Hannah was living in the U.K. and watching her weight climb. “My weight had been an issue for years. And stress was always behind it,” she says. She tried a full life makeover by moving to New Zealand and taking up a new job. But within four years, the stress was back. “The work wasn’t ideal, and I was living a life that wasn’t suited to me.”
As Hannah continued to gain weight, she began to develop other problems that go hand in hand with chronic stress. She contracted a lung infection, she couldn’t sleep, and she began having symptoms of lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
Understandably, Hannah succumbed to depression. Then, in 2009, she discovered visualization through the Gabriel Method. “I felt the stress easing almost immediately,” she says. Even though she remained in the same job, Hannah began sleeping better. Eight months later, her lung problems cleared up, the autoimmune symptoms disappeared, and her stress levels were under control. Hannah also managed to shed 30 pounds. Now, four years later, Hannah has kept the weight off. Even better, she’s managed to control her stress and prevent it from forcing her body to pile on pounds.
CAN STRESS REALLY MAKE YOU FAT?
Stress raises blood pressure, causes cold sweats, and keeps us up at night. But does it really pack on the pounds? Without question, according to nearly 80 years of research. As far back as 1936, in the science journal Nature, researchers reported that rats that were placed in stressful situations gained weight—especially fat—compared with rats who weren’t exposed to any stress at all, even though both groups of rats consumed the same amount of calories.1
Much more recently, researchers at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, tried feeding monkeys a typical modern American diet. In groups, monkeys tend to have a well-defined social order, so the researchers watched how all the monkeys fared on the diet, with a special focus on those with lower social status. The idea being that the monkeys with lower social status experience more stress. While all the monkeys gained weight on the diet, the primates who were low in the pecking order put on many more pounds than those with the most social status. And the weight they gained tended to accumulate around the midsection.2
In 2009, a landmark study from Harvard Medical School clearly implicated chronic stress as a source of weight gain in humans. Stress researchers tracked 1,355 men and women for nine years, carefully recording their weight along with various types of pressure. They looked at finances, relationships, work—they recorded every potential stressor and compared them to the volunteers’ weights. By the end of the study, the researchers had found that chronic stress could add 10 to 20 pounds on average. For men and women, the factors most strongly linked to weight gain included having little authority at work, little control over decision making, and a job that was too demanding. Difficulty paying bills was also linked to stress-related weight gain. In addition, women added pounds when their stress stemmed from feeling trapped in their lives or in strained marriages.3
STRESS ALTERS THE WAY YOU EAT
Battling constant stress spurs unhealthy eating, researchers have found. At the University of California in San Francisco, stress researcher Elissa Epel discovered that people have cravings for junk food when they’re feeling pressure. Epel queried 59 women about stress levels in their lives and rated the quantity of daily stress they experienced. Women who were among the most stressed not only had more abdominal fat than women who were less stressed, but they were also far more likely to seek out foods that are high in fat and starch, such as donuts, french fries, and other types of junk food.4
So stress leads to hormonal changes that cause weight gain. And being overweight can cause stress, leading to even more weight gain. This is a vicious cycle that adds more and more pounds. Unfortunately, the next step most people take makes things even worse: they go on a diet. And as you already know, dieting just plunges your body into a state where it holds on to weight. Restricting calories just leads your body to produce more of the stress hormone cortisol, makes you hungrier, and eventually creates more weight gain when you succumb to your cravings. At the University of Pennsylvania, Tracy Bale, Ph.D., tracked eating behaviors, hormones, and genetic changes in mice on a restricted-calorie plan. After just three weeks, the mice not only had higher levels of cortisol, as Bale expected, but their basic DNA was altered in genes that regulate stress and eating. Next, Bale put the diet group in stressful situations. The mice preferentially went for higher-calorie chow compared with mice that ate regular meals. Bale concluded that dieting actually reprograms how the brain responds to stress, pushing the dieter to make high-calorie, unhealthy choices despite their best intentions.5
THE VICIOUS CYCLE
The research surrounding the impact of the daily grind on our bodies is clear: we’re stuck in a vicious cycle of stress, weight gain, stress, dieting, more stress, and even more weight gain. Focusing too much on these study results could leave you feeling hopeless, as if you’re in an uncontrollable downward spiral.
But there is hope. You hold the key to breaking that cycle. Before you can use that key, you’ll need to understand a bit more about how your brain and body work.
By now, you know that stress raises levels of the hormone cortisol and other stress-related and inflammatory hormones. This triggers your FAT programs, those evolution-derived processes that your body developed to help keep you alive and safe but now seem to conspire to make you fat. The problem is that your survival brain can’t accurately evaluate the type of threat you’re facing. It doesn’t know that your daily worries are about your boss or your spouse; it has no idea that a scarcity of food is a result of a diet plan, not a famine. Your survival brain reacts to cortisol and other stress hormones, and it responds in the only way it knows how.
When you’re under chronic stress, pro-inflammatory cytokines—a group of hormones—begin to circulate, putting your immune system on high alert and raising your risk of autoimmune diseases such as diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis. Blood fats known as triglycerides rise, and they can increase the risk of heart disease. Levels of C-reactive protein, a marker for inflammation throughout the body, climb. The result of these changes is that your brain becomes much less sensitive to leptin (as we discussed in Chapter 1) and insulin, another hormone that helps regulate fat.
Insulin is the fat-making hormone, so, as you can imagine, this plays a big role in your FAT programs. As your resistance to insulin increases, your levels of the hormone rise. That equals trouble because insulin helps convert the food you digest into fat, which is then sent to long-term fat storage centers, such as your stomach, hips, and thighs. One of the factors in obesity that researchers are only just beginning to wrestle with is that not all overweight people eat more than normal weight people. One of the problems behind weight gain is that an overweight person’s body is programmed to convert calories to fat and pack it away thanks to insulin resistance: you could be eating next to nothing yet still be adding pounds because your high levels of insulin are converting all available energy into fat.
When you look closely at the physiology behind weight gain, you begin to see that, ultimately, it’s not a problem of overeating. Diet experts and nutritionists have been declaring that weight is all about “calories in versus calories out.” They claim that if you eat more calories than you burn, you’ll gain weight. But let’s face it—if dieting worked, there’d be one diet, everyone would be on it, everyone would lose weight, and that would be the end of it. There wouldn’t be hundreds of diets out there all offering different slants on the same flawed premise that you can somehow force yourself to lose weight against your body’s will and keep it off.
No, weight isn’t only an eating problem: it’s also very much stress related.
THE STRESS SOLUTION
Finding peace in our hectic world might seem like a crazy dream, but it’s possible. Whether you’re looking to manage stress at home or at work, or to find relief from the daily pressures of paying bills and commuting, visualization can help.
Helene was struggling with an underactive thyroid brought on by constant stress. She had been working with her doctors to treat her thyroid and was having little success. Her weight had climbed during this time, as well. Then she discovered visualization through the Gabriel Method. “I finally stopped fighting my thyroid condition and realized that my real problem was stress,” she says. Helene began doing the nightly visualizations, and the stress began melting away. “I had started a new job. And I had left my husband, who wasn’t really the right life partner for me, but I felt a lot of guilt and stress about that decision.” Although these stressful life changes had crippled Helene, through regular visualization she felt that she was able to find her own true self again. “I surrendered to the complications in my life, and to my thyroid problems, and accepted them as part of me.”
After visualization paved the way to this acceptance, Helene’s thyroid problems cleared up. Then her weight began coming off. “I can’t believe how simple it has been, and how peaceful I feel,” she says.
Helene tapped into a tool for deep relaxation that’s been well tested against stress. When you visualize with the Gabriel Method, you’re doing a form of meditation. We use guided imagery to put you in a meditative state before we even start the visualization. So, in addition to the visualization, you also get all the generic stress-reduction benefits of meditation.
The research on mind-body techniques such as meditation and visualization has been so conclusive that most major health organizations now recommend using them to manage stress. In some of the most trying environments, these methods have helped people relax. In 2013, a Dutch study at Tilburg University tracked 88 highly stressed people as they took math and speech tests. The idea was to put these people in high-pressure situations and monitor their heart rates, blood pressure, and cortisol. Half of the volunteers then took classes in guided-imagery meditation; then the entire group took the tests again. The guided-imagery meditators managed to cut their stress response dramatically compared with the other group. The guided-imagery group’s blood pressure remained steady during the exam, and they had lower levels of cortisol.6
Nursing is a profession that regularly turns up on lists of the most stressful jobs. Nurses are directly responsible for the lives of their patients, yet they don’t have complete control over their patients’ treatments. When you combine high risks and minimal decision-making power, you get the perfect recipe for creating intense internal pressure. Australian researchers at the University of Technology in Sydney decided to see what guided-imagery meditation could do for nurses and midwives at local hospitals. They asked 40 midwives and nurses to complete a one-day workshop on guided-imagery meditation, and then to practice daily sessions for eight weeks. By the end of the study, the nurses who were using guided-imagery meditation had cut their scores on stress tests by half or more.7
Visualization works its magic by addressing the very core of your stress, a structure in your brain called the amygdala. When you’re under chronic stress, the brain produces chemical messengers called catecholamines that head straight for the amygdala; this structure plays a major role in generating emotions, according to neuroscientists. In a stressful situation, the catecholamines direct the amygdala to produce emotions of fear and worry. In 2013, German and U.S. brain researchers working together found that guided-imagery meditation could alter the amygdala’s response to stress. The researchers asked 15 patients with anxiety disorders to commit to two months of daily guided-imagery sessions while another 11 patients received standard stress advice (go to bed early, try to exercise more, etc.). As a comparison, the researchers also tracked 26 volunteers with no stress disorders. Before, during, and after the study, the researchers used MRI scans to measure brain activity in the volunteers.
Initially, the researchers found that the people with anxiety disorders had much higher activity in the amygdala even in neutral, or nonstressful, situations when compared with the healthy participants. But after two months, the researchers discovered that in both stressful and nonstressful situations the guided-imagery group had much calmer amygdalae. In other words, faced with the same stress that activated strong fear at the beginning of the study, the guided-imagery group had gained control over their anxiety. The other groups saw no such benefit. The researchers marveled that the patients had “changed the [brain] areas crucial for the regulation of emotion.”8 They had essentially reprogrammed their amygdalae to react differently to stress.
When you calm down your response to stress, you also reduce the flow of stress hormones and pro-inflammatory cytokines, according to U.S. researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They analyzed the ebb and flow of cortisol and various cytokines before and after volunteers completed an eight-week course in guided-imagery meditation. Sure enough, the mind-body technique slowed the release of cortisol and pro-inflammatory cytokines compared with the group that didn’t practice these techniques. What’s more, the guided-imagery group reported feeling much less distress and fewer of the physical symptoms often associated with stress. The researchers concluded that guided-imagery meditation could “be of therapeutic benefit in chronic inflammatory conditions.”9 That includes the most troubling chronic inflammatory condition—your FAT programs.
REDUCE STRESS, REDUCE YOUR SIZE
Now, you’re wondering, can alleviating the chronic stress of your daily grind really lead to weight loss? The answer is yes. Weight researchers at the University of California in San Francisco set up a study to directly address the question of whether mind-body practices alone could produce weight loss. They recruited 47 overweight and obese women to learn yoga, meditation, guided imagery, and visualization—specifically how to visualize love for themselves and forgiveness toward others. The researchers took note of the women’s eating behaviors, weights, stress levels, and cortisol levels. The one thing the researchers did not ask the women to do was restrict their calories. After four months, the women were brought back in for more testing. Not surprisingly, the volunteers reported less stress and a greater sense of contentment. They also felt more in control of their eating; women who were obese had demonstrably lower levels of cortisol. But the biggest finding was that the researcher linked reduced stress, cortisol, and increased mindfulness to a significant loss in abdominal fat. The women lost weight—especially in the belly—without limiting their calories.10
The idea that taming stress can shed pounds isn’t shocking to Veronica. “I went from 238 pounds to 130 just by doing the evening Gabriel Method visualization,” she says. “I was in a constant swirl of stress and anxiety about my weight and my life. Now I look better, I sleep better, and I trust myself.” Veronica’s also making better food choices, just like the women in the study.
You can easily take advantage of what Veronica and the volunteers in the studies above have learned. When you practice the visualization below—or any of the other visualizations in this book—you will be rewiring your brain chemistry and your thought patterns. You’ll be moving away from fear, stress, and weight gain, and toward feelings of calmness, connectedness, and safety. You’ll allow your brain and your biology to relax and let go of stress-related weight.
SIMPLE VISUALIZATION FOR REDUCING STRESS
While in SMART Mode (see THE OCEAN OF LIGHT VISUALIZATION FOR GETTING INTO SMART MODE), imagine every cell of your body saying at the same time the following words:
Calm, calm, calm, I am calm.
Safe, safe, safe, I am safe.
Peace, peace, peace, I am at peace.
Love, love, love, I am loved.
Supported, supported, supported, I am supported.
You have approximately 60 to 70 trillion cells in your body; just imagine all of them saying these words in unison. Then imagine the stress just melting off your body and falling into the earth. Or envision a slight breeze that just blows off any residual stress that’s inside your body. Then picture a current of healing light entering your body and washing away any stress, cares, or concerns. Imagine any excess weight you have on your body melting away also, and you standing there in your most perfect, ideal weight and body shape, feeling strong, confident, secure, relaxed, healthy, vibrant, fit, and at peace with your world.
Any of the visualizations you practice in this book will help you reduce stress. Simply practice them for a few minutes a day, and you will quickly start to become aware of a calmness that permeates your entire day, alleviating the stress response that was causing so many weight problems.
While it’s important to understand that general stress can encourage weight gain, I’ve also found it extremely helpful to look at one particular form of stress that makes the body want to hold on to weight: fear. Sometimes fear can actually prevent weight loss because it makes the mind look at weight as a form of protection. That is, for some of us, fat can actually make us feel safer in an “unsafe” world.