(Tick tock. Tick tock.)

You are getting sleepy. You are getting very, very sleepy. You are getting very thin and very sleepy? And when I count to three. You will awake. And you will be fabulous.

It seems the latest in weight loss is less heart pumping cardio and more in the head. According to a recent article in Elle Magazine’s June 2011 issue entitled “Wishful Shrinking”, the latest and greatest in losing weight (a lot of weight) is a prescription of old school hypnosis.

Tucked away on the coast of southern Spain lies a magical place called Shirrans’ Elite Clinic, where British hypnotherapist Martin Shirran and his equally-hypnotherapist wife Marion carry out a hypnosis method they co-developed called Gastric Mind Band. (Remind anyone of that other surgical weight loss treatment?) Patients dole out $1,950 to “experience” a virtual-reality-like hypnosis session complete with hospital sound effects, smells and temperature control – during which they “experience” the implanting of a stomach-shrinking apparatus. Just like The Matrix.

If we can judge from some of Shirran’s patients, it might not be complete bubkis. Elle’s article quotes 30-year old “Amber” as having lost 82 in the six months prior to her GmB (Gastric Mind Band’s trademark name), and another patient appeared on Good Morning America claming to have lost 125 pounds from the treatment. It seems the faux-“surgery” – when successful – has had patients walking away from the Clinic feeling like their stomachs are actually smaller and simply can’t hold much food as prior to the treatment.

Okay, it’s not really as easy as all that. GmB’s actual “surgery” is a culmination of a four-day intensive program exploring the patients relationship with food, being shown videos of gastric-band surgeries being performed and being guided through imagery sessions where patients envision their stomachs deflating from the size of a melon to the size of a golf ball. So it seems GmB is actually a culmination of cognitive-therapy, changing vocabulary (You don’t lose weight, you release it.) and working to explore the physical and psychological impulses that led to the problem in the first place. Oh! And that awesome The Matrix-like virtual surgery.

So the question is, could GmB be the holy-grail weight loss treatment that practitioners and patients have long sought out? Not so fast.

One person smells trouble (Ew.), in the form of credibility. Mitchell Roslin, MD, FACS and chief of obesity surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in NYC calls the comparison of Gastric Mind Band to the actual surgical Gastric Lap Band procedure “disingenuous” at best.

“The idea of comparing hypnosis to a medical device that’s been through two FDA trials is basically marketing voodoo,” says Roslin. “There is no objective data. You have people who are paying money, wanting something to work. And we know that people can lose weight when they’re motivated: Just watch The Biggest Loser. What you’re seeing is the short-term effect, the placebo effect – not medically verified, long-term results.” (Yep. He said voodoo. And thank you – Dr. Roslin – for doing that verbal voodoo that yoo-doo so well.)



Sadly, he’s right. There have been no clinical studies of GmB at all and all the positive results seem purely anecdotal. But with Gastric Band surgeries being fraught with risk and costing an average of $20,000, and with other bariatric surgeries being even more invasive than that – it’s not hard to see why some people might be “motivated” to shell-out for a trip to Spain and a little virtual therapy.

According to the Shirran’s (who have trained other hypnotists to perform the Gastric Mind Band in London, Seattle and Philadelphia), they’ve treated more than 600 patients since 2008 and currently have a three-month waiting list. So it seems patients are game to keep an open mind. And despite Gastric Mind Band’s lack of credible data, there is plenty of data on the brain’s powers of visualization – aka. Mind Over Matter.

A recent study from Carnegie Mellon University found that people who imagined eating 30 M&M’s consumed less of the real candy when it was offered to them afterward than those who visualized feeding 30 quarters in the laundry machine. (Don’t ask me how the laundry machine came into play. Random weirdness, I guess.)

Joachim Vosgerau, PhD, and a member on CMU’s study team explains, “There’s a lot of research to show that imagination and experience overlap. Whether I think about seeing a spider or really do see a spider, the same reaction will occur in my brain.”



Let’s not forget about the well-documented placebo effect (that has indeed been studied by the FDA – so very official!) The New England Journal of Medicine published a clinical trial conducted by Houston-based orthopedic surgeon Bruce Moseley, MD on whether the placebo effect would also apply to minor surgeries. Patients with arthritic knees were taken into an operating room and given incisions, but received no surgical intervention. (That just sounds mean.) But hey, Dr. Moseley reported that that was enough to provide the patient with as much improved mobility and pain relief as the patients who really did receive arthroscopic surgery. So, hey! Who knew?!

The placebo effect even works when the patient knows the “medicine” being given is flim-flam, which is where hypnosis plays in. Hypnosis relies on compliance from the patient – the good news is if they choose to believe it works, than it just might.

A 1986 (ancient history) study published by The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology showed that obese women using hypnosis in collaboration with their diet plan shed about 17 pounds, while those who didn’t shed a sad 0.5 pounds. Additionally the same journal demonstrated that adding hypnosis to a range of weight-loss treatments did indeed increase the treatments effectiveness… by a whopping 97%. I guess this is why my morning inbox has been rife lately with weight loss hypnosis Cloop, Groupon and Living Social coupons. Can you smell something trending?

So what do you think? Is this just another weight loss fad destined to burn out like the bright “much-less-work-than-actually-dieting-and-exercise” phoenix it actually is? Or is this a new exciting weapon in the doctor/ patient arsenal toward healthy manageable weight-loss? And would you try it? Let us know what you think!