What is it about Delia Smith?

I can’t seem to put my finger on why is it I find her so easy to watch and why it is that I love her TV cookery shows. She is incredibly hypnotic and she does something in absolute perfection that endears her to me. Want to know what?

She does what the NLP community would call ‘pacing and leading.’ She paces the viewer… Despite the fact that her cook books outsell every other UK based celebrity chef by miles, she keeps an air of regular lady about her.

She reminds me of my Mum. She is not pretentious. She is softly spoken, loves her cookery, goes at our pace, is on our level… Then she shows you how to do things in the kitchen in a way that we all understand and feel capable of. She paces and leads…  

The good thing about Delia Smith is that she does generally stick to what she knows and what she is good at. She does own a football club, but that is mainly because she loves the club, the game, has strong ties to the region and she does not attempt to be a football impressario or have an ego about her role.

In fact during episode one of her latest cookery series, you saw her with her family all around a table at the football club looking just as regular as when any family goes out for Sunday lunch together. I feel that Delia is human, lives a lovely life and empathises with me… Now that is how to develop rapport and that is how to hypnotise…

It is when celebrities attempt to tell us things about healthcare (when they are popstars for example) that I get worried and irritated…

Celebrities do not seem shy when it comes to offering us advice on how to improve our health, just recently the organisation ‘Sense About Science’ has highlighted a number of dubious health messages which have come from various famous faces.

There are a range of things you would never be inclined to ask of certain celebrities… Like Pete Doherty’s advice on sobriety, Russell Brand on monogamy… You know the kind of stuff.
 
And yet, whether we want to hear it or not, celebrities are often talking about health. And people decide to listen! They tell us about their wonderful new diets, or the dangers of agricultural chemicals. They tell us why we should eat this, and why we should avoid that. And they’re always banging on about pro-biotic hand-plucked meals, knowing full well that their endorsement often results in many people wanting to change their own eating habits.
 
And because celebrities are usually interesting and scientists usually aren’t, we’re more likely to listen to health advice from a pop star or actress than from a bona fide expert. That’s not because we think Madonna is a doctor. It’s just that the latest research study from some bearded egg-head at the University of Cambridge is unlikely to make the front page of Heat, Hello or OK magazine. They do not have the same hypnotic allure.
 
As I read in another article this week; why don’t celebs limit what they say about health to repeating the five portions a day mantra? Get that message to kids and parents. Why don’t they? The law of celebrity endorsement means that they seem to have to climb on top of unusual, or non-scientific health schemes… Jeeez.
 
In fact, as the charity Sense About Science has discovered, celebrities often spout health advice that is at best unproven, and at worse plain silly. Take celebrity lifestyle guru Carol Caplin, for example, who recently talked about “the importance of keeping the lymph system clear and unclogged” to help prevent breast cancer. It sounds sensible enough, but it’s just mumbo jumbo.
 
According to Michael Baum, emeritus professor of surgery at University College London, Caplin’s statement has “no meaning whatsoever”. “It is not based on knowledge of anatomy…let alone breast cancer.”
 
This is not an isolated example, is it?
 
According to Sense About Science, a long list of celebrities have recently been caught spouting spurious medical information. They include Madonna, Elle Macpherson and Chris de Burgh. Even those who you’d hope might know better, like Gillian McKeith, have made claims with no scientific validity. We might be as well taking parenting advice from Britney, it seems, as health advice from her A-list colleagues.
 
Misinformation is not just spouted by celebrities. Health information garnered from newspaper reports, magazines, TV shows, websites and even the experts themselves can be biased, incomplete or just plain wrong. According to one new book, when faced with this barrage of information, we all need to acquire the skills to separate useful information from the rest.

So I’ll be contuining to bring you lots of scientific research about hypnosis in coming weeks, as per usual 😉
 
I have written about it for ages, people who come to see me for quick-fixes and when they find out that it is going to be tougher than popping a pill, they wilt and go elsewhere… We seem to want miracle cures from miracle diets, endorsed by favourite celebrities…
 
I advise that you do not take advice from celebrities, do not fall under their spell, do not allow yourself to be hypnotised for anything other than what they know about… And that is why I am going to be sat down glued to the delightfully refreshing, hypnotic Delia Smith again this week.  I love Delia.