Chapter 1: Helping Out a Friend

It was in January of this year when we had the big blizzard blast through our area overnight. I woke up to see the reports on the news telling me that just about every school was closed and shook my head. Despite the fact that I was single, all those school closings didn't bode well for traveling to work. As if to drive the point home, the news showed a local reporter standing outside in the city next to a snow drift that had to be about two feet high.

I sighed and went to my bathroom, looking out the window to confirm that where my driveway was supposed to be was a sheet of white. Steve's snow plow had come earlier and removed a lot of the snow, but there was still quite a lot of snow that gathered on top of and next to my car that would have to be cleared away.

It was still snowing outside as well, although not as much as I saw on the television. The wind was howling, though, driving the few flakes so as to look like they were horizontal.

I skipped breakfast and bundled myself up in layers to go outside and try to get my car ready to take me to work. It took about fifteen minutes; I was helped by the fact that the temperature was still in the teens, and the snow mostly brushed off my vehicle. I knew how lucky I was. Wet snow would have been the worst.

There was traffic on the way to work, of course. My normal commute of fifteen minutes took about forty that morning with a lot of stop and go activity.

I am not the sort of person who can work from home. The company I work for allows telecommuting, but I have found in the past that being in an office gives me the feeling that I'm "at work" without the temptation of goofing off while at home.

Luckily for me, the parking lot at the office had recently been plowed, and there were only a few cars parked in the main lot--quite a difference from the normal crowding of cars into the satellite lots on other days.

I smiled when I finally made it inside the building. The inside temperature was more than comfortable, especially considering all the extra clothing I was wearing. The place was mostly deserted as I pressed the call button for the elevator that would take me to my third floor office.

My stomach growled a bit, reminding me that I hadn't eaten breakfast. I looked up from my computer and saw that it was a quarter past noon. I didn't pack a lunch that day, but we had a vending machine that had decent instant soup that I could heat up in the microwave in the break room.

Shirley was in the break room when I got there. She was a coworker whose cubicle was on the opposite side of the building. Although we worked in different departments, our groups did occasionally interact, and we knew each other's names.

"Hi, Shirley!" I said cheerily as I entered the break room.

Shirley gave me a cute smile, nodded, and said, "Hi, Jim. I think we're the only two people on the whole floor that came in this morning."

"I think most everybody else is working from home."

Shirley nodded.

There was a moment of silence, so I figured the dialog was over. I went to the vending machine, put in my money, and pulled out a packet that would provide me with chicken noodle soup.

"Instant soup?" Shirley asked with a smile.

Smiling back, I said, "Yeah, I didn't know how long it would take to clear off the car and get to work, so I skipped breakfast and didn't pack a lunch."

With a shake of her head, Shirley said, "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, you know."

I shrugged. Nutrition wasn't my strong suit. Although I was in my early thirties, I wasn't much overweight. I probably ate too much junk food, but I only ate in moderation when I did eat it. I guess I did have the start of a beer belly, but that never really worried me. As Shirley was a larger woman, I carefully avoided saying that I didn't think myself overweight. "Well, I had a cup of coffee when I got here."

Shirley had a Tupperware bowl. Its top was still on, but I could see through the translucent pink material that there was something light yellow or brown inside. "I have some egg salad and a couple of bulky rolls. Want to share?"

"Really?" I asked, surprised. Normally, Shirley and I didn't speak much to one another, and her offer surprised me. "I don't want to put you out."

"I always make too much," Shirley said. "Whatever you eat will be that much that won't go to my fanny."

As I mentioned before, Shirley was a larger woman, although she wasn't so large that I would call her fat. "If you really don't mind, that would be nice," I said, avoiding the one subject that I tended to avoid with females.

"Why don't you put another pot of coffee on?" Shirley said, turning toward the coffee unit. "That pot's been on since before I got in."

"Sure," I said, knowing that I probably had been the one to put the pot on earlier.

The two of us worked silently in the break room, and after a few minutes, we had two cups of coffee and a couple of egg salad rolls set up.

The egg salad was delicious, and appealed to my rumbling stomach. "So, why aren't you working at home?" I asked, making conversation.

"I don't live too far away," Shirley answered, smiling as she scooped the egg salad onto a bulky roll. "The condo had the parking lot plowed and the roads were mostly clear."

"That's convenient."

"So, why are you in the office today?"

"I don't like working at home. It's hard for me to get into the 'work' mindset unless I'm in the office."

Shirley looked at me a little strangely, and finally nodded. "I can understand that."

The egg salad tasted very nice, and I complimented Shirley on it. "The sandwich is great!"

"Thanks," Shirley said, smiling again. "As I said, I usually make too much."

Once we started talking, I began to feel a bit more comfortable with Shirley. She was a couple of years younger than me, most likely still in her twenties. I guess you would call her "big boned," as she probably wore a size 14 or 16, but she really didn't look fat. She had a natural smile to her cute face as well as a bubbly personality.

I normally take about a half hour for lunch, but the conversation with Shirley had me forgetting about the time. We first talked about our respective projects at work, but the conversation started to become a bit personal. I was intrigued when Shirley mentioned that she was thinking about seeing a therapist.

"What kind of therapist?" I asked.

"Oh, Wendy told me about Dr. Simons, and I think he's called a behavioral therapist, but I'm not sure."

Wendy was one of the people in Shirley's group.

"Why do you think you need to see a behavioral therapist?" I asked.

"Wendy said that she went to him a few months ago. Just one visit, and she was able to stay on a diet ever since. He hypnotized her, and made her think that fatty food tasted terrible."

"He did that in one visit?" I asked, incredulous.

"That's what Wendy said. Just one visit and, bam! You start to lose weight."

"That sounds too good to be true, actually."

Shirley looked at me, concerned. "Why do you say that?"

"First of all, hypnosis is just a short term therapy. It's impossible to hypnotize a person once and in that one session make any substantial changes in a person that would have an effect more than a few days or weeks. Certainly not years."

"Really?"

"I took a few courses in college," I explained. "Hypnosis is a recognized therapy, but there are usually better ones. It requires a lot of trust from the subject, and I truly doubt that Wendy's Dr. Simons would be able to establish that kind of trust in only one session. More likely, he's convinced her that he has done what he said he did, and Wendy is simply playing along. That's how stage hypnotists work, you know."

Shirley shook her head. "Wendy did lose weight. She's lost ten pounds so far."

I shook my head. "Of course, Dr. Simons is no longer around to see if his so-called therapy may have had any unintended consequences."

"What do you mean?"

"The classic example is a quick hypnosis session and convincing a person that, say, all cigarettes taste bad."

Shirley nodded. "I've heard of that. Many people have done that."

"The problem," I explained, "is that this does not address the addiction problem that most cigarette smokers have. The smoker is still addicted, but now doesn't have any outlet for that addiction. Take my father, for instance. He went to such a hypnotherapist, and it definitely stopped him from smoking, but he traded his nicotine addiction for an addiction to eating. He started gaining weight, going from 160 pounds in his thirties to over two hundred and fifty pounds. Not only that, but he still had the nicotine addiction, and he felt it every time somebody lit one up around him. He became a militant anti-smoker, and sometimes got into fights. He eventually died a couple of years ago from a heart attack, and I believe it's because he couldn't stop eating."

"Wow," was all Shirley could say.

"That's an example of how a hypnotherapist can do more harm than good. Now, it's not all bad! A proper therapist would take a few sessions to get to know the subject. The two would gradually build up a trust and then hypnosis might be used to try to reveal the source of the person's problem. Only when that source is identified can a therapist try to work on ways to address that particular problem. It could take a while, and therapy sessions are pretty expensive. Not too many insurance policies cover that sort of therapy. That's why I'm pretty leery of the claims that Wendy says of Dr. Simons."

"You seem to know quite a lot about hypnosis and behavioral therapy."

I shrugged. "As I said, I took a few courses in school. I was interested in hypnosis after it seemed to work on my father, but I found out how it could be misused, and then I realized what was happening to my dad. He died before he was properly cured. Sometimes, I blame the hypnotist that he visited. However, I figure that he just didn't realize the harm he could cause. After all, cigarette smoking is a good thing to 'cure, ' right?"

"I guess," Shirley said. She seemed much more subdued. "Do you think that Wendy..."

Shaking my head, I said, "Probably, Wendy is safe. With her, her eating is something more basic than cigarette smoking, which is a learned habit. Smoking is purely an external stimulus. Eating, on the other hand, is something that people do every day without fail. My prediction is that her mind will eventually overcome the silly command that fattening food tastes bad. So, she will eventually stop her diet and go back to her old eating habits, and will put this down as another failed diet attempt. On the other hand, there's a lower probability that Wendy might actually be changing her lifestyle and she'll start to get used to eating healthier food. If that's the case, then Wendy probably didn't need the hypnosis at all, but just needed an incentive to do this. However, she'll swear it was Dr. Simons that 'cured' her."

"Hmm," Shirley said, intrigued.

I smiled. "How much did Dr. Simons charge Wendy?"

"Five hundred dollars."

"I'm in the wrong racket," I said.

The two of us laughed.

Shirley looked up on the wall and noticed the time. "We've got to clean up and get back to work."

I shrugged, and the two of us cleaned up the table and left for our cubicles.

A week or so later, Shirley came into my office right before I was ready to leave for the day.

"Hi, Shirley. What's up?"

"Remember our discussion last week about Wendy?"

I nodded. "What about it?"

"Wendy and I were talking about it. She tried an experiment, and went to Dunkin Donuts. She was able to eat part of a jelly donut!"

I laughed. "The effect faded so soon? I figured it might work a little longer than that."

Shirley shook her head. "No, she said it didn't taste as good as it used to, but she was able to eat part of it anyway."

"It probably wasn't a good idea to tell her it was a sham. Now she's probably mad at me..."

"No," Shirley said quickly. "I told her about what you said about changing her lifestyle, and she's still eating healthy foods."

"Oh, good," I said, not knowing if this really was good or not. I didn't know Shirley or Wendy very well, after all.

"You really seem to know a lot about hypnosis."

I shook my head. "Probably just enough to stay out of trouble. I've only did it with a few test subjects back in school."

"I was thinking..." Shirley let her words die off.

Oh, god. I knew what Shirley was leading up to...

"Maybe you and I could, like... you know..."

"Shirley, I'm not a hypnotist. I'm just an office worker. I'm not licensed, and I haven't done anything like that in ten years!"

"Aw, come on!" Shirley said, determined. "It could be fun."

"It could also be dangerous," I said. "I told you what happened to my father."

"You seem to know the dangers. You said a proper hypnotist would take time. I'm willing to take the time. Let's say I buy you dinner and afterward in return, you do a session with me. We'll do it, like, once a week. We'll go slow."

"Why do you want this?" I asked.

Shirley put both hands on her stomach. "This is why! I've tried hundreds of diets. I want to try something that works. Dr. Simons charges five hundred dollars. A few meals will cost, like, a hundred dollars or so. I can afford that."

I sighed. "You're serious about this, aren't you?"

"Yes."

There was a determination in Shirley's voice and expression that told me this was true.

"Let's try it once," I suggested. "It might turn out that you can't be hypnotized." That would even let me off the hook, actually, I thought to myself.

"Are you busy tonight?" Shirley asked, obviously eager to get going.

I thought about that night and realized it was Wednesday. "Poker night," I said. "How's tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow evening it is," Shirley said. She picked up a Post-It pad on my desk and wrote her address on it. "Meet me at my place at six tomorrow."

"OK."

I was pretty nervous about the whole idea. First, as I told Shirley, I hadn't even practiced hypnosis in a decade. Second, I would be working with Shirley on something that I knew very little about: the problems with overweight people.

I used Google to find some hypnosis reference sites. Not surprisingly, there were a lot of bad resources on the web. Luckily, I did have the knowledge from my college courses, and I could weed out the bad advice, and actually found a few good resources. There were a few sites that dealt with erotica based on hypnosis as well. The fact that there was such a specific genre of stories out there surprised me! Needless to say, I avoided those, since they would not help me with Shirley.

Next, I searched the web for resources on dieting. Again, there were quite a lot of these resources online. I decided to work from the official government sites like the FDA and other well known groups that had this information. After a couple of hours, I had a couple of good ideas of how hypnosis might actually be able to help Shirley.

I showed up at Shirley's apartment precisely at six.

"Hi, Jim!" Shirley said after she opened the door.

Dinner was at a Thai restaurant that I never heard about before. I had a basil and chicken stir fry, and Shirley ordered a chicken curry dish.

During the meal, Shirley told me about her past history with fad diets, and how she never seemed to have the self-control to stay on many of them. The ones she was able to stay with were the ones that simply didn't work for her.

For my part, I let her talk and just listened. I had some questions of my own, but wanted to learn Shirley's own perceptions about her problems with eating from herself. I still wasn't completely certain that Shirley was going to go through with the hypnosis session, and I still didn't consider myself any kind of an expert on either hypnosis or dieting.