Don’t. Eat. Cake.

I’m sitting on the train, and, as usual, am listening to my ipod on shuffle – which is fine in many ways, as it provides a constant and random selection of songs. However, it also provides the random introduction of other things that happen to be on there. Some people telling me how to order coffee in Portuguese for example. A podcast I subscribed to, forgot was rubbish, and forgot to take off there. And, prince over all them all in the chart of random things to pop up – Paul McKenna trying to hypnotise me into being thin.

I don’t know why I have this. No, that’s a lie, I know perfectly well why I have this. I have this because I realised I was fat, decided I wanted to do something about it, but was too lazy and scared to ACTUALLY do anything about it so spent 7.50 on Amazon in the hope that I could slap on some headphones close my eyes and, when I opened them again, I’d be thin.

I bought it, I received it, and evening after evening for some time afterward, I lay on top of the covers with my eyes and concentrated on the voice telling me comforting and fat-deflating. So, most importantly, Did It Work?

No of course it didn’t. What are you, stupid?

I was. Stupid, I mean. I honestly thought it would work. Just like that. Paf.

I lay down in a quiet stressfree place – not this afternoon on the train, that would bee insane, not to mention impossible, I mean when I first got it – I lay down, instructed my beloved not to bother me, for I was having a twenty-five minute horizontal weight-loss session on the sofa and it was important for the effectiveness of the method that I just be able to lie there, completely relaxed and at peace with the whole thing, otherwise I might never get thin.

For those who find Paul McKenna’s smug tone annoying when you are awake and he is just being interviewed or chatting away about something at normal pace, you have not heard anything until you try listening to him attempting to hypnotise you into suddenly shedding 40% of your body weight.

He talks really
 

 

 

 

 

really
 

 

 

Slowly.

And he drifts in and out of your left ear and your right ear and says calming and slug-like reassuring things over a backing of new age plinky-plonky music until you fall asleep. And then you wake up twenty minutes later and hurry to the mirror, only to find yourself very disappointed. So you have a sandwich.

I have considered this hypnotism lark. It’s basically made up of two parts - as I will explain in greater detail when I review the other hypnotist’s book I mysteriously found myself having bought some time after this first completely pointless one (they put something subliminal in the Amazon pages, I will swear it!).

You have the affirmations where you whisper “You’re really nice! I like you! You’re really nice! Hey! Look at you! You’re, like, really nice! Yeah! You’re nice!” And the suggestions, where you basically whisper “Don’t eat cake! Cake! Don’t eat it! You know cake, right? No! No cake! Don’t eat cake!”

And that is it. And they dress it up in very complex and fancy schmancy sounding language, but that is basically it. It’s the common sense stuff that we should all be telling ourselves anyway, just in a mid-atlantic drawl and the sound of loose change rattling in his pockets as he walks away chortling with your hard earned cash -
- Like yourself
- Want to take care of yourself.
- Realise that taking care of yourself might sometimes exclude the eating of doughnuts.
- Don’t eat those doughnuts.
- Profit!

Oh, and do some exercise. They never say that, for some reason. I suppose it doesn’t fit in well with the ‘get thin horizontally’ mindset.

There you are, I’ve just saved you £7.50.
AND you didn’t have to listen to Paul McKenna.