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[Reelya]

Sure, but you haven't quite tuned into Secret Thinking. The "less fat thoughts" isn't couched in terms of "i'm losing weight, i'm losing weight" because that's still imaging yourself as overweight.

She says to paste your ideal weight over the readout of your scales, and believe that you are already your ideal weight, e.g. using images of you when you were that weight or pasting your face on a thin model's body. So you create an alternate reality where you already are that weight and you then naturally shift over to that as the actual reality, instead of thinking "lose weight". Similarly she actually says that food only puts on weight if your belief is that it does. If you free yourself from that belief, then food has no power over you.

So it's "mentally healthy" in a way. Stop worrying about what you eat and stop checking the scales or looking in the mirror. Just believe you already look amazing no matter what. While it's semi-delusional, it's also good to let go sometimes. Until you get diabetes, because you failed to disbelieve that elevated blood sugar causes diabetes.

[Reelya]

It's unfalsifiable because she can just say that anyone who didn't lose weight after following her plan just didn't believe hard enough, while anyone who did, clearly believed sufficiently.

[TD1]

Ah, unfalsifiable. My favourite type of supernatural meme.

[Khan Boyzitbig]

The power of belief can cause incredible things to happen, but there is a serious difference between "all bad things happen because you thought bad things" and "I AM cold because I want to be". You can trick your body into being cold or throwing off cancer, but you can't stop that crazy guy with a gun by thinking he cannot exist because nothing can hurt me.

[ChairmanPoo]

You can trick your body into being cold or throwing off cancer,

If by "tricking your body into throwing off cancer" you mean therapeutical monoclonal antibodies, chemotherapy and/or adoptive cell therapy then you have a point. If you mean throwing off cancer through the power of happy thoughts and unicorns then you're as crazy as the guy attempting to think away an armed robber.

[TheDarkStar]

You can trick your body into being cold or throwing off cancer,

If by "tricking your body into throwing off cancer" you mean therapeutical monoclonal antibodies, chemotherapy and/or adoptive cell therapy then you have a point. If you mean throwing off cancer through the power of happy thoughts and unicorns then you're as crazy as the guy attempting to think away an armed robber.

You might not be able to cure cancer by being happy, but happier cancer patients tend to live longer. And iirc the causation goes being happier -> being healthier, but it's been a while since I read relevant stuff.

[bloop_bleep]

There is nothing special about human brains -- they are but only huge, complex chemical machines that abide by the laws of physics. They can't  magically kill cancer cells just because they want to.

[Reelya]

There are some people who will swear they "imagined" cancer away, but the notion that this works isn't supported by any actual studies. What's more likely in those cases is people confusing coincidence for causation.

There is some evidence that guided imagery can lead to a boost in the immune system, however that's not really proof of the notion that e.g. as one study suggests "imagining little pacmans eating the cancer cells" actually works because you visualized that specific thing. e.g. the semantic meaning of the visuals may be irrelevant. To say it has to be the specific thing they visualized that made the difference would be like giving someone a placebo, finding a positive effect, then claiming the specific flavor of placebo given was relevant.

[Criptfeind]

Well fuck. You fucked it, the secret did work, but then you believed it didn't hard enough to recombobulate the universe to make it no longer work, retroactively even.

[pisskop]

A positive outlook is the best one to have period.

Pasting your fat head on a skinny cut out paper barbie wont make you skinnier, but having took the time and made the effort to do so will show how much you actually want it and perhaps trigger the first steps to weight loss.

Imagining that a gunman cant hurt you is not at all what seems to be suggested here.  Its about internal changes, not ones affecting the presence of others.  something that could be suggested is that the gunman wont hurt you because you cant be hurt or that he wont because you will talk him out of it first.

I think its safe just to leave the general idea at 'if I change my outlook Ill take the steps to help myself'.  Its a question of motivation,, the line between 'I really want to change but will talk about it and not do it' and 'Ill watch a few videos and learn about it and then take some steps'.


Its about the manipulation of the mental to one that is proactive.

[Khan Boyzitbig]

The brain can trigger lots of things. Most humans do not put their bodies to their absolute limit because we do have our own failsafes to stop us from doing damage. But we can also override them when needed.

You can trick your body into being cold or throwing off cancer,

If by "tricking your body into throwing off cancer" you mean therapeutical monoclonal antibodies, chemotherapy and/or adoptive cell therapy then you have a point. If you mean throwing off cancer through the power of happy thoughts and unicorns then you're as crazy as the guy attempting to think away an armed robber.

Happy thoughts don't work on cancer no. And anyone who thinks that is crazy. But there are humans who have shrugged off cancer that should have killed them. And sure, it may just be a coincidence that it happened but the fact that it did happen shows that the human body can do things which are strange and cannot be truly explained.

[Reelya]

Well this some of the research. In a controlled study (2011) they found that the group using guided imagery therapy saw an immune boost not seen in the control group. So that's proof that mental state does affect immune response, however it hasn't necessarily equated to improved clinical outcomes for cancer, and there's no evidence that the choice of imagery was in fact significant. There would need to be controlled studies using different imagery to have any conclusion about that.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/belleruth-naparstek/guided-imagery-cancer-patients_b_1026296.html

[Rolan7]

I'm amused at how similar this Secret stuff is to the Warhammer universes.  Though even there, you need a lot more than 1 mind to noticeably adjust reality (with various heroic exceptions).

[ChairmanPoo]

Some tumors disappear by themselves. Notably some skin tumors and some rare leukemia subtypes in people with Down syndrome. Doesn't mean it's anything anyone did. In some of those cases the cause has even been found: turns out the tumor itself had a genetic time bomb ticking away all along.

TL, DR: sometimes weird shit happens. Doesnt mean that whatever happened is whatever you think happened, and in general: do whatever you fancy, but do it alongside the normal thing. Or, as the arabs put it, "trust in God, but tie your camel"

[Rolan7]

Faith doing stuff isn't exactly new. There's books about it (as in fiction), Touhou gods get power from faith, Touhou Youkai don't exist in the outside world since people no longer believe in them.

Heh, very true.  Small Gods was the first Terry Pratchett book I read, and I was vaguely aware of the idea even before then from stuff older kids would say.  Some tabletop game maybe, but I was very young.
Edit: Might have been Populous (the first one, not the beginning), actually.  I did gravitate towards kids who talked about video games.