Perfect Body – Jon Gabriel and Lisa J. Smith

Jon Gabriel is my guest, and he is here for you on All About Me Day, which is really all about you. Jon Gabriel is the author of The Gabriel Method. He calls from Australia, so it's 4:00 in the morning on Tuesday. So it's already the next day, so we can find out how are Tuesdays' are going to look I suppose.

Anyways, Jon is the author, again, of The Gabriel Method. Go over to GabrielMethod.com and you can check out Jon. He has a special page for you, a listener of the show, GabrielMethod.com/LisaJ. And if you go over there, he was gracious enough to put a meditation up there. He'll give us the password. And it is never too late, even though we're finishing up the book this week and maybe next week, but it's never too late to start The Gabriel Method. It is never too late to transform your body. This isn't about being on a diet, and I always love diet because the first three letters are die. This is about really being healthy and being happy and creating the life that you always wanted.

Mr. Jon Gabriel, what's going on down under today?

Hi Lisa, how are you?

Good. I'm wide awake, what about you?

I'm pretty wide awake, too, I've gotten about six or seven hours of sleep and I'm feeling really good as opposed to last week when I was practically falling asleep on the phone.

Well I'll tell you, last week was one of the better shows so go figure. No, I'm just kidding, but it's always a good show and you always have great advice and great things to say to us for sure.

I appreciate that.

I wanted to ask you — yeah, every time I got to call you I have to do the math and every time it's good I want to call you and I'm like, "Oh, no, he's probably sleeping." So we have to get on the same schedule I think. We need you to come to the United States. Either I need to come to Australia or you need to come to the United States.

Well I will be coming to the states soon, but you're also always welcome to come here to Australia. It's quite spectacular and I think anyone that comes out here would agree that it's just a wonderful experience. It really is quite gorgeous here.

How did you end up in Australia from New York? Did your weight loss have something to do with you moving to Australia from New York? Because you lost over 220 pounds.

No, actually, do you remember Luc Longley the basketball player who Luc Longley the basketball player who played for the Chicago Bulls?

What was his name?

Luc Longley. He was a big, tall center for the Chicago Bulls back in the '90s.

I don't.

He played with Michael Jordon. I can see you're not a basketball fan, but that's okay.

Yeah well, I'm a Pistons fan. That's about all I know.

Pistons, all right, well remember that team that the Chicago Bulls had where they were winning every year with Michael Jordon and Scottie Pippen? Anyway, Luc Longley was the center and he used to go to school at the University of New Mexico, ended up marrying one of ex-wife's best friends and they moved out here because he's an Aussie and they bought a house down here in Denmark and a farm. And my wife at the time went out to visit and fell in love with this area and then we both fell in love. It had always been sort of a dream of mine to move out here.

We even made an application for residency back in '97 and became residents, but I was never moving out here, I was working on Wall Street, and it was one of those things, and we always find ourselves in this situation, where it was going to be a someday thing. You know, in six months from now we'll move, six months, every six months I kept pushing it off as like a dream that maybe it was never going to happen.

And then after 9/11 when I had that situation where I was almost on one of the flights and wasn't, I decided that it was time to start making my dreams come true, and here I was killing myself and weighing over 400 pounds and living a life that really wasn't the life that I wanted to live. It made sense and it paid the bills and I felt sort of trapped and didn't know what else to do so I stayed with it, but I wasn't happy. But in my heart of hearts I wanted to live a very simple life in this beautiful area that I had found on the other side of the world and it just became like a someday fantasy.

And I said, "You know what, now's the time to start making my dreams come true." And after that experience, I booked two one-way tickets and didn't know what I was going to do with the rest of my life, had no idea where I was going. My wife was pregnant, she was eight months pregnant, I think, when we flew over here, or seven months pregnant, and it was scary and confusing, but at the same time, my heart was calling me to do this. And even though it was one of the scariest things I've ever done in my life, it was definitely beyond a doubt one of the most rewarding.

And I've learned since then, that sometimes the things that your heart's really calling you to do, the changes that your heart's calling you to make, if you take that chance it's almost as if the universe rewards you. And for me, it was definitely one of the best experiences — or the best moves I've ever made in my life.

Yeah, it's interesting — I asked the question not to be nosy really, I mean, I was curious, because I think people want to know how did Jon do it. And here's an American, how did you end up in Australia. It's not like you ended up moving to Texas. You moved around the world. Did you lose your weight once you got there and what was it that triggered and said, "Ah-ha?" Other than not getting on the flight, did your weight loss start here in America or after you moved?

It did. It started actually a month before, when I had made the decision that I was never going to diet again.

Right, and that was when you still lived in the United States.

Yeah, that was when I was living in New Jersey and I decided I was never going to diet again. I just decided I was going to try to figure out why my body wanted to be fat in the first place and what I could do to get it to go back to the way it used to be. That was the real turning point for me and that's when I started losing weight.

And then I was in the states for another six months because we had to stay — when you have animals and you want to move to Australia and take your animals, you need to spend six months preparing them, otherwise, they have to spend a long time in quarantine. So we stayed in the states for another six months and during that period I was losing weight pretty consistently. So it had started just before that.

But I think one of the biggest triggers was the fact that I really was not living a life that — I wasn't living an authentic life is what I would say. I wasn't living the life that my heart of hearts wanted to live. I was living a life that just made sense. And I think a lot of us do that, where we feel like we're sort of stuck in a situation where it pays the bills, we're getting by, but we just don't like it. And then life has sort of another plan for us. And so your heart is really calling you to that other plan, and the more you resist it, the more stress and struggle and uncomfortable your life becomes.

It's almost like everyone in your life from your boss or employers, or employees, to clients, to partners, everyone in your life is there to remind you that you're not living the life you're meant to be living. And so your life becomes very stressful and very uncomfortable, very painful, and that activates the FAT Programs and then you come home and you're exhausted and all you want to do is eat and escape and watch TV.

And I remember what my life was like where all I wanted to do was just come home and watch TV and eat after a while, because my life was so uncomfortable.

Yeah, because you were numb.

Totally numb out is exactly what I was doing. I was trying to escape from my own life.

And how does that work? Not so good because the one thing you can't get away from is yourself. So I think it's interesting. I was talking about — and it's not that I'm not a fan, but I don't sit and watch Olstein all the time and I was flipping through channels and I was talking about this earlier on the show, and he was talking about being labeled and how we label ourselves, and I was talking about at the beginning of the show that bumblebees can fly and that's proof that anything is possible, because everyone except the bumblebee itself believes that a bumblebee can't fly.

So we're kind of like these bumblebees if we would just stop listening and numbing out and doing what we think we should, I have t-shirts, I should send you one of my t-shirts. It says, "Did you should on my?" and then should with a "D" before I get fired. Did you should on me, and it's true because everyone's so busy, whether it's our friends or our family or communities or society shoulding on us that we don't even know who we are anymore. And then we become labeled and that's what happens, is we end up numbing out and so many of us struggle with weight issues. And as we've talked about for weeks now on this show, these FAT Programs get triggered because we are numbed out and then one thing leads to another leads to another. So it's really, really interesting that that happened.

I want to talk to you today, we're going to come back, I want to talk to you about some of — because we're on chapter 17 but it's interesting, some of your success stories that you've had and I want to just hear your stories and how you've helped people and how people have gone from being over 400 pounds to — and this isn't me Jon, but this is my listeners, having the abs that Jon Gabriel has.

I'm sorry?

Having the abs that — everyone wants the abs that Jon Gabriel has.

Oh, having the abs.

So you're going to have to do an abs master commercial or something, but if you don't know what I'm talking about, go check Jon's abs out. That will get them over there. GabrielMethod.com, even GabrielMethod.com/LisaJ. We're going to talk about a visualization that Jon was nice enough to post up for all of you. This is Lisa J. Smith, again, TheGabrielMethod.com.