The Benefits Of Water in Weight Loss

My staff and I were astonished when Ellen (not her real name) walked into our office. We specialized in weight loss and Ellen was thin. Of course, we always say that thin is in the eye of the beholder – anorexics can look at their skeletal bodies and see fat everywhere. Until she told us what was going on in her life, our thought was not to sign her up.

Ellen was a runway model, the small amount of weight she carried on her hips was costing her jobs. We asked her to fill out a food log to see what she was eating. She ate well. Protein and salad with vinegar or lemon juice for dressing. The only thing we saw that we thought she might change was diet soda.

Starting with her second visit, Ellen began substituting ice water for diet soda.

“Ellen,” her agent said one day. “You are dropping weight so fast you aren’t doing anything stupid are you?”

“No. The only thing I’ve changed in my diet is I’ve given up diet soda for water.”

Now, not everyone will experience Ellen’s results. She was eating well and exercising regularly to begin with. However, we have found that water helps relieve bloating and, because it doesn’t bring chemicals with it, it does not contribute to weight gain. Fat is where toxins from your environment and the food you eat is stored, so if you are regularly drinking chemicalized soft drinks – even those with no calories – your body will create fat for storage.

The very first thing we suggest to our clients is to start drinking water – eight to ten eight ounce glasses a day, and to give up drinking soda. Soda – diet and sugar filled – brings with it all kinds of problems which we’ll go into in another blog. Water is the best drink you can give to your body as long as it doesn’t come in plastic containers…. Yet another article.

What is CVR?

CVR is Creative Visualization and Relaxation. It is a process that helps you relax. When you relax, your other-than-conscious mind becomes receptive to changing habits and behavior patterns. Habits like the feeling that a meal is incomplete if it doesn’t end with dessert. If you don’t want to eat sweets at the end of a meal (frankly a dessert make me feel ill) then you tell your other-than-conscious mind that it now feels completely satisfied at the end of the main course and you finish your meal then because you are satisfied.

All our behaviors are linked to habits. Sitting in front of the TV is a habit. If you turn on the TV when you walk into the room, it’s a habit. If you light up a cigarette at the end of a meal it’s a habit. If you turn on the lights in a dark room when you enter, it’s a habit. If you snack when you come home from school, you may be hungry, and it’s still a habit. Drinking coffee in the morning is a habit. Picking up a Snickers Bar at the checkout counter is a habit – and don’t for a moment think the Supermarkets don’t know that.

In Suzy Prudden’s Pounds Off we identify the most common habits that keep people overweight and create processes to change those habits so that you can listen to on your New Reality PAL at home or in class. Sometimes the habits change as soon as you become aware of them, sometimes they change over time. Sometimes the suggestions take hold and you never return to a habit. Sometimes you find yourself slipping into the habit again so you need to listen to the habit-breaking process a few more times to get back on track.

CVR makes changing habits fun and easy no matter what behaviors you’re trying to change.

How Suzy Prudden’s Pounds Off Came About

In the years between 1998 and 2008 I built the largest Creative Visualization and Relaxation (CVR) Center specializing in Weight Loss in Los Angeles. The program was high end, expensive and it worked. I had a success ratio with my clients of over 60%. To put that in perspective, most weight loss and diet programs (including diet pills) are 2% successful, Weight Watchers is 10% and stomach stapling is 30%.

During those years I was vaguely troubled by the exclusivity of my program in the face of how big a problem obesity was becoming. The problem was that CVR wasn’t covered by insurance. My partner and sister Joan Meijer and I often talked about finding a way to broaden the availability of what we knew, but the solution was elusive and we were busy. Over those ten years our business spread to three centers, we had ten employees and we didn’t have time to think about the percent of people who called us who didn’t come in because the price was prohibitive or who didn’t bother to call us because they assumed the price would be prohibitive.

In 2008, when the recession hit, high end weight loss became a luxury. I closed my weight loss centers and started in a different direction developing a new modality called hypno-coaching. Just when I wasn’t paying attention to the problem of weight loss, my sister and I began to experience a new idea taking shape. In a matter of weeks the Suzy Prudden’s Pounds Off program emerged as a Business-in-a-box (or in this case, a binder).

As it turned out we were teaching a coaching class at the time. “What would you think about weight loss classes that use the material that you’re learning here and in my CVR classes?” I asked one afternoon. The response was amazing. It felt as if we had opened the door to a possibility no one had ever considered before and that the class was relieved to have the structure of that little binder to lean on while they built their practices.

My students began using the program and the success stories began to come in. The student’s clients lost 30, 40, 50 pounds, experienced no cravings and enjoyed lifestyle changes in exactly the same way as my high end clients but at much lower cost.

One day, in the middle of all this change and development, I had dinner with Dale Springer of New Reality a company which had developed a revolutionary delivery system for the processes I was developing. I was in the process of becoming the voice of New Reality and I was interested in seeing Dale’s reaction to our little binder idea. “I have 200 people who would sign up for this immediately,” was Dale’s response. “Let’s blend our businesses and market it.”

Thus began our quest to reach every corner of America with a revolutionary weight loss program which has a proven track record of success at a reasonable cost.