Saturday, January 8, 2005

Start Losing Weight Today Using The Natural Medicine Of Humor

P.T. Barnum, who dedicated his life to entertaining the masses, often relied on size-related adjectives to sell his attractions. His posters and announcements were peppered with words like mammoth, extraordinary, colossal, and gargantuan.



Unfortunately, if you're like most of us those words might be used to describe you as well. Americans have an obsession with losing weight and with good reason; the percentage of overweight people in the United States is doubling every ten years - from 1 in 200 in 1986, to 1 in 50 in 2000. Pretty soon there won't be enough room for us all on this continent!



We've identified a curious paradox: Americans are obsessed with weight loss and spend billions on it each year, yet 140 million of us are overweight or obese - and that number grows (pun intended) each year. With all that energy and money thrown at it, why can't we lose that excess weight and why do we pack it on in the first place?



Let's quickly move beyond simple, though true, solutions. We intellectually "know" that there are only two things necessary for maintaining our proper weight (outside of a medical condition): eating right and exercise. We "know" these things are true - so why don't we apply them?



The answer is simple and so is the solution. As you learn the following diet you will realize that with a little willingness and discipline you need never worry about having to lose weight again. You will lose your extra weight and you will never gain it back as you see how well my weight loss method works!



Let's just be honest about it - we love food! Eating is an enjoyable ritual and we commonly use food to reward ourselves because it feels good to eat. Whenever we feel unfulfilled or frustrated (when we need affirmation or esteem) we are naturally drawn to fill that void with food. When we're lacking pleasure in our lives we rely on the eating ritual to make up the difference.



And this formula works; overfilling ourselves with food does fill our emptiness. It works so well that, just like any addict, we become gluttons - regularly overstuffing ourselves and/or eating too much "comfort" food to fill our emotional void. The end result, despite our best intentions, is a constant, steady weight gain because we're using food for a purpose it is not intended - support.



The healthful solution I've created to fill your emptiness exists already inside you because you were born with it. Unlike food, this solution fills your void while also fostering lasting and sustainable health, vitality, energy, and fitness. Instead of food, what you need is more fun because fun is the most accessible and constant source of energy and support known.



Because it is an energy, fun is readily and abundantly in you and around you. Once you learn to find more fun in your relationships, your work, and your home life I guarantee you will quickly do away with those excess pounds - and they'll never return. And the best news is...I will teach you exactly how to do this using my Fun Factor Diet.



My Fun Factor Diet is based upon my unique prescription, The Fun Factor, because The Fun Factor delivers you to new heights of health, wellness, and success. Years ago a terminally ill patient, Lisa, taught me about the incredibly powerful natural medicine of humor. I used Lisa's lessons to create my Fun Commandments, eventually molding them into my unique prescription, The Fun Factor, capable of producing health, energy, and vitality that others will envy.



My Fun Factor Diet works because it is based on my Fun Commandments and, thus, enables you to unleash your powerful humor nature on every aspect of your life. As you learn to have more fun in your relationships, your work, and your home life, you will rely less and less on food to meet your emotional needs. With the Fun Factor Diet the urge to overeat melts away, along with the excess pounds because you will be using food for its natural purpose - sustenance.



  • The first strategy of my Fun Factor Diet is to Always Go the Extra Smile. Smiling is a deliberate and controllable behavior that almost always calms inner stress and attracts outward fun. Smiling unleashes the natural medicine of humor anytime and anywhere because it has a profound physical and emotional impact.



    And here is the beautifully powerful secret behind the first Fun Factor Diet strategy: your internal physiology is fooled by your smile. Whether spontaneous or forced, your body thinks you're having fun when you smile, whether you are or not, because smiling activates the pleasure centers of your brain. By smiling you literally become more physically relaxed and enjoy a greater sense of fulfillment and enjoyment.




  • Step two in my Fun Factor Diet is to Be Willing to Laugh at Yourself. This is not a step of humiliation or self-denigration because those things are definitely not fun; it is a strategy of being willing to take yourself lightly. Easing your harsh expectations you impose on yourself, relaxing some of your self-administered pressure, sets the stage for astounding personal gains (or in your case personal "losses")



    Freed from the tyranny of your unrealistic expectations, you will be able to relax and have more fun. Things you have dreaded doing in the past will become enjoyable activities because you won't have expectations of perfection. Combined with your commitment to Go the Extra Smile, you will find your use of food to calm and comfort yourself almost extinguished because taking yourself lightly helps you see yourself as, literally, less "heavy."




  • In the next step of my Fun Factor Diet you Stay Focused, yet Flexible by not engaging in any other activity while you are eating. Activities that have commonly accompanied your eating are to be shunned while putting food in your mouth - including reading, watching television, or socializing at get-togethers. With the exception of reasonable table conversation, eating becomes a focused activity for you, not connected with any other behavior because you are about to halt the underlying cause of your weight gain.



    Once you begin disciplining yourself to separate eating from all the pleasurable and stressful activities with which you have associated it, you will discover a disturbing fact: you will be shocked by how much you've been using food as both a stress reliever and a pleasure enhancer. Your weight loss can be dramatic when you change your use of food from pleasure enhancement and stress relief to simple nourishment. You're ready for this change because, with the first two steps, you've already begun to fill your emotional and spiritual void with fun rather than food.




  • The final step in my Fun Factor Diet will make your weight loss permanent because it centers you in the unique paradigm of lasting success. My Fun Commandment, Practice Wanting What You Have, Rather Then Getting What You Want, increases your awareness of gratitude because it stops the merry-go-round of always needing "more" to feel satisfied. Ongoing gratitude for what you have has the amazing benefit of making it possible to get and keep more of what you want.



    Filling yourself up with gratitude is not a platitude, so to speak, because it works in real practice. You eat in excess to fill an emotional and/or spiritual void, not because you are hungry; you eat too much to provide yourself with emotional comfort, fulfillment, and reassurance. The strategy of Practicing Wanting What you Have, Rather than Getting What you Want, actually fills this emptiness in a meaningful, lasting manner because your emotional appetite is satisfied by the things that really sustain it!




Smiling fools your body and attracts socially fun attention, Taking Yourself Lightly releases you from the tyranny of your unrealistic expectations, Staying Focused, yet Flexible teaches you to use food for nourishment rather than fun, and Wanting What you Have allows you to fill your emotional void with fun and gratitude rather than food. There you have it...my Fun Factor Diet. Welcome to a life free from weight worries!



So, here are some simple, easy steps you can take right now to prepare yourself for permanent, painless weight loss.



  1. Subscribe to my Fun Times newsletter. The Fun Times is all about using your natural power of humor to increase the quality of your life - including your physical appearance. The Fun Times is 100% free, and is delivered instantly, every week, to your email inbox. If you sign up now, I'll also throw in a copy of my "Stop Your Seriousness" Ecourse and my book, Ten Ways You Can Be Happier...Right Now! which will show you how you can use my Fun Factor prescription in your life to increase your success!




  2. Check out The Fun Factor. This prescription has changed so many lives for the better - it would be a shame if you passed it up. Check it out here if you're sick of being overweight and are ready to shed those excess pounds once and for all!




By the way, in one of his museums, P.T. Barnum found that he was having trouble getting the crowds to leave once they had seen all the attractions. So he devised a clever sign, elaborately lettered to draw as much attention as possible, which read "This Way to the Egress"



Most of the patrons expected to see some bizarre animal that Barnum had collected from one of the far corners of the earth when they followed the sign through the door. What they didn't realize, however, was that "Egress" is simply another word for "Exit." Funny...and true.



Today you begin your "egress" from excess weight and from all your worries surrounding it. Start using my Fun Factor Diet right now!



Cliff Kuhn, M.D.

The Laugh Doctor



The Natural Medicine of Humor

"Discover a unique, FREE, and incredibly powerful prescription created out of desperation by a (formerly) stressed-out Kentucky psychiatrist"



The Blog Directory



Listed on Blogwise

Thursday, January 6, 2005

What Do Rodney Dangerfield, John Adams, And Walt Whitman All Have In Common?

Rodney Dangerfield reflected how we all feel, from time to time, when he said, "I get no respect." Revolutionary hero John Adams eloquently said, as early as 1805, "The rewards in this life are esteem and admiration of others - the punishments are neglect and contempt." A recent Harris poll even revealed, not surprisingly, that "respect from others" is what 76% of respondents said they wanted most.



We've been searching for esteem and respect since humans became civilized creatures. We still search for them today. Why have they proven so elusive?



Respect and esteem are elusive for one reason - if we glean it from others we will always be wanting it. We cannot rely upon others to provide us the respect we seek and deserve so it must, therefore, stem from another source. And you have but one consistent, reliable source of respect and esteem - yourself.



Fortunately, you have a ready reservoir of self-esteem and self-respect - your sense of humor. And you are also fortunate to have a veritable medicine chest full of resources that turbo-charge your sense of humor. My Fun Commandments, the cornerstones of my unique Fun Factor Prescription, allow you to simply and easily maximize the amazingly powerful natural medicine of humor that you were born with and still carry inside you.



One of my Fun Commandments, for example, is to Allow Your Mistakes. Allowing your mistakes is not only a ready-made formula for adding abundant humor and joy to your life, it is also an insanely powerful method of creating and fostering self-esteem and self-respect. As my patients and clients continue to discover, you should be prepared to feel up to 60% better about the person who greets you in the mirror each morning once you begin allowing your mistakes on a daily basis.



First of all, if you allow your mistakes you will find that you're a very amusing person. You are a perfectly imperfect creation, a living breathing contradiction, full of frailties and foibles. You may soon enjoy your mistakes enough to make them on purpose - like the great Johnny Carson famously did on the Tonight Show to keep himself fresh and on his toes.



Secondly, if you allow your mistakes you will become what we psychiatrists call a self-actualized person. The self-acceptance and self-respect found through believing that your mistakes are okay delivers massive amounts of self-confidence; the self-assurance of knowing that you are just like you're supposed to be is finally here! Not only will you quit worrying and second-guessing yourself, but you must learn to temper yourself lest you create jealousy in others.



A great way to begin allowing your mistakes is to follow Johnny Carson's lead, make small ones on purpose. Press the wrong button on the elevator, wear mismatching socks, transpose the names of your pets - anything silly and harmless will do. You will immediately notice how naturally silly you are, how making mistakes causes no irreparable damage, and how ridiculous it was for you to expect perfection from yourself in the first place!



Actually, in the long run, you will discover that you are perfect - perfectly imperfect - and born to make mistakes. You'll finally unlearn the greatest lie that our seriousness ever told us - that mistakes are bad - because you'll realize that mistakes are our greatest teachers! You will set free the natural medicine of humor; you'll throw off the shackles of fear and seriousness that've help you back as you realize that a person who doesn't make mistakes isn't living!



In 1871, Walt Whitman said that in America, where our form of government promotes a uniformity among the citizens, one of our unique anxieties would be a constant struggle for "individual self-respect based upon social approval." Little did Whitman know how prophetic his words were. But you are a more fortunate soul; the more you understand that respect and esteem come from yourself, the sooner you stop denying yourself the natural medicine of humor as only my Fun Commandments can deliver it to you!



See you at my website, where you will learn about all my Fun Commandments - for free.



Cliff Kuhn, M.D.

The Laugh Doctor



The Natural Medicine of Humor

"Discover a unique, FREE, and incredibly powerful prescription created out of desperation by a (formerly) stressed-out Kentucky psychiatrist"



The Blog Directory



Listed on Blogwise















Wednesday, January 5, 2005

Avoiding Interaction With Your "Prophetic Bishop"?

In the late 1800's a bishop of the United Brethren church was interacting with a college professor. The bishop's opinion was that the millennium was at hand. As evidence, he cited the fact that everything about nature had already been discovered and that all useful inventions had already been made. The college professor expressed his belief that man had far to go; he would, for example, one day be able to fly. "What a nonsensical idea," the bishop countered, "Flight is reserved for the birds and the angels!" More on this contentious interaction in a moment...



You have, within your personal chemistry, a pharmacy so powerful that pharmaceutical companies would pay a king's ransom to duplicate it. Your pharmacy is capable of delivering the natural medicine of humor - the most potent and effective pain reliever, stress reducer, creativity enhancer, and mood elevator we've yet to encounter! Engaging your humor, beyond the standard recreational uses, turbo-charges your energy, health, vitality, and success.



With a commitment to act and interact today, you should be prepared for an incredible surge of energy created by the natural medicine of humor you're engaging. Acting and interacting with the people who cross your path today is very important for your health and welfare. So important, in fact, that I've made Act and Interact one of my Fun Commandments - the pillars supporting my unique Fun Factor prescription.



How does acting and interacting with the people you naturally encounter open the floodgates of your natural humor medicine? It allows you to avoid spiritual "flat tires". Spiritual flat tires occur when you sidestep, or avoid, an interaction that is about to naturally occur - you duck into an office to avoid encountering someone in a hallway or you don't answer to the phone because you don't want to talk to the person calling. This type of avoidance drains and deletes your reservoir of insanely powerful energy created by your fully activated sense of humor.



Spiritual flat tires are a result, as are most of the habits which drain and deplete you of your health, vitality, and zest, of your deadly seriousness. Seriousness refers to taking ourselves too seriously; when we make the fatal mistake of taking both our responsibilities and ourselves seriously we are putting our productivity, serenity, peace of mind, and health at great risk. We start taking ourselves too seriously and pretty soon we're dodging a person placed in our path because we think we know best what we need today.



But have you ever noticed that it usually takes you twice as much mental and physical energy to avoid doing a job then it would've taken you to just do it? It also takes twice the energy to avoid acting and interacting with the people you cross paths with because you are, in effect, saying, "I'm going to correct the mistake that nature is making by putting this person in my path and I'm going to be mentally and spiritually negligent so that I can correct nature's mistake." Mental and spiritual negligence have the same effect as physical negligence (isn't it strange how you get tired if you don't exercise?) and if you can afford to allow this much energy to be drained than you have a much bigger reservoir than I!



But spiritual flat tires do more than drain our energy, they are detrimental in at least two additional ways:



  1. We miss out on an interaction with a teacher; nature had a lesson for us, otherwise that person we just avoided would not have been placed in our path. You say that the person you just avoided was a negative influence or would've wasted your time? I know there are legitimate emergency situations where I have to get somewhere, but if I am avoiding people based on my prejudgment of them, I'm cutting myself off from my greatest teachers - other people.



    And we all learn tolerance from the intolerant, patience from the impulsive, temperance from the gossip, gentleness from the rough, etc. I am supremely grateful for those teachers and the lessons they give me.




  2. We create a small, nagging spiritual void of dishonesty, the kind of dishonesty that keeps us from laying our heads down with complete peace of mind each night. Our spiritual flat tire is caused by the pothole our avoidance created; the flat tire is a natural consequence, or symptom, of our spiritual dishonesty. The natural consequences of such avoidance clutter our lives with mental and emotional baggage that further drains us of our energy and vitality.




By deciding to act and interact with the people we encounter today, we fully engage our sense of humor. When our sense of humor is thus engaged our personal medicine cabinet is wide open, flooding our body with the natural medicine of humor. We find resilience and creativity, we have a childlike curiosity for life that results in new solutions to old problems, and we find people being attracted to us personally and professionally without them quite being able to figure out why.



By the way, that bishop from the United Brethren church was named Bishop Wright. Bishop Wright was the father of two budding young inventors named... Orville and Wilbur. True story.



Make sure you employ the invaluable skill of acting and interacting. Visit my website today and let me teach about this, and all, my Fun Commandments - for free.



Cliff Kuhn, M.D.

The Laugh Doctor



The Natural Medicine of Humor

"Discover a unique, FREE, and incredibly powerful prescription created out of desperation by a (formerly) stressed-out Kentucky psychiatrist"



The Blog Directory



Listed on Blogwise