'Honey, I Shrunk My Stomach'

This is not another movie starring Rick Moranis. It's Duncan Tooley tricking one's mind into thinking their tummy is the size of a golf ball. Needless to say, not many carbs can fit in there. Not only does one lose weight, Tooley said, unhealthy foods once drooled over become as tempting as a bowl of fish eyes.

OK, so it's dieting by hypnosis.

On this particular day, at his home on a quiet street adjacent to Marymount College, Tooley, a certified hypnotherapist based in Rancho Palos Verdes, guides client Samantha Pana in what he calls "Mental Gastric Band" weight loss, a process meant to mimic Lap-Band surgery.  

Using a combination of breathing techniques, auto-suggestion and prearranged goals, Tooley instructs Pana to enter her inner sanctuary and glory in the absolute control she has over herself.

"Your subconscious mind rules your body," Tooley said in his Oriental-themed dining area before Pana arrived.  "You have to command it to obey." 

It's "turned my life around"

For Pana, who has lost ten pounds in seven weeks, the process has "turned my life around."  Traveling from Lawndale to Rancho Palos Verdes to meet with Tooley each week, the young wife and mother says she weighed 203 pounds following the birth of her second child. 

"It took me three years to lose three or four pounds, and I was very depressed," she said. "Now I'm down to 186 without starving myself or crash dieting. And my girls (7 and 3) are eating what I'm eating, nutritious foods: vegetables, fruits, low-fat meats and grains."

Not only does Pana eat what's good for her, she's seen a revitalization of her spirit. 

"I'm way happier, and I laugh a lot." 

Free from thoughts of stitches and scalpels

The original Gastric Mind Band process, Tooley explained earlier, was developed in Spain and uses hypnosis to make you think you've experienced an operation and that a physical band has tied off most of your stomach.  

In contrast, Tooley's technique is free from thoughts of stitches and scalpels.  Instead of implanting the memory of surgery, he employs "stomach-limiting induced muscle response."

A diagram showed how the stomach looks with a physical lap band as opposed to one using his mental lap band. Resembling longish, pink balloons, both organs were pinched near the top, one collared by silicone, the other merely indented. 

"By triggering the stomach muscles to contract through hypnosis," Tooley said, "it creates the sensation of a small upper stomach, similar to that the surgical gastric band creates."  

Food still reaches the larger stomach and digests properly, Tooley said, but in much smaller amounts.

Asked if the mentally-induced, lap-banded organ appears pinched when x-rayed, he replied with a laugh, "I don't know."  He questions: So long as the client believes that to be the case, does it matter? 

Backed by a stunning, stained-glass creation he made himself, the soft-spoken artist and therapist presents the image of calm authority and friendliness. In his white lab coat, dress shirt and rimless spectacles, he easily could be mistaken for a family physician, the old-fashioned kind who makes house calls and exudes bedside manner.

"Tragedy struck five years ago"

Born in Baton Rouge, LA and raised in the Bronx, Tooley was a computer consultant in Louisiana when tragedy struck five years ago. Along with pain and increasing numbness in his hands and feet, he kept losing his balance, frequently falling to the ground. A biopsy of his ankle indicated neuropathy, meaning serious nerve loss and damage. 

"My immune system was attacking my nerves as if they were enemies," he said. 

Not only was there no cure, little clue existed as to the cause. 

"The doctors believed it was hereditary," he said.

Tooley, who always had retreated to his stained-glass art to relieve the mental stress of his computer consulting job, had to go on disability. Increasingly incapacitated after three years and headed for a wheelchair, he was led to hypnotherapy, first by his wife, Dona, who was studying the practice, and then by one of her instructors, Shelley Stockwell Nicholas of Rancho Palos Verdes, a noted hypnotherapist and teacher. Dona met Stockwell at a convention in Detroit.

Told he held the key to his own health, Tooley began to recover by berating his nerves (what was left of them) and telling his subconscious: "Nerve cells, grow back!" and "Immune system, leave the nerves alone!"    

Hypnotherapy as a profession never occurred to him

When the numbness and pain subsided within weeks, he felt infinitely better and—after three years—was able to cease all medications and bi-weekly hospital infusions. Tooley's success with sub-conscious narratives hardly convinced him to switch from information technology to hypnotherapy, however. 

"It never occurred to me," he said. 

That didn't happen until he accompanied his wife to California and attended one of Nicholas' seminars.

Under hypnosis, Tooley was asked by Nicholas, "What would you most like to be doing right now, Duncan?"

He answered, "Watching the sunset on the Pacific Ocean." 

He not only realized he wanted to move to California to paint and create stained glass, but he also began to think seriously about hypnotherapy as a profession. His wife, who had become a hypnotherapist by this time, was as surprised as Tooley. Both agreed California was a superior choice when it came to practicing their craft. 

After looking at a couple of houses, they were at the airport, preparing to fly back to Louisiana, when Nicholas called, saying she had found the perfect house. 

The Tooleys never got on the plane.

You could eat off the floor

Modest from the street, the draw of the home from inside is apparent, Catalina Island rising in the mist like Bali Hai in a spectacular view of the Pacific. Dona's collection of miniature unicorns displayed on shelves in the living room, several Buddha-like porcelains scattered about, the home is immaculate to the point you could eat off the floor. 

Tooley, who has taught a pain management course for nurses and caregivers at Providence Little Company of Mary Medical Center and a chronic/cancer pain control class to seniors at Torrance Memorial Medical Center, conducts his weight-loss sessions in a sparsely furnished room in his home. 

A Hypnosis Instructor of the Medical and Dental Division of the International Hypnosis Federation, he also holds classes in self-hypnosis for groups at Hesse Park in RPV and in pain management at his Tooley Weight Wellness Clinic in Torrance.

For Pana, it began on the scales to see if she had succeeded in her previous week's goal of losing three pounds. One pound short, she was reassured by Tooley.

"Don't worry if you haven't lost as much this time," he said. "Muscle weighs more than fat," he added, congratulating the dark-haired mother of two for increasing her exercise routine to include jogging and going to the gym.

One of the guided imagery processes Tooley uses involves a trek into the body's control center. Once there, clients learn to turn down (or off) the preference or craving for certain foods, whether Häagen-Dazs ice cream or strawberry margaritas, he says. For Pana, it is chocolate; be it a Dove Bar or a Sees Bordeaux, she thinks of chocolate "all the time." What she neglects, she said, is fruit.

The smell of chocolate disgusts me

Thus was born her motto for the week, and the imagery exercise intended to decrease her craving for chocolate and increase her craving for fruit. With a chart showing two scales and a list of suggestions, Tooley asked Pana to fill in blanks such as: 'I choose to eat less chocolate; each day I want less chocolate; the smell of chocolate disgusts me…,' etc.  The same for fruit, only on the positive side: 'I choose to eat more fruit; my cells crave fruit…'

Seated in a reclining chair, soothing music floating softly on the scented air, Pana closes her eyes as Tooley sits nearby, easing her into breathing exercises. 

"Feel the oxygen going into your brain," he says softly. "Know it is nourishing your body."

From there the therapist progresses to the more or less standard technique of drawing her down into her subconscious by means of an elevator that descends slowly from the 10th to the first floor. The elevator doors open to a private sanctuary, a "magnificent chamber," he says, a place Pana knows well. 

"You see doors with something written on them ... you see the words 'Samantha's Control Room'. The doors are opened by someone who looks like you. It is your Control Mistress, the part of you who runs you."

Next, Samantha is lead to a room full of food preferences: meat, vegetables, grains and sweets. There is a master control for sweets and individual controls for pies, cakes, ice cream, etc. She chooses the individual control for chocolate.  

"If you want to reduce your desire for chocolate, turn the control knob clockwise and stop at the spot on the dial you feel is right," Tooley said, instructing her to repeat to herself her goal to eat less chocolate.

Suggestions of mouth-watering deliciousness

She does the same visualization for fruit, but in the positive sense, the imagery reinforced with succulent suggestions of mouth-watering deliciousness. Then Pana is asked to return to her sanctuary, where she experiences a gentle rain that washes every particle of the desire for chocolate away, followed by a glorious golden light that infuses her with a fierce hankering for fruit. 

Rising slowly again in the elevator, she is instructed to repeat her motto and dwell in laughter and happiness. 

"In a few moments, Samantha, you'll feel terrific, knowing you've changed your life forever," Tooley said.

She soon stretches and yawns, her face already brimming with smiles. The hour-long session has increased her sense of well-being, she said, and reinforced the feeling of a lap band around her tummy. Sickening old chocolate doesn't stand a chance.

"When I had my mental lap band installed," Pana said later, "it felt like my stomach had been pulled up and squeezed tighter, [as if] a string had been wrapped around my stomach making it the size of a golf ball."  

Ever since then, she said, she eats much less and feels full in a heartbeat. 

"I never would have considered caffeine, refined sugars, artificial sweeteners and toxins as bad for my body," Pana said. "Now I spend a lot more time at the market reading labels and making sure what we eat is good for us."

Along with setting a new weight goal, Tooley advises Pana to record her food intake in a journal (one he provides), keep to her exercise schedule, take a multi-vitamin, drink a green drink, keep her thoughts positive, and twice a day repeat her motto and listen to his CD, a reinforcement hypnosis-imagery audio program.

In general, Tooley recommends 27 weekly sessions to gain a whole new attitude toward food. 

"It makes it easy to select only health-promoting foods," he says. "Processed and preserved foods become distasteful and easy to avoid." 

Although prices vary with the program length, individual sessions run about $150, Tooley says. In Pana's case, her mother helped with the cost because she recognized how depressed her daughter was and that her lifestyle had an unhealthy effect on her husband and children. 

"The program has not only helped me, it's helped my entire family," Pana says.   

Group sessions are arranged according to how many wish to participate. Tooley can be reached by phone at 310-832-0418 or emailed at duncan@tooleyweightclinic.com.  More information about the Tooley Mental Gastric Band can be found at www.MentalGastricBand.com.