Deep Rooted Problems

We also have Connie calling in. She wants to ask a question about stress and pregnancy.

Welcome Connie.

Hi guys.

Hi Connie.

Hi. How are you guys doing?

Good. How are you?

I’m good. Thank you for taking my call. I’m so excited.

Good.

Well, listen, I’ll try to make this brief. I have been on the program now for about seven weeks and I love it. I’ve seen great results. Weight loss is slow, I can tell, but the other results I’ve seen have been really fantastic.

So as I go through this journey I’ve sort of tried to look back at my life. I’ve been overweight my entire life. I’ve been sort of looking back and talking to my mom about so, “How was I different than my three siblings who were really quit thin growing up all their lives?” We all had a very happy childhood. I got great parents, great siblings, very fortunate, and I was a very active child, I loved to play.

But my mom said to me a couple things. She said when she was pregnant with me she was very stressed out. She was learning how to drive and it was stressing her out and she was also feeling a lot of stress for now a third child coming into the home and how was life going to change for her now and very busy and all this stuff, and she said she felt a lot of stress. So I was sort of curious whether or not there’s been any studies done on whether that stress can sort of affect the unborn child as well and could it affect me in a way?

Connie I love that question. It’s such a good question and I do have an answer for it. What happens is, when you have fetus, information is communicated to you from your mother about the world that you’re going to be born into so that you can best survive once you’re born. Is the world you’re going to be born into — are you going to be born into an ice age where there’s not enough to eat and it’s cold all the time? Or are you going to be born into a tropical jungle where there’s plenty to eat but you’ve got to be really fast to run away from tigers? What type of world are you going to be born to? That information is communicated to you from your mother, and when you’re born, you’re going to be predisposed to activating certain genes and not activating others.

Now, in the case of your mother, the stress that she was having was a stress that was similar to the stress that she would be having if she was in a famine. If we were living thousands of years ago and we were in a famine, and that — if we were living thousands of years ago in a famine it would be causing a stress to your mother that would be causing certain chemistry to her. It would be changing certain things and activating her FAT programs but it would be also communicating to you, in the womb, that, “Hey, guess what? You’re going to be born into a world where there’s famine and you’ve got to be ready to activate your FAT programs much quicker.”

So it’s going to give you like a hairpin trigger to activating your FAT programs. You’re going to be predisposed to activating certain genes. Specifically one called the SOCS III, which is the Suppressor of Cytokine Signaling III, which will make your hypothalamus, make your animal brain, less sensitive to the hormone leptin and that will cause your body to gain weight easier.

So you came in predisposed to activating certain genes based on the stress that your mother was having. It was a miscommunication. It was confusion, but your body didn’t understand. Your body doesn’t understand, and this is really the essential theme of what I try to communicate to people, that our bodies don’t understand the mental and emotional stress that we’re in and our bodies are always trying to adapt to the mental and emotional stress because our bodies think it’s a physical stress.

So your body doesn’t know what driving is and your body doesn’t know what getting a driving test is and your body doesn’t understand the stress that your mother was going through, but your mother’s body was still trying to adapt to it. It sort of understood because the chemistry was so similar to a famine it said, “Oh this must be some sort of famine,” and so your mother’s body adapted to that and your mother’s body communicated to you that you grew up in a land where there’s famine. Another type of stress that will activate your FAT programs is chronic exposure to cold weather.

I’m from Canada originally so there you go.

They did a study and I love this study because it was so broad. They did a study of I don’t know how many years with 40,000 people in England, and what they found is the children that were born during wintertime in England, were much more likely to develop insulin resistance as adults. And they couldn’t explain that. And insulin resistance is part of what happens when you have the FAT programs on. If you were in a famine, you would have insulin resistance. But if you have insulin resistance and there’s no famine, your insulin levels go up and your body goes to the fat storage mode.

So the reason that was is because they would be born into cold weather and it was communicated to them that they’re living in a cold place and that they need to be predisposed to activating the FAT programs. So that’s sort of what happened to you, but that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing you can do about it because —

Yeah, and —

Go ahead, I’m sorry. Yeah, what were you going to say, Connie?

Well, no, I was just going to say that I sort of know that, having cholesterol tested a while ago, that my triglycerides were really high. My cholesterol was fine but my triglycerides were really high and, at the time, I didn’t think anything of it and I know I’ve always had this crazy like addiction to sugary things. Sugary foods, carbs, like bad carbs, and I had a house full of baked goods growing up. My mom was a great baker.

So I really now — like I said, since I’ve started the Gabriel Method I’ve really trying to sort of figure out well, okay, what can I do now to help myself? And I know the cravings have gone down considerably, but I can tell that that’s very, very strong for me and there’s another aspect to having a very good relationship with my mother. When she cooks or bakes it’s like eating her love. You take it in. And so I have to sort of watch that as well.

But I’ve been noticing really good things since I’ve been on this. Those cravings have died down. Eventually, in a couple of months, I’d like to go get my triglycerides tested again because, to me, I’m sure they’re moving in the right direction.

Yes. Yeah, well the thing is with triglycerides is triglycerides are elevated when you have your FAT programs on, and what it does is it also makes your body less sensitive to the hormone leptin and leptin is like the master hormone of obesity. But what you have to do is you have to communicate to your body that you’re not living at a time of famine.

The way to do that is to add nourishing food, because when you talk about different stresses of famine, one of them is dieting, unfortunately. Like I say, if dieting would work then there would be no point to having our conversation or my book or thousands of other books that are all coming out right now. If dieting worked then there would be one diet and that would be the end of it. Unfortunately, dieting activates the famine response and that causes stress that activates your FAT programs. But nutritional famine will also activate your FAT programs, and that’s not eating enough of certain nutrients.

But adding the foods I recommend that have Omega 3s, live food, and protein, you’ll be nourishing your body so you’re not in a nutritional famine. By being very vigilant for you of the type of stress that you have and reducing your stress by listening to the CD and doing meditation, exercise, going into SMART Mode, whatever it is that you can do to reduce stress and by doing visualization. And visualization is a really powerful way to communicate to your body that you don’t need to be fat, that you’re not living in a time of famine. You see, your body was confused into thinking that you were being born into a time of famine and that’s not the case and you have to communicate that to your body.

So the question is, how do you communicate that to your body? Your body doesn’t speak English. It can’t say to your animal brain, “I want to lose weight because I want to look good for a wedding in six months and fit into a dress.” You can’t do that. Your body doesn’t know what a wedding is, it doesn’t know what six months is, and it doesn’t speak English.

But the way to communicate to anyone who doesn’t speak English — I mean, if you were in a foreign country — I always use this example, if you were in foreign country and had to go to the bathroom and they don’t speak English, you could ask 100 people where’s the bathroom and none of them are going to understand. But if you draw a picture of a bathroom and show it to anyone, they all understand.

See, symbols are the universal language for communicating with people when they don’t speak your specific language. And your body, your animal brain, doesn’t speak English and that’s the biggest problem that we have is that we’ve got a brain that’s in charge of how fat we are and many other things and it doesn’t speak English. What we have to learn how to do is communicate to your own brain.

So what I’ve discovered is that visualization is an incredible way and effective way to communicate with your own body and to communicate your own brain. When you make a visual image of exactly the way you would like to look, you’re really communicating to your brain that it’s getting it wrong; it’s getting the stress signals wrong. You’re not in a famine; you don’t need to make this adaptation. What you need is to be thinner in order to best survive in this world, not fat, and you’re communicating to your brain. And once your brain understands that thin is the best way for you, it adapts instantly. Because you can lose weight once your brain and body understands that that’s the safest way for you to be.

Right. What's a good application of the photo, the picture? How would you do it every day?

Yeah. Well, what I talk about is — I don’t know if you do this, Connie, but like to have a picture of —

Oh, yeah, yeah. I have one that I insert in my head and it's sort of like a — because I couldn’t — I mean I don’t have a body to think back to.

That’s creative. That’s very creative.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I sort of used that and I’ve been doing the CD every — for sure every night and then some days when I put my little guy, he’s two, and I put him for his nap in the afternoon, if I feel like I need a little something then I’ll do that in the afternoon as well.

But, Jon, isn't there a thing particularly that you have told people to do with the photo?

Yeah. Just to stare at the photo for 30 seconds and then just to close your eyes and then listen to the CD or to practice visualization. Because the CD gets you into that SMART Mode I talked about earlier, and doing the other technique that I talked about will get you into that SMART Mode.

And when you create a visual image, when your brain’s that powerful and that receptive and that impressionable, you’re basically programming into your body your ideal body, and I know this from firsthand experience because when I was over 400 pounds or over 180 kilos I had a visual image of exactly the way I wanted to look and one day that came true and I just don’t think it’s a coincidence. I can really even feel — like as soon as I started practicing visualization I could really even feel how my whole body had changed.

So you need to create that kind of living environment for your body that it’s not living in a time of famine, and once you do that — it’s going to take some time because it’s been a lifetime thing for you, but over time it’s going to get easier and easier and your body is going to get more efficient burning fat. Because the insulin resistance will go down, your insulin levels will go down and then your body gets better and better burning fat because once your insulin levels are elevated, it suppresses your body’s ability to burn fat. And a lot of people, they talk about calories in, calories out and the question is that nobody even asks is, do you even have the ability to burn fat at all?

Jon, can I tell you something? That was the most powerful thing I got from reading the book. That struck me the most was like, “Oh my goodness, here I’ve been all my life worried about the calories and I never stopped to think okay can I even burn these?”

Exactly.

Can I burn fat?

Right.

Yeah.

When your insulin levels are elevated, you lose the ability to burn fat and I talk to people and they say, “I’m eating nothing.” The point is, if your insulin levels — what insulin does — insulin's the fat storage hormone, and as a fat storage hormone, one of the things it does is it suppresses all the other hormones and enzymes that burn fat. So mechanically you've lost the ability to fat if your insulin levels are elevated, and that comes from insulin resistance which comes from the FAT programs. It first starts with something called Leptin resistance and that becomes insulin resistance and that’s all the scenario of the FAT programs.

But by doing all of these different things to turn your FAT programs off, you become more sensitive to insulin. The Omega 3s, the live food, visualization, eating more regularly, not dieting, adding nutrients. All of these things, your body becomes more sensitive to insulin, and then the insulin levels go down, and then you regain the ability to burn fat. So it’s going to take some time but just keep doing what you’re doing, okay?

Okay.