Hypnosis in Media

“In my 20s, I laughed at any­thing vague­ly mys­ti­cal. Forty pounds lat­er, I’m not skep­ti­cal — I’m desperate.”

Thus starts the sto­ry about one man’s sto­ry about weight loss through hyp­no­sis at the online mag­a­zine Salon.

“I’m sit­ting in a hyp­no­tist’s office because I am a fat load. There’s no oth­er way to put it. I’ve been “stocky” or “husky” since ele­men­tary school. But my most recent weight gain — brought on by a sub­ur­ban lifestyle, a dead thy­roid, a desk job and a fat­ty parade of cook­ie tins brought to my house — has called for dras­tic measures.”

Com­men­tary: Like so many oth­er sim­i­lar sto­ries, there are the req­ui­site stereo­typ­i­cal ele­ments (the lead graph­ic, for one, or the pock­et watch ref­er­ence.) How­ev­er, the author does men­tion that the ses­sion did have the desired effect: it would be inter­est­ing to see, sev­er­al months down the road, how much suc­cess was accom­plished. (For his sake alone, I’m hop­ing it will.)

The let­ters accom­pa­ny­ing the arti­cle are also worth perus­ing: there are a num­ber of sim­i­lar, pos­i­tive sto­ries as well as the expect­ed snarky com­ments from nay-say­ers. (And it only took six pages of com­ments before any­one men­tioned the HypnoToad.)