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Healing sick minds
Celia Walden
The Telegraph - 22nd January 2008

‘I believe I can cure most psychological problems,” Paul McKenna announces calmly from the plush and eerily perfect confines of his mews flat in Kensington, “and quite a number of medical ones.”

Paul McKenna has declared war on the diet industry The British hypnotist and self-help author has something of the religious zealot about him - as well as a strong whiff of money. Last week he earned himself a £15 million television deal in the United States.

The man with the most powerful eyes in television was born in Enfield, Middlesex, to a builder and a home economics teacher.

He first discovered his “powers” in his twenties, when he hypnotised the boy next door into achieving an “A” in his biology A-level: “I couldn’t believe it worked, and started trying it with everything.”

Twenty years later, the 44-year-old has a multimillion-pound self-help empire and a number of well-known clients, including Sarah, Duchess of York, David Bowie, Little Britain’s David Walliams - whom he helped to mentally “shrink” the perceived distance of his cross-Channel charity swim - George Michael and Robbie Williams.

He smiles involuntarily when I mention them, unashamedly impressed by the whole celebrity “thing”.

And then there are the freaks - my word, not his - such as the woman who came to him with a phobia of jelly, those suffering from trichotillomania (where you pull out your hair and eat it), and one man who couldn’t stop himself doing a kind of silent, celebratory scream in the middle of sentences.

“When I asked him why he did it, he said that he would imagine he had just scored a goal at Wembley. He was using it as stress release, because it made him feel good. Like every other habit or tic, it was essentially just a chemical/muscular equation.”

He places his teacup almost too precisely on the black veneer coffee table, and suddenly I can’t help but to start visualise the contents of his ordered fridge: individually wrapped leftovers, probably labelled and relegated to their own specific areas.

Formerly a radio disc jockey, McKenna’s main focus now is helping people to lose weight. He is a food evangelist with a pathological hatred of the diet industry.

Sitting on his black velour couch, he cuts a tidy, anxious-to-please figure - and one who can’t abide the messiness of fidgeting. Instead, McKenna’s tirades about the misconceptions surrounding weight loss are peppered with nerdy, schoolboy expletives. “It’s got sh*g all to do with food and everything to do with psychology,” he says.

“There is a better case for banning diets than banning smoking,” he continues, not pausing to draw breath.

“Diets simply make people fatter, leading to obesity, which is a massive drain on our health services. Any regime that restricts what you eat just means that your body gets good at storing fat, and so the second you come off the diet - slam!,” he shouts, and I wonder if the sudden shift in volume works as some form of mind control, “the weight goes back on. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be funny that in the early part of the 21st century a load of people tried to starve themselves to make themselves thinner and actually made themselves fatter.”

McKenna’s weight-loss seminars, which he tours around the country, preach a simple sermon: to eat what you want, consciously, and only when hungry. He has, he says, been working with a group of doctors to make his self-improvement strategies available on the NHS, and hopes to meet up with the health minister later this year.

“The only worry is that the diet industry is so big and so powerful that there may be too much at stake there. Politicians, I’m sure, have been bought - I can’t think that they haven’t.” I disagree, disappointed that, after making so much sense, this last point just sounds barmy.

When I ask about celebrities and their promotion of fad diets, McKenna becomes so agitated that I fear he might take off, levitated by the sheer passion of his convictions.

“There’s a new kind of anorexic now: there’s your professional anorexic, and there are quite a number of famous people like that. They are right on the edge, walking around thinking, ‘I am so in control. You want to look like me, don’t you?’ These people are getting their serotonin highs from perceiving themselves as being better than other people.”

Is he alluding to people such as Victoria Beckham, whose excessive slimness seems to be their primary accomplishment? “I don’t know whether she has an eating disorder,” he gives a wry smile, “but I can say that some people just white-knuckle it. Every day it’s just a question of getting through the day, and sometimes they binge, and sometimes they starve or they become bulimic or anorexic.”

McKenna assures me that he refuses to work with the food fanatics, unless, of course, they allow him to concentrate on their underlying problems.

“An actress I won’t name came to see me recently, telling me she needed to lose 10 pounds. Now, she was anorexically thin, and I thought, ‘Not on my watch.’ So instead, we worked on her body dysmorphia, which most people have. They look at themselves in the mirror and go through a checklist of abuse: ‘Funny eyes, fat face, look at the state of my bottom…’

“But it is as if they are looking at themselves in one of those seaside mirrors. In her mind, the actress will never be thin enough, so I worked away on her for 45 minutes until eventually it just popped. Before she left, she said, ‘You know, I did used to get more roles when I was a little bit bigger. Actually, I look OK.’?”

It’s as we’re shaking our heads indulgently over human frailties that I realise I have smeared mud across McKenna’s opulent cream carpet with my boot.
To distract him, I turn the subject to sex. Now, McKenna may not come in the traditional Lothario packaging (”I’d like to come back in my next life and be liked for something other than my mind”), but he does have a long back-catalogue of Amazonian blondes.

After a relationship with GMTV’s Penny Smith, presenter Liz Fuller famously dumped him live on air. Now his beautiful former fiancée, Clare Staples, is said to be stepping out with his close friend Robbie Williams. “I like a pretty girl,” he admits.

After splitting up with his girlfriend of 18 months at Christmas, McKenna is currently single.

He doesn’t go for skinny girls, “because I just want them to go and eat a pie”, and laughingly concedes a liking for unbalanced women: “I love a mental case, because then I can fix them.” The next question is so obvious, McKenna poses it himself.

“Have I ever used my powers to seduce women?” he asks with a smile that screams “Yes, yes, yes!”, but he replies: “Well, that would be rather sad, don’t you think?”

There is, he goes on to explain, something called speed seduction, where one can work a woman into states of arousal, simply by making her remember how she’d felt when she’d once been in love - and then touching her on the arm, thereby linking those thoughts to you.

He claims never to have tried this himself - and a yearly income that already stood at £2.5 million and that new deal in America, may never need to do so.

He still has some work to do, though. As we leave the room, he sees the mud and a flicker of panic disrupts the placidity of his features. I picture him on his hands and knees, scrubbing frantically at the stain, as soon as I’ve left the building.

Tags: Celia Walden, Hypnosis, NLP, Paul McKenna, Press Clipping

Tags: Hypnosis, NLP, Paul McKenna, Paul Revoir, Press Clipping

Paul McKenna signs £15m TV deal
Leigh Holmwood
The Guardian - 16th January 2008

Celebrity hypnotist Paul McKenna has signed a three-year golden handcuffs deal with the Discovery Channel in the US that could make him up to $30m (£15m).

It is thought the channel, which was formerly run by ex-BBC2 controller Jane Root, wants to market McKenna as an alternative to long-standing American self-help TV host Dr Phil.

In March, McKenna, a former Capital FM DJ, will appear in a new prime-time series, I Can Make You Thin, in which he will attempt to help the studio audience and viewers with weight issues.

A UK series of the same name recently aired on Sky One and a related book is currently No 1 in the Sunday Times bestseller charts.

McKenna also had success in the UK with another Sky One series, I Can Change Your Life.

The three-year Discovery deal, together with spin-off merchandise and downloads of his weight loss techniques which viewers can pay for, could make McKenna between $25m and $30m, according to a source.

The deal will see McKenna join the ranks of other British talent to have made it big in the US, including Simon Cowell, Gordon Ramsay, Ricky Gervais and Hugh Laurie.

McKenna will now divide his time between London and Los Angeles, where he has recently bought a house.

Tags: Hypnosis, Leigh Holmwood, NLP, Paul McKenna, Press Clipping

Paul McKenna makes himself rich - and moves to Hollywood
Laura Roberts
The Daily Mail - 11th January 2008

He has promised to make help people lose weight, get rich and even get bigger breasts using the power of hypnotism so perhaps it was inevitable that Paul McKenna would move to Los Angeles.

The British hypnotist has bought a £3.4 million home in the Hollywood Hills in a bid to conquer the US market.

He has already helped comedian Ellen DeGeneres to quit her smoking habit and is known to be a friend of the now-established Beckhams.

A builder’s son from Enfield, North London he still has an eye for a bargain and bought the Regency-style home for half a million pounds less than the original asking price.

The impressive home is located in an area known as Rising Glen and with 4,529 sq feet of space, five bedrooms, four bathrooms and a pool he will certainly be able to entertain his wealthy neighbours who include actress Brittany Murphy and a slew of film directors and music producers.

The 4-car detached garage will perfectly house his collection of cars which include a Bentley Arnage, Ferrari 575, Range Rover Sport and a Jeep wagon Back in the UK McKenna has treated high profile British names such as the Duchess of York, David Bowie, David Beckham, and George Michael.

In September last year he brought out a book called I Can Make You Rich after talking to successful entrepreneurs such as Sir Philip Green and Body Shop founder Anita Roddick.

Until the 1990s McKenna worked as a radio DJ for Capital Radio, and Radio One among others before leaving to concentrate on hypnosis.

Tags: Hypnosis, Laura Roberts, NLP, Paul McKenna, Press Clipping

Change your life in 2008

FROM weight loss to boosting confidence, the New Year would not be the same without a list of “new” resolutions. The challenge though is sticking to your goals and this is where many fail. But the key to making lasting changes is simple, according to Britain’s top mind guru Paul McKenna. The country’s leading motivational coach reveals all you have to do is train your brain to think positively.

McKenna has already inspired millions with his books and CDs, including bestsellers such as I Can Make You Thin, now out in a new version. His clients include Geri Halliwell, Sophie Dahl and Robbie Williams. His weightloss system was launched three years ago and independent studies show nearly three-quarters of its followers have successfully trimmed down.

Here is Paul McKenna’s exclusive guide to transforming your life in 2008.

GET THE BODY YOU WANT

BY FOLLOWING these four golden rules you will find it easy to lose weight and transform your relationship with food.

January is always the month for faddy diet launches. However, research shows that as soon as you starve yourself your body goes into “survival mode” your metabolism slows and you start to store fat. Your relationship with food is upset; if you starve, you will binge.

So instead follow these rules:

RULE 1. WHEN YOU ARE HUNGRY, EAT

You must recognise the difference between emotional and physical hunger: physical hunger builds up gradually, emotional hunger happens suddenly, when you feel bored or upset (emotional hunger can be overcome with the Craving Buster technique).

THE HUNGER SCALE:
1. Physically faint 2 Ravenous .
3 Fairly hungry 4 Slightly hungry 5 Neutral 6 Pleasantly satisfied 7 Full 8 Stuffed 9 Bloated 10 Nauseous

Each person is different, but as a general rule, you want to eat whenever you notice yourself between 3 and 4 on the scale when you are fairly hungry but before you become ravenous. If you wait until you get down to one or two, your body will go into starvation mode and you’ll wind up probably eating more than your body needs and storing the excess as fat.

Ideally, you’ll want to stop eating at around 6 or 7 on the hunger scale when you are feeling pleasantly satisfied or full but not yet stuffed or bloated.

Never go to the extremes of the hunger scale ever again.

RULE 2. EAT WHAT YOU WANT, NOT WHAT YOU THINK YOU SHOULD

As soon as you tell yourself to not eat certain foods (usually because you’ve been told they’re bad for you), you upset the natural balance of your relationship to them. Rather than wanting it less, that “forbidden food” instantly becomes more attractive to you. The inner battle between your positive intention and your resistance to being controlled even by yourself can be exhausting. As you begin to make peace with food and learn to listen to the wisdom of your body, you experience freedom from the tension and guilt that comes from NOT following your intuition.

Also, as you stop resisting and start to follow your natural intuitions about what to eat when, you may notice your tastes changing. You may even find yourself naturally attracted to the very foods you’re “supposed” to be eating now.

RULE 3. EAT CONSCIOUSLY AND ENJOY EVERY MOUTHFUL

People who are overweight often shovel food into their mouths as quickly as possible in order to get high from the happy chemicals we release in our brains when we eat. Unfortunately, because they are eating unconsciously, they never notice the signal from their stomachs that lets them know they are full. So they keep on stuffing their faces, expanding their waistlines and putting on weight.

The problem is that even though they feel temporarily high from cramming in lots of food, they feel fat and guilty afterwards. In fact, they feel so bad that they repeat the whole ritual of unconsciously stuffing themselves again in order to anaesthetise the bad feelings they have just created.

The single most important key to success with this system is: You can eat whatever you want, whenever you want, so long as you fully enjoy every single mouthful.

Put the knife and fork down while you are chewing your food and really enjoy it savour the taste, and enjoy the wonderful textures and sensations as you thoroughly chew each mouthful of food at least 20 times. If all you did for the next two weeks was to slow your eating speed down to about a quarter of what it used to be and chew each mouthful thoroughly, you would find it easy to leave food on your plate.

RULE 4. WHEN YOU THINK YOU ARE FULL, STOP EATING

The natural design of the human body is to eat when we’re hungry and stop when we’re satisfied, but many of us are conditioned to eat until we think we’re full or, even worse, until whatever food we put on our plate is gone.

When you’ve eaten enough, your stomach sends a signal a sensation that says: “I’m satisfied, that’s enough.” Most people experience this gentle, clear, satisfied sensation in their solar plexus (the area below your rib cage but above your stomach).

The more you pay attention to it, the more obvious it becomes. If you are not sure whether you are full or not, just guess. You will soon find it becomes easier to tell.

Tags: Confidence, Free Advice, Hypnosis, NLP, Paul McKenna, Weight Loss

I’ll make you thin, rich and happy
Evening Standard
Liz Hoggard - 7th January 2008

In the first part of our exclusive Paul McKenna life-change plan, Britain’s top motivational coach reveals how, despite his phenomenal success, his own life is still far from perfect.

PAUL McKenna is giving me permission to flirt. I’m sitting on his couch, eyes closed, fingers pressed into my palms.

It’s all a bit excruciating. But already he’s identified a conflict in my love life. One part of me wants to to be more proactive; the other is making damn sure I don’t get hurt again.

“Even though they are taking you in opposite directions, they both want the best for you,” he advises me. “Is it possible to unite these two guys? Place your palms against your chest, integrate it all at the unconscious level and don’t be surprised by all the delightful changes that happen over the next two days.” Blimey.

A multi-millionaire, McKenna, 44, is the UK’s top motivational coach. His clients include Geri Halliwell, Sophie Dahl and Robbie Williams. He helped David Walliams with the psychological aspects of his Channel swim. “I taught him a method of time distortion so it speeds up. I use it myself on plane journeys.” But it’s not just celebrities: London’s chattering classes are queuing up to attend McKenna seminars, which sell out at £250 a time. Go to any dinner party and you’re quite likely to meet someone he’s helped quit smoking, lose weight or mend a broken heart.

McKenna insists he’s not a guru or a Svengali. But through neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) the positive thinking and visualisation process that underpins his work he can help us to reprogramme our brains. He compares it to rewiring a computer.

We meet at his Kensington mews house.

Interviewers always report back breathlessly about his silver Bentley, Brioni suits and gleaming Rolex. But today McKenna is in jeans and a simple sweater, his hair in a fashionable buzz cut. He looks far more normal. But then it seems he has undergone a Pauline conversion.

Yes he enjoys “nice toys”, but now he’s on a mission to heal people.

January is Paul McKenna month. We all yearn to change our lives after Christmas excess and cannily he’s just republished his 2005 bestseller I Can Make You Thin, with an extra chapter. His face is already plastered all over London railway stations.

So far, so obvious. But he’s also determined to blow his old enemy the diet industry out of the water.

“I am on a quest to close down the hateyour-body industry,” he declares. “Seventy-five per cent of people put on more weight than when they started. The reason half the country is overweight is because we’ve been dieting for the past 40 years. It’s not just that diets don’t work: they are the problem, cynically profiteering out of other people’s misery. I couldn’t sleep at night knowing that but these f***ers can. There is a better case for banning diets than banning smoking.

Over 20 million people are putting themselves at risk because they’re overweight.”

McKenna claims his own weight-loss programme has a 71 per cent success rate (compared with nine per cent for diets).

“There’s an army of doctors right behind me who want to get this on the NHS.” And his system is brilliantly simple. There are four golden rules. One: when you are hungry, eat. Two: eat what you want, not what you think you should. Three: eat consciously, and enjoy every mouthful. Four: when you think you are full, stop eating.

The key is understanding the difference between “emotional hunger” where we shovel in food because we feel bored or upset and true physical hunger.

The funny thing is, McKenna has always been thin. So what’s his motivation? “Most of my family is overweight. I’m contrary, I think. My parents would say: ‘Eat up, there are starving kids in India’, and I’d go ‘I can’t see how me being overweight helps them.’ The more someone tells me to do something, the more it makes me question it.” The careful dedication to his 2004 book Change Your Life in Seven Days reads: “To my parents, who gave me more than I realised”.

Was he a tricky son? “Oh, I don’t doubt it, probably still am,” he laughs. “We weren’t that sort of family where we have big emotional outpourings, although my mum and dad have said some nice things to me in recent years.” McKenna grew up, the elder of two sons, in Enfield, north London. His father was a builder, his mother a home economics teacher. He remembers watching them lurch between times of plenty and times when they had to “batten down the hatches” “I would see my parents’ ups and downs and I thought it would be nice not to have that pressure.” From the age of 11 he attended a Catholic comprehensive in north London run by Jesuit priests who, he claims, specialised in guilt. He was told he was worthless (a school report said: “If he carries on like this, he’ll never amount to anything”).

When he published his first book he sent a copy to his old English teacher, with “F*** off ” written inside. Childish but satisfying.

“I spent years in a Catholic school so I understand from the kings of mind manipulation how human beings work,” he says.

He left school at 17 with two Olevels and an A-level in art and became a DJ, like his hero, Kenny Everett, making his way from Topshop, via Radio Caroline and Capital, to Radio 1. He also moonlighted as a hypnotist, having been impressed by a fellow practitioner whom he interviewed on his radio show. He started practising on friends. At first it was a party trick where he’d turn people into washing machines, but soon he was selling out theatres. In 1993, ITV launched The Hypnotic World of Paul McKenna, where volunteers were hypnotised into performing funny tasks.
Viewing figures reached 13 million.

He could have been another Paul Daniels. But, looking back, he wasn’t happy. He cut down on the stunt TV and began using hypnosis to help individuals with particular problems or phobias. He met Richard Bandler, the Californian cofounder of NLP a form of psychotherapeutic counselling developed in the 1970s.

They started running seminars together and Bandler, a former cocaine abuser, became his mentor, helping him to reprogramme his mind: “In the past I used to be quite controlling, almost robotic.” Today, Paul McKenna Training is the biggest hypnosis and NLP training centre in the world. But he has his detractors. In 1994, a participant on his show said he had developed schizophrenia as a result of being hypnotised. His claims were taken up in the national press McKenna sued and won the libel case.

But another accusation pursued him. In 1996, he had earned a PhD in hypnotherapy from LaSalle University in Louisiana, which turned out to be unaccredited. The Daily Mirror claimed McKenna knew the qualification was bogus. Eventually McKenna won damages. He also went on to get what he calls a “proper” doctorate from a UK-based business school and turned his PhD thesis into Change Your Life in Seven Days.
What’s the worst thing people have said about him? McKenna falls over himself to tell me. “That I’m a fake, a fraud, that it’s all pyramid selling; that I don’t really care about other people, which I find hurtful.

If I was interested in making money, I’d be in banking or oil.” Stop worrying about hypnotists, he says bluntly, the real people to fear are cult leaders, politicians, lunatic religious leaders, salesman “all of whom coerce and manipulate people”.

THERE is something incredibly endearing about McKenna, as easy as it is to represent him as part Wizard of Oz (small man, large megaphone), part Princess Di. A self-confessed geek, he describes his own life as a work in progress. Although he meets your gaze with authority, he is incredibly fidgety. He worries about going bald; he worries about his beaky nose.

“Until a few years ago, I wasn’t the major shareholder in my feelings,” he has admitted. “I thought I needed a bigger house, more cars, more beautiful girls, more money, more fame. Then I tipped the other way. I realised I had everything I wanted and began to make peace with aspects of myself I hadn’t wanted to admit to.” In fact, these days he and the psychological community are reading from the same page. They attend his seminars.

McKenna, who was once rabidly antitherapy (he believes it takes too long), is working with positive psychologists, Jungian therapists, philosophers, you name it.

“It’s about training your brain to spot which moments you felt happy in and to search for more happy moments.” And it’s not enough to just have “slick skills”; compassion is everything, he insists.

There’s no denying McKenna is a workaholic.

He relaxes with trashy TV and going out to dinner: “I’m very sociable.” Most days he practises Big Mind meditation, which encourages you to integrate the serene and shameful parts of yourself.

He accepts people are fascinated by his love life. “People have a right to know if I walk my talk: whether I’m authentic and consistent.” He has talked about being a commitment-phobe but admits: “I’ve had my heart broken, I’ve been trashed a few times” (past girlfriends include GMTV presenter Penny Smith and model Liz Fuller, who dumped him live on her cable TV show). His book I Can Mend Your Emotional Heart came from experience: Richard Bandler helped him recover with a technique developed for abused women.

“Out of my pain came a resource for other people and profit,” he says, with a glint.
He says his girlfriend of 18 months, Niki Roe, a dog trainer, hates the limelight.
“She doesn’t like public events but does it for me, which I appreciate.” On the walls of his flat he has silver-framed photos of his Great Dane, Mr Big. At 44, does he want children? “At the moment, I’m not sure, I don’t think so. Although a friend said, ‘Look how much you love your dog: imagine that for a child!’” McKenna once boasted he’d be a millionaire by 30. His last book, 2007’s I Can Make You Rich (based on talking to gurus from Philip Green to Richard Branson) was deliberately controversial “it’s meant to piss people off”. He thinks the British are still encouraged to feel guilty about success. And actually there’s an egalitarian streak. He thinks working people have been tricked into thinking poor by the ruling classes.

“If you think money is bad, you will unconsciously sabotage your attempts to create more of it.” He’s currently our top-selling non-fiction author. But he is about to go global. When we meet he is busy packing up his life. For the next year McKenna will be based in LA, where he’s working on an interactive self-improvement television show. “It will be digital, downloadable. Clearly books will always be around but we’ll be able to reach millions more.” For a rich man he is working his butt off. “In some ways,” he says, “I don’t feel I’ve had any say in it. I believe I’ve shaped my destiny but it’s as though life’s taken me in a direction, too.”

When that’s launched he says he may “nearly retire”. I doubt it he’s too much of an evangelist. “I do want to help the person in front of me but at the same time I want to do a damn good job,” he says. “So sometimes it’s my outrageous ego. I won’t stop until they’re fixed.” Am I fixed? Two weeks on I’m not exactly embracing the postman but there’s optimism.

I like McKenna; he doesn’t patronise and he understands wariness (he’s been crazy in love, too). He’d like to see me “open up enough for something good to happen”, to take “evaluated” risk. He even diagnoses some self-sabotage. I’d go back. And I appreciate his honesty. “I’ve been asked to do books on relationships,” he laughs, “and my own response is: if I can stay in one for long enough, I’ll do one.”

Paul McKenna’s revised book I Can Make You Thin is out now (Bantam Press, £10.99)..

Tags: Celebrity, Hypnosis, NLP, Paul McKenna, Press Clipping