Can Virtual Surgery Using Hypnosis Help With Weight Loss?
Exploring the impact of imagined bariatric surgery while under hypnosis.
Posted December 8, 2025 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina
Several randomized controlled trials and meta-analysis have investigated weight loss through hypnosis, finding small effects. [1],[2], [3], [4].
But no study has ever been published addressing the questions:
Can the mind be tricked into believing the body is undergoing bariatric surgery? Can weight loss be achieved in those conditions? And if it can, how is the weight loss compared to real bariatric surgery?
Those are the questions Maya Mizrahi (psychologist and hypnotherapist) and her team at Hadassah Mount Scopus Medical Center are planning to answer in their new study. The results of this new study will be published at one year, but Maya already has some preliminary results at 3 months.
Maya’s multidisciplinary team includes Dr. Tamar Elram, director of Jerusalem’s Hadassah Mount Scopus Medical Center, Prof. Haggi Mazeh, head of the surgical department and Dr. Ronit Greenbaum, senior bariatric surgeon. They are joined by Prof. Danny Ben-Zvi, head of the metabolism and diabetes research lab at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Dr. Eitan Abramowitz, psychiatrist and medical hypnosis specialist at the Hypno-Campus Institute.
The study compares three groups of patients:
I interviewed Maya Mizrahi last week to find out what triggered her desire to do this research, the details of her research, and the preliminary results at 3 months.
What triggered Maya Mizrahi’s research
In 2008, when Maya founded the psychological service in the surgical bariatric department at Hadassah Mount Scopus Hospital, she accompanied hundreds of patients during their bariatric surgery. The surgery at that time was sleeve gastrectomy where the bariatric surgeon operated on the stomach to make it much smaller.
Maya noticed that there was a “honeymoon phase” where patients were less hungry and lost weight. This phase lasted one to two years. But by 2010, 2011 and 2012, close to 45 percent of the operated patients she was still following were regaining weight (numbers similar to the ones found in published studies [5] [6]).
Several of Maya’s patients kept on telling Maya “It would be wonderful if we could get that gastrectomy surgery every two years.”
Maya knew a gastrectomy surgery every two years would not be realistic but wondered if she, via hypnosis, could make patients believe they were having surgery again?
In 2019, Maya started to hypnotize obese patients in her private practice, making them believe they were re-experiencing their previous surgery of downsizing their stomach.
Maya had such good results that obese people who never had bariatric surgery asked her to do the same hypnotic protocol for them.
Not knowing whether the same hypnotic protocol would work for patients who never had a gastrectomy, Maya decided to try the procedure on those patients. To her surprise, the hypnotic protocol worked.
In total, from 2019 to 2023, Maya hypnotized 70 patients. About half of those had bariatric surgery in the past, and about half never had bariatric surgery. Most of her patients lost weight but Maya had no unified methodological protocol at that time.
Given her good results, in 2023, Maya decided to start with the ultimate goal to publish a study done with strict methodological protocols comparing weight loss at 3 months, 6 months and one year after treatment. Her study includes the three groups of patients mentioned above, with all of the patients taken to the operating room for either imaginary surgery or real surgery.
How Maya Mazrahi is performing her hypnotic induction
Maya Mizrahi takes all her patients to the operating room. The patients need to be fasting since midnight, the day before “surgery”. The day of “surgery”, they are welcomed by a medical student. They put on a surgical gown and an “IV” without any needle is placed on their arm.
Maya starts her hypnotic intervention on the gurney going to the operating room (OR), asking patients to focus on the ceiling lights of the corridor leading to the OR.
Once the patients arrive in the OR, they transfer from the gurney to the operating table, EKG leads are placed on their chest, a blanket covers their body, a pulse oximeter is placed on their finger, blood pressure cuff on their arm, intermittent pneumatic compression devices are placed on their legs, an antiseptic solution is rubbed on their abdomen, then an explanation of how the scalpel and other surgical instruments will be used is described to the patients.
When this is done and the patient is attached to the beeping monitor, an oxygen mask is placed on their mouth and nose and the imaginary surgery starts with Maya describing during the 50 minutes of hypnotic trance every step of the imaginary surgery from the initial incision to the final staples.
The patients who had surgery before are being told the precise details they have remembered from their previous real surgery.
The patients who never had bariatric surgery are told general details of a sleeve gastrectomy.
Maya says: “This combination of details gives the brain a powerful sensation through all the senses and thus strengthens the placebo effect of the simulated surgery.”
After the surgery, every patient is transferred to the recovery room then discharged with two days of liquid diet , then one week of pureed food, then small quantities of solid foods.
Pre-surgical and post-surgical psychological sessions are done.
Two sessions are done before surgery where Maya evaluates if the patient is a candidate for hypnotic surgery. If the patient had bariatric surgery before, the patient is asked to recall every detail he or she remembers from that surgery. The patient is also asked to project him or herself in the future to imagine how they will be after the “surgery.”
Post surgical psychological follow-up is done in person one week after, one month after, then 6 months after real or imaginary surgery, with possible sessions in between as needed and self-hypnosis practice explained. There are also once a month phone calls where patients are taught how to control their body, mind and what food they put on their plate .
Finally, measurements of blood samples are performed before and after the intervention, in order to discover if “ appetite ” hormones such as ghrelin and leptin are influenced by the hypnotic intervention.
Preliminary results at 3 months
The real surgical group has only 14 patients out of 20 so far, and the results will be analyzed when that group will be complete.
The two other groups are complete and that part of the research is closed.
The preliminary results are promising: Out of 41 patients receiving hypnotic imaginary surgery, 86 percent have lost weight after three months. Sixty five percent of those who had surgery previously, and 55 percent of those who never had bariatric surgery have lost more than 20 percent of their excess weight.
Hypnotized patients lost 5 to 20 percent of their weight at 3 months, an average of 10 percent weight loss.
Important comments by Maya Mizrahi
Maya said: “Hypnosis for weight loss is not new, I didn’t invent it. What is new is that I take people to a real operating room and I trigger sensorial stimulations of a real surgery during the hypnotic trance.”
“The brain doesn’t know how to distinguish between reality and imagination ,” Maya observed, “so a situation is created whereby the brain ‘believes’ that the body is undergoing the operation and thus activates the desired feelings of satiety, self-control , and motivation for change.”
This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.