The Placebo Diet: Use Your Mind to Transform Your Body

by Janet Thomson MSc

Fed up with endless fad diets that never deliver the results you want, and leave you lunging for the chocolate with a guilty conscience? It's time to stop looking to crazy regimes for weight-loss solutions, and to start recognizing that the solutions are actually within you - in your own mind. In The Placebo Diet, life coach and nutritionist Janet Thomson explains that the key to losing weight is not calorie-counting but identifying and re-shaping your attitudes towards your body. This book will help you do just that, by utilizing the most powerful mind-tool we have - the placebo effect. This occurs when we have an absolute belief that something will work, which generates a feeling so powerful that it changes our physiology, often spontaneously. Using this tool The Placebo Diet incorporates a range of psychological techniques that will change the structure of your thoughts towards food, generating brand new beliefs and habits. Combined with a simple-to-follow nutrition plan that will maximize fat loss and increase energy levels, you will change not only your body, but also your entire outlook on life. Ditch the fad diets, deprivation, and guilt, and prepare to fall back in love with food and your own body, once and for all! This is an updated edition of Think More, Eat Less with all-new material focusing on the placebo effect.

302 pages, Paperback

First published February 2, 2016

Reviews

[Rachel]

Patchy. There is good stuff here, but there is also arrant nonsense, which kind of undercuts the serious scientific parts. How can you trust someone on psychology and nutrition when they are also telling you all your problems can be solved by tapping the side of your hand, because that's the boundary line between the positive palm and the negative back?

The main premise is that if you can change your habits, mental as well as dietary and exercise-wise, getting healthy and losing weight will follow - much like the No-diet diet (Fletcher), although Fletcher advocating breaking all habits, and even the habit of habits, and Thomson is much more focussed on the relevant ones. The idea is to self-hypnotise yourself into believing chocolate tastes like slime, and that you really love vegetables. I must not want to be slim enough, because that horrifies me! Neuroplasticity is fine - the brain changes as we learn, what we do consolidates it, we all know that much - but this vision of focussedly changing fundamental parts of yourself seems uncomfortably close to brainwashing. The actual diet takes up about 5 pages out of the book, because of course 'this is not a diet', (every diet book of the last 5 years says that...) although since you'll be giving up cake and eating mostly vegetables, it is a diet really. The good news is you are on it for life! And if that doesn't thrill you, then you just don't want it enough...I did like the way Thomson says you should build positive associations with healthy food, and that enjoying it will make it easy, it's just hard to believe that it's as easy as she says.

[Kari]

Loved it. It's more an approach for those that have a difficult relationship with food and need to encourage themselves and embrace a different mentality. It isn't for everyone but for those that are compatible, it's a life-changer.

[Anthony Faber]

It has some valid points but too much woo and "think yourself thin" stuff. I quit about 2/3rds of the way through it.