determine how much weight (no pun intended) to put on a holistic medicine degree versus years spent studying hypnotism versus a former career as a clinical nutritionist…

At the end of the day, price and credentials were honestly too hard (or in some cases too similar) to compare.

I could have based my choice on customer outcomes and testimonials, but these all seemed similar and a little hard to believe.

If I’m honest, at the end of the day, I chose my hypnotist based on looks.

I know, that sounds so wrong…but hear me out:

Would you rather take financial advice from someone who turned ten dollars into ten million dollars or someone who inherited ten million dollars and now lives the carefree millionaire lifestyle and supposedly helps others do the same?

When I went for my free consultation with my two top choice hypnotists, this was the primary difference between them.

The first hypnotist, Mary, looked like a supermodel.

She was about 6-feet tall, appeared to have a 23-inch waist, and looked like she had just stepped off the runway, with the designer snakeskin stiletto boots to match.

She also looked to be about 32, though we would come to find she was actually 48. That’s the magic of Hollywood, I guess…or a healthy diet…or botox. Probably a combination of all three, with a sprinkle of good genes and a dash of exercise-OCD.

There was nothing wrong with Mary. She was nice, professional, gorgeous, and clearly put a lot of time and effort into her physical health and appearance…but that was the problem.

Mary didn’t just offer the weight loss hypnotism service; she also helped her clients develop a nutrition plan, an exercise regime, and pretty much the whole nine yards…

So, here’s my question: If the weight loss hypnotism works so well, why the focus on diet and exercise?

From my perspective, hypnotism took the hard work and effort out of dieting and weight loss, so I really wasn’t excited about this 360-degree approach.

However, Mary’s additional services weren’t my biggest hang-up.

She was just too pretty, too skinny, and too effortlessly so.

I wanted to be hypnotized by someone who had shared in my struggles, had tried every diet and exercise under the sun, and finally came to hypnotism as the answer to her prayers.

This is where Rita came in.

Rita was a muscular, attractive mother and wife who had just turned 50, and a few of her gray hairs were starting to show under a subpar (for L.A. standards) dye job.

Rita was honest and open with me from the start. She told me about her binge-eating history. She had even been sent away to a treatment center to help get her diet on track. In the past twenty years, she had managed to lose 50 lbs, keep it off, and create dozens of similar transformation stories for her clients.

Rita knew my struggle, experienced an even graver one of her own, and had found hypnotism as the freedom from the prison of diet and exercise obsession that had consumed her youth.

Rita was perfect.

I booked my first session, paid my $250, and was ready to go!

Before I tell you about the session itself, here’s a bit on my background for context:

I had fairly recently moved to L.A., was experiencing scheduling freedom I had never known after quitting my corporate job for my first foray into entrepreneurship and had yet to learn that self-employment required self-control. That’s a nice way of saying, I was kind of letting myself go and I didn’t even know it.

There’s a level of self-discipline you maintain when you know you have a corporate image to maintain and an expensive wardrobe of professional business attire to fit into…

As a first-time entrepreneur living the pajama lifestyle, I was letting those personal health and appearance standards slip a little bit…

Also, I accidentally discovered Erewhon, the most delicious and overpriced gourmet food shop in the L.A. area. I lived within walking distance of the Abbot Kinney location, spent way too much time and money there, and it was starting to show.

This was also proof to me that you can’t outwalk a bad diet…or at least I couldn’t.

Here’s how the session went:

We spent the first fifteen to twenty minutes talking about me. Rita asked me questions about my upbringing, my current life situation, my history with food and exercise, and so on. She began to identify small incidents in my life and tried to connect them with my “food addiction.”

That’s all fine and dandy, but I just want to be hypnotized and skinny already please! I’ve paid my $250, can we just get this show on the road?

Okay, so I didn’t really say the above, but that’s definitely what I was thinking.

Here’s the thing: Rita wasn’t playing around with this hypnotism stuff.

She was confident in her abilities. She was so confident that she told me she could say a word and I would be sworn off a food for life.

But she didn’t want to use those superpowers just yet.

We were too early, and that was too serious, permanent, and disruptive of a change to make.

For example, if she hypnotized me to hate chocolate, I wouldn’t even be able to be in the same room with it. Rita asserted that this could have devastating effects on my day-to-day life and relationships, so it wasn’t quite time for this drastic measure just yet…we’d save that one for (maybe) later.

Rita did mention that some people are easier to hypnotize than others, and you really do have to open your mind, let go of control, and let yourself believe. In other words, you have to want to be hypnotized.

Now, here’s my problem: I’m a very Type A person with a strong-willed mind. Yes, of course, I want to be hypnotized, but if I knew how to accomplish this, I would have hypnotized myself through a DIY YouTube video tutorial.

What I really wanted was a hypnotist dominatrix or something to tie me up, take over my mind, and convince me that I loved running, crunches, and cabbage and hated all things carbs, fat, and sugar.

Was that so much to ask? For $250, I hoped I would get some type of mind control experience or at least be under Rita’s spell for the next few days or weeks until my next appointment…

How was the hypnotism?

I don’t really know. I mean, I was there. I did it…I think? It was very strange and honestly hard to gauge. I laid in the reclining chair, closed my eyes, listened through the headphones, and tried my best to get hypnotized.

I just don’t know if it worked.

Once you’re 39 minutes and a prorated $216.67 into a 45 minute ($250) hypnotism session, you’re kind of willing to tell yourself whatever it takes to believe. I didn’t want to let Rita down and be the one un-hypnotizeable client. I didn’t want to let myself down and be too wound up in my own Type A mind to allow this proven professional to work her magic.

I also didn’t want to feel like I had wasted the $250.

It’s embarrassing enough to make the call and decide you’re so far gone and hopeless at controlling your own weight that you need an outside influence, and specifically, a hypnotist, to take over and do it for you. It would be even more embarrassing to admit to myself I spent the time and paid the money and it still didn’t work. Was I that difficult of a case?

And if you’re wondering why it worked, that’s exactly why.

I wouldn’t exactly call it the placebo effect, but more the personal shame and intrinsic embarrassment technique.

Whether or not I had been fully hypnotized in that room didn’t really matter. I wanted Rita to believe so, and I wanted to convince myself that’s what happened…

However, walking out of that room, I had to justify the investment and the experience.

There was no way I was going to make myself spend another $250, $275, and so on going back to Rita or trying different hypnotists if I couldn’t attempt to exercise a bit of self-control first.

I was going to make this hypnotism thing work, whether I liked it or not.

So, here’s what hypnotism really did for me:

It made me take a good look at the sorry state my mind, body, and self-acceptance were in. If I was that desperate to seek out a weight loss hypnotist to solve my problems, I had really lost control, and it felt pathetic.

That feeling of being “pathetic”, along with the shame of having spent the time and money with Rita, plus the guilt at being the one un-hypnotizeable failure of a client, is what whipped me back into shape.

I decided I had to start making the changes Rita talked about in the first twenty or so minutes of the session.

• The sampling had to stop.
• The daily double walks to Erewhon and the unnecessary gourmet food purchases to follow had to go.
• The weekdays would be for health and groceries, and the weekends would be for limited desserts and eating out.

Listen, I know this isn’t the exciting five-minute-abs story most people want, but this is the reality of my experience. The shortcuts don’t always work.

Unless we’re talking plastic surgery, in which case, lipo away…

Personally, I wasn’t quite at the stage where medical intervention was necessary. I was probably in the middle of the healthy weight range for my height. I just didn’t feel or look my best, and I was hoping someone else could swoop in, wave a magic wand, and make those last ten to fifteen pounds disappear immediately and forever.

Rita wasn’t willing to do that. Since I didn’t go back to her to have her do the “serious and permanent” food-specific hypnosis on me, I’ll never know if she really could have created a life-long aversion to foods like chocolate or ice cream. I would have loved that, and it would have made me feel a lot better about my $250 investment, and maybe one day I will give that a try…

For now, I’m somewhat satisfied letting my $250 shame and hypnotism failure guilt motivate me to follow Rita’s more practical weight loss advice.

Unfortunately, that advice likely won’t differ much from what you’ve heard from your doctor, read in nutrition books and blogs, or seen from weight loss and fitness influencers online.

Here’s some alternate wisdom I can offer if you’d like to take the less conventional approach that seems to have worked for me:

• Stop eating samples and thinking the calories don’t count. They all count!
• Just because you live in the land of celebrities doesn’t mean you can eat what you want AND look like them…unless you hire their plastic surgeon.
• If your personal trainer, nutritionist, hypnotist, etc., seems too good to be true (too pretty, nice, skinny…), you can find another! If hypnotist barbie is your ideal #bodygoals motivation, great; if not, why pay to be jealous and skeptical?
• Sometimes, you can’t pay your problems away…but if you try, you might as well get a return on that investment! (even if that means dieting and exercising your way to successful weight loss hypnotism…)
• Once you’re embarrassed by the decisions you’re making, it’s likely time to make a significant change. For example, spending $40/day at Erewhon is not something I’m proud of, and I’ve since stopped. Spending $250 to be a hypnotism failure wasn’t great either, but maybe it was just what I needed to wake me up and take responsibility for my own weight loss journey.

Was it worth it and would I do it again?

Yes and maybe.

It was so worth it to me because if I hadn’t booked that hypnotism session, I know I would have spent the rest of my life wondering “what if”.

“What if that hypnotist could have cured my weight loss struggles forever?”

It was also worth it because I was determined to make it worth it. $250 was not chump change, and I was going to do whatever it took to get my money’s worth.

Knowing that I’m apparently a hypnotism failure, you might wonder why I would do it again.

It all just comes down to curiosity and the nagging “what if”. I really wish Rita just went all out and did the strongest level of hypnotism on me so I could go face the world with a brand-new #bodygoals physique and lifelong effortless weight control mindset.

I don’t fully believe that Rita has that power, or that her hypnotism is stronger than my tightly wound Type A mind, but I’d like to believe that.

If I happen upon a seemingly incurable (and unhealthy) new food addiction and deem it worth another try, I might go back to Rita and ask for the most extreme version of hypnotism she offers, since my mind is clearly less malleable than others and may require a deeper level of hypnotic control.

For now, self-control it is, I guess…