LOSE WEIGHT FROM THE INSIDE OUT
Here’s a question for you: what do Albert Einstein, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, Thomas Edison, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Anthony Robbins all have in common? Besides being incredibly successful, they all credit a large part of their achievements to visualization. And it’s not just these few superstars. Tennis legend Billy Jean King was asked how she prepared mentally for a game. Her response—visualization. Nine-time gold-medal winner Carl Lewis would visualize himself winning before every race.
Visualization played a huge role in Jim Carrey’s career, too, as he explained in an interview: “Back when I was broke and poor, I would go up to Mulholland Park, and I would visualize things coming to me that I wanted. I had nothing at that time, but it just made me feel better. I actually wrote myself a check for $10 million for ‘acting services rendered.’ I dated it three years later. Just before the three years were up, I signed up to do Dumb and Dumber, and I was paid $10 million to play that role.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger also points to visualization as the reason for his achievements: “When I was very young I visualized myself being and having what it was I wanted. Mentally I never had any doubts about it. The mind is really so incredible. Before I won my first Mr. Universe title, I imagined myself walking around the tournament like I owned it. The title was already mine. I had won it so many times in my mind that there was no doubt I would win it. Then when I moved on to the movies, the same thing. I visualized myself being a famous actor and earning big money. I could feel and taste success. I just knew it would all happen.”
The list goes on and on. If you question the greatest in any field, from inventors to actors to athletes to politicians to businessmen, you’ll find the vast majority have learned to tap into the power of their minds and use visualization to create amazing success.
In my experience, visualization is most powerful when it comes to weight loss. I can really identify with Arnold’s words about how winning the Mr. Universe title in his mind meant he would actually win it for real. That’s exactly how I approached my weight problem. As I was losing weight, I spent so much time visualizing myself in perfect shape that I had no doubt it would happen. It felt real, I saw it clearly, and then it happened. While most of my friends and family were shocked by my success, it didn’t surprise me in the least.
The same is true for thousands of my clients all over the world. Sharon was completely bewildered by food choices. She’d tried a high-protein diet but got constipated and irritable. She tried going vegetarian but ended up eating too many grains and gaining even more weight.
“I had gotten to the point where it seemed like everything was bad for me except fruit and veggies,” Sharon said. It’s not uncommon for people to feel overwhelmed as they try to figure out what to eat and what to avoid. During our coaching sessions, Sharon wanted me to tell her exactly what to eat. She wanted a meal plan, but I encouraged her to take the focus off her eating and commit to a daily visualization practice. “Later, we’ll talk more about food,” I said. “Let’s first start with the mind, and then the body will follow.”
That’s the inside-out approach to weight loss that we use at the Gabriel Method. It doesn’t mean you’re going to instantly, magically lose weight eating pizza and chips to your heart’s content. But it does mean that by starting with the mind, certain subtle chemical changes will take place that will make you not want to gorge on junk food.
Reluctantly, Sharon agreed. She visualized herself being thin, picturing her ideal shape in a summer dress and sandals, walking along the beach. She imagined her hips and thighs thin and toned, the way they’d been in her early 20s, and she envisioned her chin and cheekbones sharp and pronounced as they’d been so many years ago.
Like I do with everyone, I asked Sharon to commit first to a daily evening visualization practice—nothing more. This evening visualization is one of the most popular visualizations we use at the Gabriel Method. You simply listen to it as you go to sleep at night. If you’d like to try it, you can download it for free at www.TheGabrielMethod.com/freecd.
The effects for Sharon were so immediate that she quickly started practicing in the morning, as well. “It’s amazing,” she told me on the phone after just eight days. “It’s as if my cells are tingling in delight! And when I go out to eat, or go to the grocery store, I feel drawn to healthy, wholesome foods.”
Sharon’s experience is not unique. Many people experience similar changes. And while there’s still a lot that science doesn’t understand about visualization, the evidence is slowly mounting that harnessing the power of your mind will do wonders for your weight loss.
HOW VISUALIZATION ALTERS YOUR DIET
The weight-regulating hormone leptin plays a huge role in how much you weigh, yet we didn’t even know leptin existed until 1994. It was discovered by Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman at Rockefeller University.
As Friedman and others found out, leptin is produced by fat cells, and it helps the brain keep track of how much fat is on your body. Like most hormones, which are the chemical messengers of the body, leptin enables one part of your body to communicate with another. When a hormone is produced by one cell, it travels through your bloodstream until it connects with another cell somewhere else in your body, causing that cell to perform a specific action.
Hormones allow your pancreas to communicate with your heart, your brain to “talk” to your stomach, your stomach to convey messages to your liver, and so on. If you imagine that your circulatory system is the Internet, then hormones are the e-mails.
LEPTIN—THE MASTER HORMONE
Leptin is the master hormone in charge of body weight. The more fat cells you have—or the bigger your fat cells are—the more leptin you produce. When you have high levels of leptin traveling through your bloodstream, your brain gets the message that you have plenty of fat on your body, and then you stop being hungry. You get the opposite signal if you have very little leptin in your bloodstream: eat more.
Should leptin levels rise, a normally functioning body will realize there’s too much fat on the body, and the brain will activate mechanisms that automatically trigger weight loss—and the operative word here is automatically. A healthy, functioning body that reacts to leptin as it should can lose weight effortlessly. Here’s how it works.
When your body is sensitive to leptin, the way it is in thin people, your brain sends a message to your thyroid to produce more thyroid hormones, and that revs up your metabolism. Suddenly, you won’t crave sweet foods as much and you’ll have more energy and burn more calories. What’s more, your brain starts tracking your food intake closely. Anytime you eat, your stomach produces hormones that indicate fullness; when your leptin levels are high, your brain becomes much more sensitive to these hormones, and you feel full much sooner.
Often, naturally thin people are active and seem to have lots of energy. You may notice sometimes they eat a lot and other times they may go all day without eating much. Or they may have all kinds of junk food on their plates and simply leave their plates half-full. That’s the sort of thing that used to drive me nuts when I had a weight problem.
I had a business partner who used to order a burger, fries, and a chocolate milkshake for lunch. He’d take a couple of bites of the burger, eat a few fries, and leave half the milkshake sitting there on his desk all afternoon! I couldn’t concentrate on my work. I kept thinking, If I could get my hands on that milkshake, I’d suck the whole thing down in 30 seconds and get a big old brain freeze. I was eating whatever low-fat, low-calorie, bland food I could find, based on whatever my diet du jour was. I’d eat everything on my plate as if it were my last meal, and he would be sitting there with a milkshake that was slowly, painfully melting all afternoon!
I’m sure you’ve been in a similar situation where maybe you’re having lunch with a “naturally thin” friend and she’ll leave half a piece of pizza on her plate. As she’s talking, you can’t concentrate on a word she’s saying, because you know that if that food were on your side of the table, it would be gone in an instant.
The reason your thin friend isn’t finishing her meal is because her chemistry is different. Her brain is more sensitive to the messages from her stomach. Leptin has changed the hormonal balance in her body so that she is full sooner, isn’t as hungry in the first place, and burns more calories throughout the day thanks to her higher metabolism.
Hearing this, you might think a leptin pill or injection that would raise your leptin levels could be a magical fix for obesity. That’s what many researchers speculated when Friedman first discovered how the hormone worked. To test leptin theory, mice were specially bred to be incapable of producing leptin; sure enough, these mice ate incessantly and grew to three times their normal size. Then the researchers gave the mice leptin injections. The results were just what the researchers had hoped: the more leptin they gave the mice, the more weight the mice lost.1
The next logical step was to give leptin to obese people. Sadly, the leptin had no effect. No matter how much of the hormone they gave overweight and obese people, they didn’t achieve any lasting weight loss success. Even more puzzling for the researchers was the fact that their overweight and obese subjects already had incredibly high levels of leptin in their bloodstreams. That makes sense when you think about it, though, because the more fat you have on your body, the higher your leptin levels will be. Overweight people always have high leptin levels, but they’re not losing weight. So what’s going on?
As the researchers eventually discovered, obese and overweight people have something called leptin resistance.2 This means that the brain is no longer listening to the hormone leptin. It’s the same as having no leptin at all; you just get fatter and fatter. The cells fail to respond to leptin’s message. To use the Internet analogy again, leptin is the e-mail, but the cells just are not reading them. The leptin e-mails are going into the spam folder.
With leptin resistance, even if you have 10, 50, 100, or 200 pounds of excess weight, your brain thinks you have zero fat on your body. And then what happens? Your brain forces you to eat large quantities of food—often high-fat, high-calorie food—so you can put more fat on your body. Then when you do eat these foods, your body makes sure that every extra ounce of food you ate, over and above what you actually needed to sustain yourself, gets stored as fat. Since everyone needs a certain amount of fat, your body is just working to get you to this healthy level—even though you’re already above it. That’s leptin resistance, and it’s a living nightmare from a weight management perspective. I’ve lived through that nightmare, and unfortunately millions of people around the world are now going through this.
How can communication in the body break down like this? Why won’t the brain respond to leptin and flip the fat-burning switch? You can blame it on evolution—and the wrong kind of stress.
FLIPPING THE LEPTIN SWITCH
In a research report on leptin from 2009, scientists at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge wrote that leptin plays a role in “powerful biological mechanisms that evolved to defend adequate nutrient supply and optimal levels of body weight/adiposity.”3 In other words, leptin resistance is something we evolved to help us gain weight for survival reasons.
Imagine living thousands of years ago during a long, hard, cold winter with barely anything to eat and no heating. That would be challenging, to say the least. It would be stressful. What would make that experience less stressful? More fat on your body. If you had more fat on your body, your organs would stay warmer and you could live off your fat stores until spring came. Fat is the body’s natural defense against cold winters and famines.
Being in a famine or being out in the cold for days on end are particular types of stress that trigger specific chemical patterns in your body. These chemical changes are designed to make the brain resistant to leptin because being leptin resistant is the best way to force your body to gain weight.
That’s all well and good when you’re in a famine, but why do we get leptin resistance today when we live in a world of temperature-controlled environments and all-you-can-eat excess? The reason is because leptin resistance is triggered by a very particular type of stress: a chronic low-grade inflammatory type of stress.
We may not have to worry about famine and freezing anymore, but we still have stress. In fact, we have many more types of stress than we once did. We’ve got mental stress, emotionally traumatic experiences, toxins, processed foods, inflammatory medications, sleep disorders, digestion problems, nutritional starvation, sleep deprivation, and, last but not least, the stress of calorie-restrictive dieting. All of these can cause chemical changes in your body that are similar to the stress of a famine or a cold winter. Because these stresses produce hormonal signals that are so similar to that of a famine, our brains basically get tricked into activating the leptin-resistance survival program. So, in essence, the stresses in our lives are tricking our bodies into “wanting” to gain weight for survival reasons.
Your brain can’t distinguish between the chronic stress of a long, cold winter and the day-in, day-out stress of trying to make ends meet, having an abusive boss, or dealing with other traumas in your life. You may not be facing a famine, but when you wake up every day dreading your job or dealing with a relationship gone sour, for example, the same stress channels are activated, and you develop leptin resistance.
WHY DIETS DON’T WORK
Once you understand leptin resistance, it becomes startlingly clear why diets don’t work. Restrictive dieting mimics a famine. As you’re starving yourself and fighting cravings left and right, you’re creating the same chemistry in your body as if you were in an actual famine: your survival programs kick in and you become leptin resistant. The result is that you’re hungry all the time, you’re tired, and you probably dislike exercise. These survival programs are also why you might lose weight in the short term but eventually regain the weight plus more.
I call this survival mode the FAT—famine and temperature—program. The measures your body takes when faced with a shortage of food or with cold winters, such as leptin resistance, were originally designed to keep you alive. Now, they just make you fat.
Dieting is particularly harmful when your FAT programs are activated. Think of it this way: The part of your brain in charge of your FAT programs is called your hypothalamus, which is also known as your survival brain. Your survival brain is doing everything it can to conserve calories and build up fat stores. Some stress in your life is causing hormonal signals that activate your FAT programs. Then you decide to diet and start forcing yourself to eat less. Now you really are creating a famine. It’s a self-induced dietary famine, but a famine nonetheless. This just reinforces your body’s mistaken notion that you need to hold on to weight for survival reasons, and your FAT programs accelerate, making the body want to hold on to weight even more.
You hear it from dieters all the time: “Once I began dieting, I became so much hungrier. All I could think about was food.” Well of course. Your survival brain is hell-bent on keeping you alive, and in its primal understanding, it thinks that eating as much high-calorie food as possible is the best way to keep you safe. The research report on leptin resistance from the Pennington Biomedical Research Center puts it this way: “Food restriction and fat depletion thus lead to a ‘hungry’ brain, preoccupied with food.”4 Essentially, successful dieting only makes you more likely to fail and gain weight. Faced with scarcity, your survival brain panics and takes more extreme measures to conserve fat. Remember, it thinks it’s helping you survive.
Dieting isn’t the only thing that can activate your FAT programs as we just mentioned: lots of chronic, modern-day stresses can flip the switch and cause leptin resistance, and we’ll talk about all of them in the coming chapters. There are certainly things you can do with food to help address some of these issues. But those steps will be infinitely easier and yield far better results once you address some of the other stresses triggering your FAT programs. When you practice visualizations, your brain gets rewired for calmness instead of stress, and this reduces the inflammatory hormones that cause leptin resistance and activate the FAT programs.
We’ll cover nutrition in depth in Chapter 14. For now, just a quick note; as a rule of thumb man-made foods usually cause leptin resistance and “real” foods usually help reverse leptin resistance and turn off the FAT programs. What do I mean by real foods? Imagine you were stranded on a tropical island—what would you eat? All the food naturally found on that island would be nourishing and would not cause excessive blood sugar spikes or inflammation. Real food includes organic, grass-fed, and free-range animal protein, raw nuts and seeds, leafy salad greens, veggies, fruits, and herbs. There are certainly exceptions to the “real food” rule, and we’ll cover all that. In the meantime, try to add as much real food as possible to your meals right now.
Don’t adopt a restrictive diet or count calories, but do try to eat as much of these types of food as you want. And if you’re craving other foods, go ahead and indulge in them for now. You may not lose weight immediately, but as you listen to the visualizations and address some of the stresses that are setting off your FAT programs, your chemistry will change, and you’ll find that you’re drawn to healthier foods. You won’t feel that overwhelming desire to stuff yourself with high-calorie junk. Instead, your balanced body chemistry will direct you to high-nutrient, high-quality foods, and you’ll feel the desire to eat them in healthy amounts.
If you’re currently on a restrictive diet, don’t make too many changes initially, because you’ll suffer a rebound once you stop restricting yourself. But over a few months, once you’re no longer as hungry, you’ll be able to transition off your diet and develop more natural eating habits. As I’ve said, once the body wants to be thin, weight loss happens more easily. But it can take some time to get to that place.
When you do get to the place where your body wants to let go of excess weight, losing it becomes virtually automatic. You simply crave less food, your metabolism speeds up, and you become more efficient at burning fat. Your body becomes more sensitive to leptin and other fat-regulating hormones. You become like those naturally thin people, have lots of energy, keep your blood sugar stable for hours at a time, go long periods of time without being hungry, and feel full much sooner.
This is the value of the inside-out approach to weight loss. By fixing the chemical imbalances within your body starting with the mental and emotional stresses, you’ll naturally start to make better food choices.
Now that you understand why dieting doesn’t work, and the importance of taking an inside-out approach to weight loss, let’s look a bit more closely at why visualization does work.