A recent newspaper column written by a medical doctor referred to an experiment in England in which some overweight women were given reducing drugs and others were given "dummy" pills.
"Oddly," the physician reported, "women taking the 'dummy' pills lost weight as rapidly as those taking the real drugs, and some of them lost even faster. It's a pretty convincing indication," he concluded, "that just believing you can reduce is the biggest part of the battle."
Believing that we can accomplish any good objective does indeed speed the achievement of our goal. But can we be permanently freed of obesity if our reliance is placed no higher than on material or mortally mental methods such as positive thinking, hypnosis, dieting, exercising, and reducing pills—even if those pills are placebos?
