What is Creative Visualization Relaxation (CVR)?

Creative Visualization Relaxation (CVR) is a process that helps you relax. When you relax, your subconscious mind accepts suggestions that change your behavior patterns and habits. In this way, you can change your lifestyle so that you lose weight.

Creative Visualization Relaxation, also known as guided visualization or meditation, is a process that simply helps you relax. When you relax, your subconscious mind becomes receptive to suggestions that enable you to change your habits and behavior patterns. Habits like the feeling that a meal is incomplete if it doesn’t end with dessert. If you don’t want to eat sweets at the end of a meal (frankly a dessert makes me feel ill) then you tell your subconscious mind that it now feels completely satisfied at the end of the main course and you finish your meal then because you are satisfied.

All our behaviors are linked to habits. Sitting in front of the TV is a habit. If you turn on the TV when you walk into the room, it’s a habit. If you light up a cigarette at the end of a meal, it’s a habit. If you turn on the lights in a dark room when you enter, it’s a habit. If you snack when you come home from school, you may be hungry, and it’s still a habit. Drinking coffee in the morning is a habit. Picking up a Candy Bar at the checkout counter is a habit – and don’t for a moment think the Supermarkets don’t know that.

In our Pounds Off Programs we identify the most common habits that keep people overweight and create processes to change those habits so that you can download and listen to these processes at home or in class. Sometimes the habits change as soon as you become aware of them, sometimes they change over time. Sometimes the suggestions take hold and you never return to a habit. Sometimes you find yourself slipping into the habit again so you need to listen to the habit-breaking process a few more times to get back on track.

CVR makes changing habits fun and easy no matter what behaviors you’re trying to change. Listening to your processes is one of the most important parts of the Pounds Off Programs. Your accountability coach will often ask if you are listening to your processes. The important questions that you should ask yourself if you find that you have a thousand “reasons” for not listening is – what are you making more important than your weight loss? What is more valuable to you than losing weight? Where is the pay off for staying fat?

“You can have what you want or your reasons for not having it,” says Suzy Prudden.