Several randomized controlled trials and meta-analysis have investigated weight loss through hypnosis, finding small effects. [1],[2], [3], [4].

But no study has ever been published addressing the questions:

Can the mind be tricked into believing the body is undergoing bariatric surgery? Can weight loss be achieved in those conditions? And if it can, how is the weight loss compared to real bariatric surgery?

Those are the questions Maya Mizrahi (psychologist and hypnotherapist) and her team at Hadassah Mount Scopus Medical Center are planning to answer in their new study. The results of this new study will be published at one year, but Maya already has some preliminary results at 3 months.

Maya’s multidisciplinary team includes Dr. Tamar Elram, director of Jerusalem’s Hadassah Mount Scopus Medical Center, Prof. Haggi Mazeh, head of the surgical department and Dr. Ronit Greenbaum, senior bariatric surgeon. They are joined by Prof. Danny Ben-Zvi, head of the metabolism and diabetes research lab at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Dr. Eitan Abramowitz, psychiatrist and medical hypnosis specialist at the Hypno-Campus Institute.

The study compares three groups of patients:

I interviewed Maya Mizrahi last week to find out what triggered her desire to do this research, the details of her research, and the preliminary results at 3 months.

In 2008, when Maya founded the psychological service in the surgical bariatric department at Hadassah Mount Scopus Hospital, she accompanied hundreds of patients during their bariatric surgery. The surgery at that time was sleeve gastrectomy where the bariatric surgeon operated on the stomach to make it much smaller.

Maya noticed that there was a “honeymoon phase” where patients were less hungry and lost weight. This phase lasted one to two years. But by 2010, 2011 and 2012, close to 45 percent of the operated patients she was still following were regaining weight (numbers similar to the ones found in published studies [5] [6]).

Several of Maya’s patients kept on telling Maya “It would be wonderful if we could get that gastrectomy surgery every two years.”

Maya knew a gastrectomy surgery every two years would not be realistic but wondered if she, via hypnosis, could make patients believe they were having surgery again?

In 2019, Maya started to hypnotize obese patients in her private practice, making them believe they were re-experiencing their previous surgery of downsizing their stomach.

Maya had such good results that obese people who never had bariatric surgery asked her to do the same hypnotic........

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