Visualization for Weight Loss

Cravings are all anyone ever wants to talk about when they are on a diet or weight loss program. I personally place little emphasis on resisting cravings, because I know that the cravings are always a symptom, never the cause of the problem. For example, if you’re craving potato chips, it can mean that your body actually needs more healthy fats and trace minerals. Sugar cravings typically mean that you’re insulin resistant and have lost the ability to regulate your blood sugar properly. You can become insulin resistant from being nutritionally starved or from chronic stress.

Learning how to manage your stress and nourish your body properly will go a long way toward making those cravings disappear. I’ve seen it happen thousands of times: after beginning to work with visualization, clients say, “I just don’t crave sweets anymore.” It makes perfect sense. When you take an inside-out approach to weight loss, you’re changing your body on a cellular and chemical level, so the cravings are being eliminated from their source.

If you’ve already started practicing daily visualizations, you may find your attraction to junk food and sweets diminishing on its own. As your FAT programs begin to shut down, high-calorie, high-fat foods begin to seem less appealing. Following the inside-out approach to weight loss naturally triggers a desire for healthier foods. You won’t crave those extreme flavor blasts of tooth-aching sweetness and mouth-puckering saltiness. Once your brain accepts that it’s time to get thinner, you’ll naturally crave high-nutrient, sensible foods like fresh produce, nuts and seeds, sprouted beans—foods that at one point you may have thought you could never crave will suddenly seem very appealing.

The reason you’ll be drawn to healthier food is that your body is trying to lose weight. It wants to be thinner, and as your cells become more sensitive to leptin and insulin, you’ll feel full sooner. Your urges will automatically steer you toward healthier foods—the ones that give you the highest-quality bang for your nutritional buck.

However, we all have weaknesses, and it just so happens that visualization is extremely effective for killing junk food cravings and food addictions. So if you don’t want to wait for the inside-out approach to naturally dissolve your junk food cravings, you can use specific visualization techniques to accelerate the process.

At the moment you might feel that certain foods “have power” over you. You might lose control at the sight of chocolate cake. Other people might be brought to their knees by a pint of cookie-dough ice cream. Maybe salty snacks are your weakness, with BBQ potato chips and french fries singing a constant siren song in the back of your mind. Whatever your nutritional Achilles’ heel might be, visualization can help bring it under control.

My weakness as a young teenager was sugar. While I wasn’t heavy yet—not like I was later, when I was working on Wall Street—I was a pudgy kid, and I was particularly attracted to sugar. I’d ladle it onto my breakfast cereal, sprinkle it on waffles, and even sneak it out of the bowl by the spoonful.

About the time I was realizing that I needed to do something about my sugar habit, my aunt came to visit my family in Philadelphia. I was serving her some coffee, and I asked her how much sugar she wanted. She said, “I don’t take sugar.” I was surprised. Nearly every adult I knew put sugar in their coffee. (A “regular coffee” in that part of the world means you want it with cream and sugar.)

I had to ask my aunt again, “You don’t have sugar in your coffee?” She replied that she didn’t eat sugar at all, period. I was stunned. How could she never eat sugar? The concept seemed so foreign to me. But I began to wonder, could I give up sugar? I asked my aunt how she had accomplished this incredible feat, and she explained that she had done it through visualization. A light went on for me, because I was able to control my migraines with the same method. Could visualization actually help me conquer my sugar cravings, as well?

My aunt let me in on the secret of how she beat her sugar cravings. During visualization, while in a deep meditative state, she imagined that sugar granules were actually little pieces of ground glass. I tried it immediately. I began my visualization by slowly calming my mind and sliding down into a suggestive mental state; then I pictured what would happen if I put these sugar granules—which were ground glass—in my mouth. They were tasteless. Worse, they would cut up my mouth and destroy my insides. I was repulsed.

After a few days of doing this visualization, I didn’t want sweets at all. The effect was so strong that I didn’t eat sugar for almost 12 years. I couldn’t even look at a donut. If I walked by a bakery, I’d get nauseous. Just like that, the craving was gone. I had artificially created an aversion that—to my brain—seemed very real.

This approach has worked for countless Gabriel Method participants. Nicole had struggled with her cravings for decades when she finally discovered visualization. Once she forged a connection between chocolate—her weakness—and stinky, foul mud, her desire soon abated. “I was amazed that my cravings disappeared in just two weeks.”

Meredith began getting results even faster. “After just three days, my cravings are changing,” she said. “I don’t want sugar anymore, and that’s amazing for me.”

In 2005, researchers at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, recruited 130 students and asked them to imagine eating a favorite food. The researchers really put the students through their paces by making them remember in detail every aspect of the food. If the student was imagining sitting down to a steak, he would picture the sizzle, the texture, the smell, and, of course, the taste. As the students recalled their indulgence, they rated what made them most crave the food: Was it the taste? The smell? Or was it the mental image of the food that triggered their desire? When the researchers went over the students’ responses, they found that mental images were by far the most powerful driver of cravings. A vivid mental picture increased the intensity of desire much more than memories of taste or smell did.¹

The Australian researchers concluded that the most effective way to battle unwanted food cravings would be to interfere with that compelling mental image. They decided to try distracting volunteers to lessen cravings and help them avoid obsessing over a food. In a subsequent study, the researchers had 50 women perform distracting tasks while they pictured the foods that they craved. The women would look at abstract images, for example, or tap an imaginary line in front of their faces with their fingers to avoid focusing on the food.

The distractions worked well: the women reported that temptation was less of an issue when they used these techniques.² However, the distractions only served to tone down the effect of the image, not eliminate it—or better yet—render it undesirable. That’s where visualization comes in.

Consider this for a moment. If you tell yourself that chocolate cake is bad, and that you shouldn’t eat it, what happens? All you can do is picture that chocolate cake and you start salivating. As the Australian researchers found, picturing the cake is the single worst thing you can do if you’re trying to resist temptation. The image of that cake makes you want it so much more.

Trying to rely on willpower to resist your cravings will only make the food that much more desirable. That’s where the term forbidden fruit originates. You just end up magnetizing your attraction and desire for the very food you’re trying to avoid. Trying to tell your brain to ignore it won’t work for long. After all, your survival brain doesn’t respond to verbal commands. You need images to get through to it. And if you choose the right images, not only can you convince your survival brain that the food is something to avoid, but you’ll actually be repulsed by the very food that once drove you crazy.

You can see how visualization grants you mastery over your cravings. But what about addictions? As a young teen, I also started smoking. But I was also an athlete. I played soccer and I was a ski racer. I began to see that smoking and sports were incompatible. Again, I thought I would try visualization. It had worked for my sugar cravings, after all. What if I could create a negative connection with tobacco that would eliminate my desire for cigarettes?

It actually turns out that food and drug cravings are not so different, as researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia discovered. In 2004, they asked volunteers to imagine their favorite foods—the foods they most often craved—while undergoing an MRI of the brain. The researchers discovered that picturing the food activated the same brain structures that light up when addicted drug users imagine their vices.³ In fact, food and drug addictions are so similar that one research report recently found that cocaine and heroin are less addictive than Oreo cookies.⁴

But it turns out that visualization is an effective treatment for both. In a research report titled “A Study of Visualization and Addiction Treatment,” psychologist Kathryn Kominars, at Florida International University in Miami, tested visualization with 76 addicts over eight months. Kominars compared visualization with typical psychological education and counseling for addiction. She found that visualization could help addicts beat their problems and deal with the temptation as well—and in some cases better—than the standard treatment.⁵

That’s how I ended up kicking my cigarette addiction. After getting into my visualization, I pictured the tar and nicotine in tobacco as the same thing as the hot tar road crews use to repair asphalt. I imagined that the second I brought a cigarette to my mouth, it was full of that hot, stinky tar. If I inhaled it, I would be drawing that greasy tar deep into my lungs. The image was so repulsive that I was able to stop smoking the next day. I kept up the visualization for a few more weeks, and that was the end of my smoking habit.

From then on, if I touched a cigarette I would immediately get that association. If you ever question the power of these associations, just imagine taking a bite out of a sandwich and then noticing there are maggots crawling inside. You would immediately spit it out, and whatever was in that sandwich—turkey, ham, bologna—you would be so repulsed by it that it might take years before you’d feel comfortable eating that meat again. This actually happened to a friend of mine. She loved oysters in a tin and ate them frequently. But several years ago, she got a bad batch and became violently ill. To this day she can’t even look at oysters without getting an upset stomach.

So you can try imagining sugar as ground glass, bread full of maggots, or chocolate as mud. Be creative; the more repulsive the association, the more effective. I know a man who, as a child, ate a sandwich that someone had spit in without telling him. Once he found out, he couldn’t eat another sandwich for 30 years! From one extremely unpleasant association, he’s spent his entire adult life not eating bread. You can use the power of your mind in this way to create negative associations to problematic foods and addictions.

If you’re looking to beat a craving or tame an addiction, try the visualization below and come up with a truly disgusting image that you can associate with your problem. You’ll be surprised how fast you will be able to make dramatic changes.

While in SMART mode (see THE OCEAN OF LIGHT VISUALIZATION FOR GETTING INTO SMART MODE), imagine yourself about to eat the specific food you’d like to avoid. After you’ve taken a bite of the food, look at it and notice what’s different. Maybe it’s really mud and not chocolate; maybe there are maggots crawling around in it. Quickly spit out the mouthful and throw the food on the ground.

Feel every cell of your body saying at the same time, “This food is disgusting; it’s repulsive.”

Now imagine that you’re walking past a bakery or restaurant where you see this specific food and feel your stomach start to tighten and your body contract, and feel how every cell of your body is repulsed by the sight and smell of the food. See yourself quickly walking past the store in disgust.

Later, imagine you’re craving healthy, live, vibrant, nutritious foods. See yourself eating them and loving them. Feel every cell of your body delight at the taste and the nourishment you’re getting. See yourself getting fitter and healthier and more vibrant as the days go by and as you’re craving only real, live, healthy, nourishing foods. And see the weight effortlessly melting off your body.

Again this type of visualization doesn’t actually address the root causes of a problem. You may very well find that you won’t need this method because the other inside-out work you are doing will take care of your cravings or addictions. But this approach can be useful if you want to accelerate the changes you’re making or if you have a serious addiction that you’re battling to a food or drug. There’s no better way to kick a habit than being repulsed by the substance.