Visualization for Weight Loss

Extreme exercise programs have reached a new level of ridiculousness. If you’ve ever watched late-night TV infomercials, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Gone are the days of “8 Minute Abs”; today’s at-home fitness gurus now recommend one to two hours of grueling, military-style workouts that are painful just to watch. This “more is better” concept is meant to burn the maximum calories, but in reality it leaves most people intimidated, sore, exhausted, and hungry. Yes, that’s right. Extreme exercise often leaves you hungrier than when you started, which defeats the whole purpose!

Let me be clear here—exercise is wonderful. I love to swim in the ocean, race around on my bike, and chase my daughter in the park. But when I weighed more than 400 pounds, I’d break a sweat just trying to tie my shoes. The days when I forced myself to go to the gym and pedal for an hour on a stationary bike were excruciating and miserable, and they did nothing to help me lose weight.

Thankfully, visualization is a great way to regain your love of movement. Forget about treadmills and stair climbing: start by remembering and visualizing the physical activities that you used to love—or anything that excites you now. I’ve always loved cycling. While it was impossible for me to ride my bike at my top weight, as I dropped some pounds I was able to ride more and more. Even now, cycling remains one of my favorite activities. Maybe you’re excited by the idea of dancing, swimming, or hiking in the woods. Whatever it is you love (or used to love), focus on that, visualize it, and you’ll most likely find that you’ll start being more active naturally.

Gabriel Method student Desiree had given up trying to lose weight. She had yo-yo dieted to the point of absolute despair, and, as she put it, “I was either going to lose the weight or lose my life.” I knew exactly what she felt like, and I also knew that there was help.

Desiree was open-minded about my approach and right away committed to her nightly visualizations. Within weeks, she began making better food choices, like many people do, but more surprising to her was that exercise suddenly became fun and easy. After a month of visualization, Desiree started taking swimming lessons for the first time in her life—something she had always wanted to do but had never found the time or courage to pursue. To her own delight, she found she didn’t have to force herself to go to the pool. She actually looked forward to it, and it became the highlight of her day.

To date, Desiree has shed 119 pounds, and exercise has become a regular part of her life by choice, and it never feels like a chore or a workout. Like many Gabriel Method students, Desiree discovered that visualization can lead to a spontaneous interest in physical activities, even if you had previously lost all desire.

I’m not too surprised by Desiree’s success. As your FAT programs get turned off through visualization, you’ll naturally have more energy to be active. Remember, one of the chemical changes that takes place when you’re leptin resistant is that the brain sends fewer messages to the thyroid to produce thyroid hormones. This slows your metabolism and makes you feel tired and lethargic. That’s an intentional act on the part of the body to conserve calories. When your FAT programs are on, just the thought of exercise is exhausting. When I was overweight, walking up a flight of stairs seemed daunting.

However, as your chemistry changes, your thyroid speeds up and you have much more energy. Suddenly, the idea of being physically active is appealing. You’ll be drawn to activities that you loved as a child or that you are intrigued by as an adult.

Many of the people I speak with tell me how much they hate exercise. They groan if I even bring it up. But when we were children, we ran, we jumped, we chased balls, and we chased each other, without ever realizing we were “exercising.” Activity has gotten a bad rap because we’ve been told we must do it. And it has been stripped of its pleasure by so-called experts who want us do hours of mindless, repetitive, boring aerobic exercise.

You can recapture the joy you experienced as a child by visualizing an activity you once loved to do:

Once you’re in SMART Mode (see THE OCEAN OF LIGHT VISUALIZATION FOR GETTING INTO SMART MODE), picture yourself in your ideal body, toned and firm and strong and fast and lean. Feel the wind in your hair as you’re running to get the ball. Feel the sun on your shoulders, hear the ocean and birds, smell the salt air; use all your senses to really be in the scene, loving the feeling of being active and enjoying your fit, energetic body.

Try this at night before you go to bed or first thing in the morning—especially on days when you actually intend to be active. By visualizing the inherent fun in the activity of your choice, you’ll begin changing the dysfunctional belief that you don’t like movement and you’ll be creating and reinforcing powerful neural connections and associating the physical with fun, love, and joy.

Visualization doesn’t just help you find the joy in movement so you move more; it actually has the power to boost the quality and results of the exercise you are doing. Many professional athletes rely on visualization to reach and then remain at the top of their game. Golfing great Jack Nicklaus and gold-medal Olympic gymnast Mary Lou Retton both credit their success to visualization. Premier League soccer forward Didier Drogba visualizes his strikes in advance: “I actually think about the way I am going to score my goal,” he says. “When you get it in your head that you are going to score a certain kind of goal, it happens.”¹

Researchers have found that nerve receptors in your muscles actually fire when you visualize activity. In 2013, researchers at the University of Texas asked college students to imagine lifting a heavy weight with their right arms for a few minutes, five days a week. When the researchers monitored brain waves and muscle contractions, they found that the students’ brains were sending nerve impulses to muscles as if they were actually working their arms. After six weeks, the researchers measured the students’ right arm strength: they were 11 percent stronger, and the students hadn’t hefted a single dumbbell.²

Even when visualization is pitted against actual gym workouts, it fares well. Exercise psychologist Guang Yue at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio compared people who exercised at a gym with people who only visualized doing similar workouts. After three months, Yue discovered that the visualizers had increased their muscle strength by almost half as much (13 percent) as the gym-goers (30 percent).³ Again, the visualizers hadn’t lifted a single weight.

At the Gabriel Method, we avoid the word workout because it implies that we’re doing work to our outer body only—the stereotypical calorie-burning routine—which is ultimately pointless and rarely effective. Instead, I like to talk about “work-ins,” where we use specific types of exercise combined with visualization to create an internal shift in our biochemistry. Exercise done right shouldn’t feel like work. It should feel like play, and the changes that happen will be cumulative over time, creating a positive spiral of fitness in your life.

I came to realize from my own experience that activity should be fun. I couldn’t spend hours on treadmills or lifting weights. The repetition was just too boring; I wasn’t having fun. I suspect you may be like me in this. Don’t blame yourself if you dread going to the gym and trudging on a stair stepper. The evidence is piling up that steady-paced aerobic workouts are not only unhelpful; they may actually interfere with your weight loss. They can lead to a phenomenon known as “overtraining,” which creates a type of chronic stress in the body that can actually activate your FAT programs, just like so many other low-level chronic stresses. When it comes to boosting fitness and shedding pounds, quick bursts of activity—the kind you get when playing tennis or basketball, riding a bike up and down hills, or chasing and wrestling with your kids—can’t be beat.

Based on countless studies, health experts at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the American College of Sports Medicine now recommend against relying solely on steady-paced aerobic exercise to help you lose weight.⁴

There is a much better way to use exercise for weight loss. Shorter, more intense bursts of exercise activate your inside-out weight loss mechanisms, and research is very clear about this. Exercise scientists at McMaster University in Canada asked volunteers to alternate minute-long bouts of fast pedaling on a stationary bike with short periods of rest for 20 minutes. After doing this three times a week for two weeks, the volunteers had gained as much endurance as people who had spun the pedals at a moderate pace for an hour a day, five days a week.⁵ You’ll shed more fat this way, too. Canadian researchers found that just two weeks of interval training (this is the term for short-burst, high-intensity exercise) enabled women to burn 36 percent more fat.⁶ And a study from the United Kingdom revealed that just four to six 30-second sprints on a stationary bike boosted levels of human growth hormone 530 percent.⁷ Human growth hormone builds muscle and burns fat.

If you’re wondering whether this really leads to weight loss, the answer is yes: Australian researchers found that the women doing only 20 minutes of intervals lost almost six pounds on average without dieting, while women cycling at a moderate pace for 40 minutes actually gained weight.⁸

Although the studies on interval training required people to perform regimented timed bouts of sprinting and active rest, you don’t have to use a stopwatch and a heart-rate monitor to achieve these results. You can get the same effect by pursuing the activities you love. Most games have natural fast-paced and slow-paced rhythms. Bicycling on roads or hiking on trails requires intense effort going uphill and provide a chance to catch your breath when going downhill and on the flats. Most ball sports involve fast bursts, then rest, so do dancing, skiing, playing chase in the park with kids, or water sports like surfing, kayaking, kite surfing, and polo. In fact, most sports that are designed to be fun follow this pattern. So for me, when it comes to fitness, fun is really where it’s at.

There’s another reason the short-burst approach to exercise is so effective. Along with the FAT programs that force you to gain weight to help you endure long winters, you also have other survival programs in your brain that force you to lose weight—also for survival reasons. Basically, it’s a survival program that evolved to protect you from predators. I call it the “get-thin-or-get-eaten” adaptation.

If you were living outdoors thousands of years ago and a predator like a bear or tiger leaped out, you wouldn’t have been able to survive by going for a 40-minute power walk. You would need a full-out, life-or-death sprint. At that moment, you’d get a surge of adrenaline, and your muscles would demand more energy now. Together, this would signal to your survival brain that you’re living in an environment where you need to be lean, and it would respond by activating your get-thin-or-get-eaten adaptation. Your sensitivity to leptin would increase—and research demonstrates that short-burst exercise does in fact raise your leptin sensitivity—which in turn boosts your ability to burn fat and lose weight.

I experienced this in a very real way when I was about three-quarters through my weight loss journey. I was biking this beautiful route that followed winding, hilly dirt roads through vineyards. As I pedaled, I was musing about what might help take my progress to the next level. Suddenly, a dog came out of nowhere and started chasing me. I had to sprint for a mile or so with this beast barking and snapping a millimeter from my Achilles tendon.

I managed to escape without injury, but it took a while for my heart and breathing to return to normal. Then, over the next couple of weeks, I noticed a big change: without doing anything different, I began dropping weight like crazy!

My brush with the dog had activated my get-thin-or-get-eaten adaptation, and my survival brain took over. Although I wasn’t doing anything differently, I wasn’t as hungry and the weight was falling off. I began shedding pounds more rapidly because my body had made a primal association between being fast and thin and surviving.

Once I realized what had happened, I began to repeat the scenario that had given me such positive results. Whenever I got to that same place on my bike ride, I would stand and sprint while imagining that dog was chasing me. (I’m happy to say, I never saw the actual dog again.) The simulation worked as well as the real thing—my weight loss accelerated. In this way I learned to use visualization to activate the get-thin-or-get-eaten adaptation.

To get these effects for yourself, you don’t have to look for a dog to chase you. If you’re going for a walk or a bike ride, begin at a leisurely pace. Then, every once in a while, go as fast as you possibly can for 10 or 20 seconds while imagining that you’re being chased by something—like I did after my initial experience. Your survival brain doesn’t know the difference between real and imagined experiences. By planting the idea that you’re being chased, you’re convincing your survival brain that you’re actually being chased by a predator, and this activates the get-thin-or-get-eaten adaptation. If imagining a predator chasing you is too uncomfortable, just imagine you’re being chased by a friend but that you are determined to beat him at all costs. You’ll still get great results.

After a while of doing the visualization of being chased while I was biking, I decided to try an experiment. I took my visualization one step further and just imagined that I was riding my bike and that the dog was chasing me, without actually exercising at all. Remarkably, that worked, too! I went through a period of several weeks where I did no exercise at all. But as I was going to sleep at night, I visualized the scene of biking really hard with my trusty canine companion snapping at my heels. I imagined that I was in the best shape of my life and sprinting at a blinding pace. I saw myself easily outpacing the dog and even smiling because I was moving so fast and it was so easy to escape. During those several weeks of using only visualization, my fitness continued to improve, just as it did for the exercisers in the visualization studies.

In other words, because the survival brain can’t differentiate between a real and imagined experience, you can simply picture yourself sprinting and your chemistry will change as if you were actually being active.

You may be thinking, isn’t that stress, being chased by a dog? Isn’t stress bad for you? The answer is yes and no. From a weight loss perspective, it depends on what the stress is, how your body interprets the stress, and, most important, how your body adapts to the stress.

Our bodies are brilliantly designed to adapt to any stress in our environment. If the stress is a famine, the body turns on the FAT programs, making you insatiably hungry so you’ll gain more weight. Having extra weight on your body during times of famine is less stressful; the fat can help keep you alive. But if you’re being chased by a tiger—a different kind of stress—the brain will adapt by making you as thin and fit as possible to help you survive.

As a result, imagining you’re being chased can be an extremely powerful visualization technique. See yourself easily outrunning your pursuer and leaving the beast far behind you. Keep a smile on your face in the visualization. See your body as being strong and fast as the wind, so fast that nothing could ever catch you. And remember, if the predator chase is too much, too intense, you can always imagine being chased by a friend. These images will have the same effect of communicating to your survival brain that you need to be thin.

One last note: if you’re visualizing while exercising, remember that you shouldn’t do it daily. Overtraining, as I mentioned, can actually turn on your FAT programs. With a few sessions of activity a week combined with daily visualizations, you’ll tap into this powerful survival adaptation by convincing your body to want to be thin.

Visualization can help us reconnect with our bodies, but it also helps with something else that’s essential for weight loss, as we’ll talk about in the next chapter. It’s so essential that many researchers believe it’s the most crucial ingredient to health, happiness, and sustainable fitness: sleep.