Silhouettes

Silhouettes Program Focuses on Stressed Women

A half-dozen women enjoying the sounds of waves lapping on the beach while they release their cravings for chips and chocolate… in a conference room in Orange County!!!

That’s just the escape provided by Barbara Denny, director of the Silhouettes Weight Management Program.  Denny uses a combination of hypnosis, guided visualization and behavior change to enable these women make lifestyle changes in eating and exercise by working from the inside out.  The program covers topics relevant to women’s needs such as busting the sugar craving, the cortisol connection to weight gain, dealing with people who sabotage your efforts, the cortizone—that dangerous period from 3 p.m. to bedtime, dealing with stress eating and more.  It is her approach that makes this program so unique and effective.

Denny, a licensed psychotherapist for more than twenty years, found that radical changes demanded by most weight loss programs lead to emotional resistance and feelings of deprivation.  This results in the yo-yo dieting syndrome in which people bounce from the diet, no-diet mentality and regain any weight they have lost.  She states that when you lose your keys, you search for them until you find them again.  In a similar way the body is constantly trying to regain its equilibrium after a quick weight loss. Denny bans the use of the term losing weight, and urges her women to consider dumping, releasing or donating it to the universe, wherever it is needed.  After all, many of the women attest that their weight problems began with their parents’ concerns about the starving children in China.

Three small changes each week lead to sustainable lifestyle improvements without triggering emotional resistance.  This is based on the Japanese technique of kaizen, achieving great and lasting success through small, steady steps which melt away the fight or flight response of the brain.  The initial steps are so small, such as doing 30 seconds a day of exercise, that they are failure-proof.  This is important to the women in the group who feel they have tried everything and failed.

The program also applies the latest research that shows that women tend to do what anthropologist Helen Fisher calls “web thinking.” Many men  are inclined to think in straight lines, an either-or, zero-sum approach.  In contrast, women think contextually and holistically, a both/and way of thinking that opens up infinite possibilities.  Women have innovative ways of dealing with life’s competing priorities that frequently include family and work pressures.  So the women learn to include a spouse or friend in their evening walk, and to see restaurant dining primarily as a social rather than an eating experience, to do lunges and squats while putting on make-up in the morning, and to listen to their open-eye hypnosis tapes on the way to work.

Denny states that based on the Myers-Briggs temperament indicator, most of the women in the Silhouettes program may be logical and analytical in performing tasks, but put a high priority on relationships and may tend to put the needs of family and friends before their own.  So the part of the evening when the lights are turned down and the women stretch out in comfortable chairs to experience hypnosis is their time to relax with no demands on them, no place to go, nothing to do but enjoy what for many has been the only time they have had to themselves all day.   

The group interaction is a key factor in the lifestyle changes these women achieve.   Under stress, men tend to become competitive or withdraw, the “fight or flight” response. However, women show a “tend and befriend” response and enjoy laughter and comradely as they collaborate in helping each other develop creative solutions to life’s challenges.  They may call each other at night when the cookie jar beckons or plan a 5K charity walk together, or share before and after pictures to help the members see how far they have progressed in their changes.