How Visualization Helped Me Lose 220 Pounds
You’ve picked up this book for one reason: you’ve tried to lose weight and it didn’t work. You probably think you’ve failed at dieting. You might think you failed the fitness trainers and doctors who have given you so much advice over the years. At this point, you almost certainly feel disappointed in yourself. Before we go any further, let me set the record straight. You didn’t fail on those diets; those diets failed you.
The statistical reality is that restrictive dieting never works in the long term. If it did, we’d all look fabulous and no one would ever have to write another book on weight loss. Instead, month after month, some new diet appears, promising to unlock the secrets to shedding “10 Pounds in 10 Days” or “Burning Fat Like Magic!” No doubt, the authors and experts behind these programs have the best of intentions, but all diets are created around the same flawed premise that the only way to lose weight is through force, willpower, and restriction. Basically, you end up going to war with your body, fighting cravings night and day, and hoping against hope that you can somehow keep the struggle up for the rest of your life. The sad reality is that all diets have failure built into their very design.
Simply put, restrictive dieting doesn’t address the real issues of why we gain weight in the first place, so it doesn’t cure the problem. Sure, you can force yourself to lose weight in the short term by cutting calories or avoiding problematic foods. But if your body is forcing you to eat more or craving all the wrong foods, you end up fighting your body. Sooner or later, your body will win. You can control what you eat for a while, but you can’t control how hungry you are or what types of foods you’re craving. If you don’t get to the heart of the problem, your body will undermine your efforts by making you insatiably hungry for all the wrong foods.
Rather than working against your body, there’s another solution that is extremely effective: you can use visualization to get your mind and body to work together. It’s an approach that’s accessible to anyone with an open mind. The method presented in this book is a complete paradigm shift that delivers phenomenal results, and you won’t have to struggle or deprive your body in any way. You’re about to learn a holistic, mind-body approach that makes weight loss not only possible but actually easy and sustainable. Step-by-step, I’m going to teach you how to work with your body, rather than against it, to totally transform yourself from the inside out.
Why should you listen to me? I used to weigh 409 pounds. I was morbidly obese, my health and life were at risk, and the only thing I knew for sure was that I needed to find a solution. With my background in biology and extreme personal motivation, I became a fanatical biomedical researcher. During an 11-year period, I tried every diet—from low fat to no fat, from high protein to low carb, and everything in between—I tried them all.
I worked face-to-face with the late Dr. Robert Atkins (of Atkins Diet fame), who had me eating bacon and eggs for breakfast, steak and sour cream for dinner; in the end, when I failed to lose weight on his program, the best he could do was yell at me for being so fat. I went on to try the low-fat, high-carb approach under the supervision of the highly acclaimed medical team at the Pritikin Institute in California. When their whole-grain approach also failed to fix my problem, instead of throwing in the towel, I became even more fixated on finding the solution. I became a serial diet junkie.
I met with doctors, naturopaths, homeopaths, personal trainers, and nutritionists—and still no one seemed to understand that I was struggling with something much more complex than simply restricting portions or committing to an exhausting gym routine. No one seemed to understand that my body was fighting me tooth and nail, and the only tools available were no match for my cravings.
Every diet or approach I tried followed the same pattern. There was a list of “bad foods,” things I couldn’t eat, and I’d avoid them like poison. Then there were “good foods,” the stuff I was allowed to eat freely, so I’d fill my fridge and my stomach with those approved items, trusting that as long as I did my part and followed the program, it would work. But it didn’t. It never works.
The pattern was the same every time. I’d lose some weight initially, but after a few weeks (or a few months) on the program, my intense food cravings would completely take control, and I’d have a huge binge. Within days, I’d gain back all the lost weight; worse still, I would invariably gain a few extra pounds, adding insult to injury. This binge-purge, yo-yo cycle went on for more than a decade. It was one of the most difficult times of my life. When I hit my heaviest, my weight had become a debilitating problem in every area of my life.
Intuitively, I knew I had to address the real reasons my body was forcing me to gain weight. I just didn’t understand why I constantly wanted more food than I needed or why I was so exhausted all the time and why I craved junk food night and day. So out of sheer desperation, I started using the mind-body practice of guided-imagery visualization. As a kid I’d experienced great results using visualization to resolve other challenges in my life, so I figured, why not? I had nothing to lose. Who would have guessed that the solution to my struggle with weight would come from something I learned as a ten-year-old boy—but that’s exactly what happened.
As a child, I had terrible migraines. I would sit in a dark room for hours, trying to sleep while I waited for the pounding pain and nausea to subside. Painkillers wouldn’t help at all and would only make me more nauseous. We were all at a loss over what to do. My father was a dentist and had developed a very powerful visualization practice he used with his patients for pain control during procedures. On a whim one day, as I felt a migraine coming on, he sat me down and took me on a mental journey to see if it would help. He started by walking me through a relaxation exercise.
He asked me to release the tension in my feet, my calves, and my thighs, until I had relaxed all the way up to my face and scalp. Then he said, “I want you to imagine that we’re skiing at Waterville Valley,” a ski area we used to visit every winter. “Picture yourself at the top of Valley Run,” he said. “And now imagine there’s a big bucket of black sand on your shoulder. As you’re skiing down, imagine that black sand is tipping out behind you, sprinkling all over the white snow,” he continued. “And now, imagine that the sand falling away behind you is your headache.”
As my dad continued to guide me in this visualization and I had progressed to halfway down the ski run, the black bucket of sand had become half-empty. At that point he said, “Now your headache is halfway gone.” And sure enough, my headache had faded. By the time we reached the bottom, the bucket was empty and my headache had disappeared altogether.
I was shocked that simply thinking certain thoughts and imagining certain events could have such a tangible effect on my physical well-being. I felt as if my father had just given me a tremendous gift and that I was introduced to something truly amazing, something that belonged to me that I didn’t even know I had: the tremendous healing power of my own mind.
I soon learned to use that ski-run visualization to relieve migraines all on my own. Initially, it took me about 15 minutes to clear a headache with my dad’s approach, but I later learned to banish the pain in just a few minutes. I then applied this healing technique to other areas of my life.
By the time I started my daily visualization for weight loss practice, I’d been unsuccessful at every other method of weight loss, and the situation was becoming dire. Part of the reason I was initially able to commit to a daily visualization practice was because it made me feel so good. But to my amazement, it did much more than just calm my mind. From the very first week I began visualizing, I felt an internal shift, and I knew I’d tapped into something truly life changing. Within a month, I could see some visible signs of weight loss. Then, like water falling off the edge of a cliff, the fat just started to fall off me, week after week, without struggle or force, without calorie counting or scales.
After getting into a deep state of relaxation, I would picture the body I wanted to have: a chiseled frame, defined stomach muscles, and tight skin. If anyone had seen the image I held in my mind back then, they would have thought I was absolutely crazy. I was 409 pounds, and there I was visualizing myself as a lean and fit 186-pound guy. As ridiculous as it may have seemed even to me, no one today can argue with the results.
Every night, I would visualize my goal, and then the next day things seemed to fall perfectly into place to help me achieve that goal, just like clockwork. My food choices started to change on their own. I wasn’t craving junk food anymore; I started craving real foods, and I started having lots of energy. Suddenly physical activities like biking, walking, or hiking became fun again. I didn’t need meal plans, diets, or exercise programs. My body knew what it needed to restore radiant health, and it all just happened organically.
Fast forward two and a half years. I’d reached my ideal weight and ideal body. When I say ideal, I really do mean it. I was 186 pounds, lean and fit. I was a living embodiment of the exact image I’d held in my mind during those transformative years. I had a chiseled frame and defined abs, and, to the amazement of my doctors, even my skin had tightened up to the point where you’d almost never guess I’d lost more than half my body weight. How was this possible?
Visualization is uniquely suited to retraining your body to be thin, much more so than dieting or exercise are, because it works from the inside out to change your biochemistry and neural pathways. I’ve learned that the biggest challenge in weight loss is not finding the perfect diet or the perfect exercise routine; the biggest challenge is convincing your brain that your body needs to be thin. From there, everything flows naturally.
I realize that the idea of using your mind in this way to solve your weight issues may sound highly unlikely—but I’d encourage you to keep an open mind. The mainstream medical community will likely take years to catch up to the latest research in mind-body healing, so the current diet myths will continue to linger. In order for you to break free from our broken diet paradigm, the most important thing to remember is that your body cannot and will not be reduced to a simple math equation. It is not simply about “calories in, calories out.” I’m sure you know that some people can eat whatever they want and never gain a pound, while other people take just a few bites of ice cream and seem to gain weight immediately.
The types of foods you consume are certainly a contributing factor in weight gain, but what you feed your mind—your beliefs, thoughts, opinions, and emotions—all have a fundamental and overriding impact on your biology. It’s your biology, or more specifically your hormones, that dictate how hungry you are, how much energy you burn each day, and how much fat you will store. Studies have shown that visualization works directly at the hormonal level to restore balance and encourage weight loss in natural and automatic ways.
We’re now in a second wave of diet theory, one that emerged after the resounding failure of “calories in, calories out.” There are new plans that talk about changing your body at the hormonal level. They recommend eating certain foods in defined patterns to reset your hormones. These are great programs, based on sound metabolic research. But unless you address the underlying stresses that are affecting your body’s hormones, you’ll get marginal results. It’s a bit like driving with the emergency brake on: your body will resist you all the way. Dealing with the real issues—the stresses and inflammatory signals that increase levels of fat-making hormones—allows the weight to fall off much easier and faster, and stay off!
With regular practice, visualization will ease the stress in your body, and you’ll build up the defenses to protect yourself from deadly diseases. You’ll have more energy, and your body will once again regain the ability to lose weight easily and naturally.
In the coming pages, I’ll explain exactly what’s causing you to gain weight and give you simple, yet highly effective visualization techniques for addressing these issues. You’ll learn visualizations that will help you:
You’ll even learn visualization techniques for activating the genetic expression of your “thin genes” and increasing the elasticity of your skin—all translating into easy, natural, and sustainable weight loss. Sustainable, because the real issues have been addressed and your body no longer wants excess weight.
Having lived through being in a body that once wanted to be more than 400 pounds—and that was fighting tooth and nail to gain weight—to now being in a body that is effortlessly fit since 2004, I can tell you that there’s nothing easier and more natural than losing weight when your body wants to be thin. And these visualization practices work directly on the root causes of why we gain weight to get your body to actually want to be thin.
I’m not the only one who has experienced success with visualization. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have used my visualization methods to achieve dramatic results—many losing 50, 100, and even 200 pounds. These people, most of whom have been on the dieting roller coaster for years, will tell you that their success started when they began practicing visualization. After suffering one diet failure after another, they are now fit and healthy, without struggling and without being at war with their bodies. Sure they eat healthier, don’t have binges anymore, and are more physically active, but it’s all happening naturally. Their bodies simply want to be leaner. (Visit www.TheGabrielMethod.com/ success-videos to see amazing stories of people using visualization to totally transform their bodies.)
The visualizations only take about seven to ten minutes to practice, and you can do them yourself. You can also hear recordings I’ve created of three of these visualizations at www.TheGabrielMethod.com/visualization-bonus. Either way, you’ll be able to get tremendous benefits that increase on a daily basis. Just like learning an instrument or practicing a sport, your ability to visualize gets better over time. So if you’re ready to tap into a mind-body healing technique that’s different from anything you’ve ever tried before, one that has the power to totally transform your body from the inside out, let’s get started …