Visualization and Weight-Loss – Jon Gabriel and Lisa J. Smith

Spiritual warriors, it’s Lisa J., Lisa J. Smith and we’re not just spiritual warriors, we’re mind, body and spirit warriors. My guest, as promised, is Jon Gabriel and I have to give him a little bit of a hard time but, of course, he’s calling at 5:00 a.m. Australia time so he just got up and I think 4:00 a.m. would have been a little too early for Jon. Hi Jon, how are you?

Good Lisa. How are you?

Well, we’ve been waiting for you. Do you know why?

No. To give me a hard time I guess.

Yeah. Well, it was daylight savings yesterday.

Oh, nobody sent me the memo.

So it’s 5:00 eastern time and I’m like where’s Jon?

Oh, so I got the time wrong. Oh, wow.

Yeah. So you would have had to have got up at 4:00 eastern.

Oh, wow, that’s beautiful. So that’s what we’re doing? 4:00 from now on? That’s okay. I usually get up early anyway.

You do? My God, I’m going to bed at that time.

What’s that?

Well, we can figure — I got to bed at that time and you’re just getting up. I think I have to redo my clocks or something. Well, we don’t have much time so I definitely want to get right into it, but I had to give you a little bit of a hard time and luckily we have some listeners here in Michigan.

Lisa, I’m really sorry about that and I apologize to your listeners for that.

Oh, don’t worry about it. They had more time to listen to me ramble so it was all good, but I definitely want to connect with you because I have been waiting since last week to talk about chapter three, the mental causes of obesity. And I know for the first part while you are on we’re going to talk about that, and then we’re going to talk about the emotional causes of obesity, and I think it’s really, really an important key. And you say in your book, and I’ve been talking about the whole show, The Gabriel Method, that we really need to understand this mental to make a difference and so tell us about mental obesity.

Well, anytime, as I mentioned, that you have mental or emotional stress it causes chemistry in the body and it’s a very real chemistry, and your body is trying to interpret that chemistry and trying to interpret the stress in physical terms, because your body only understands physical threats. And stress is always a warning that, in some way, you’re in danger.

Now if you’re reading the newspaper and you find out that interest rates go up and it’s going to affect your mortgage payments, so in a mental sense, you’re feeling some sort of danger because it’s going to be harder to make ends meet and all these kind of things — and then that escalates into all these other problems that can happen. That’s a mental danger and that’s causing you some sort of stress, but your body only interprets stress in physical terms.

So what happens is, when you have that stress, your body thinks you’re in physical danger, and our bodies are brilliantly programmed to protect us from physical danger. Any type of physical stress you have, your body will adapt so as to make the stress less stressful.

In other words, like when we talked about Jesse’s Law, when my cat — when Jesse has to run away from a dog, his body adapted by getting thinner and faster so that the next time that stress, the next time that threat came around, he would be better suited to running away from the dog. He would be better able to survive. When I arbitrarily induced a famine in his diet, when I created a diet and I didn’t give him enough food for a month to shift his set point back, that was another type of threat. The threat is starvation and your body adapts to starvation by getting fatter or by wanting to get fatter. This is a way to protect you from starvation and this is the whole reason we have the FAT Programs.

But when you have mental and emotional stress, what happens is you’re causing chemistry and your body is trying to adapt physically. It’s saying, "what’s the threat?" So our body is always trying to protect us from this type of stress. So when you have mental stress, sometimes, for some people, and this is really crucial, it’s going to activate the FAT Programs. Your body is actually going to try to protect you from mortgage rates by getting fatter.

So how do you eliminate that? What do you do, because we all have that and I mean I know that I was doing great and then all of a sudden I had a week last week and I’m like what is going on? All of a sudden I feel like now did I gain weight? What stressors were in my life that made me trigger that, but that’s just life is reading the newspaper. So what can we do?

Okay. Well, there’s two ways to do it, and it really speaks to the heart of living a happy life. And that is one, you have to learn how to deal with the stresses in your life, that’s one thing that we have to do and you can’t get around that, and that’s why I created that visualization CD that you listen to at night which you can download for free from my webpage, and the other is being able to communicate to your body that the stresses in your life are not stresses that the appropriate response is to get fatter from, that getting fatter isn’t helping. And that is where visualization is really, really affected. Visualization is like a language that you can use to communicate to your body that the stresses in your life are not stresses that you need to get fatter from and it’s a way to help your body clear up all the confusion in your life. That all of these stresses are not stresses that you need to adapt to by getting fatter or getting thinner or whatever.

Now how does the visualization help us do that? Because people have asked me that and I get emails all the time and people ask, "Well, why do I need to do that visualization? What is that doing for me?"

Okay. Visualization is a language that you can use to communicate with your body. And this is the real problem in health, in general, and specifically in weight loss, is that we have all these mental and emotional stresses and they’re causing all this chemistry and they’re activating these FAT Programs, and we don’t know how to communicate to our body that that’s not what’s supposed to happen. So our body is getting tricked into activating these FAT Programs.

And the reason is because our body doesn’t understand English. You can’t say to your body, "I want to be thin because in six months time I want to go to a wedding and I need to look good and I need to fit into my dress," and all these kind of things. You can’t say that to your body. Your body doesn’t understand that. Your body only understands the chemistry that’s going on. But, you can use visualization as a language. Visualization or symbols is the universal language that you use to communicate with other people that don’t speak your language.

Imagine you’re in a foreign country and you have to do something simple like go to the bathroom and nobody speaks your language, and you can ask 1,000 people where’s the bathroom, where’s the bathroom, nobody will understand. But if you simply make a drawing of a bathroom and you show it to anybody, instantly they understand what you want and they’ll direct you to the bathroom. Visualization or symbols is the universal language to communicate with people that don’t speak your language, and this is the biggest problem that we all have is that our brain doesn’t speak English. In other words, we have a brain that’s in total control of how fat or thin we should be and so many other things, and we don’t know how to communicate with it. It doesn’t speak English. But it does understand symbols.

Your body has a consciousness, the cells of your body has a consciousness. The part of your brain that they call the animal brain that’s in charge of the FAT Programs, it has a consciousness and you can communicate with it. So when you’re in a really calm state which I call SMART Mode or some consciousness researchers call the Alpha and the Beta state, the meditative state, when you’re in that real calm state and you make a vision of exactly the way you would like to look, your body understands. It’s a language that you can use to communicate to your body. So you can explain to your body in symbols that you don’t need the weight, that the stress is not a stress that you need to gain weight from. And by doing that, you can sort of reprogram the association between the stress in your life and that stress triggering your FAT Programs.

I know this from firsthand experience because when I first started losing weight, I was over 400 pounds and what I used to do at night is I used to make a visual image of exactly the way I’d like to look, and one day, two and-a-half years later and 220 pounds later, I became that exact image of exactly the way I’d like to look. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence. And it wasn’t just that I had lost the weight, I looked exactly the way I imagined myself to look. It’s like my body understood that this was the way I needed to look, that the stress wasn’t — the stresses in my life, I didn’t need to get fat in order to protect me from the stresses in my life, I didn’t need the weight to feel safe.

My body understood. It became almost like a two-way dialog where I would have a vision of how I would like to look and my body would kind of communicate that to me, that hey you need to eat some more of these foods or you need to go out and be a little more active. It would kind of communicate back and forth with other symbols of what I needed to do. And it became this whole kind of way of really understanding myself better and communicating with myself better.

So the visualization part is just essential in really getting your body to understand that you don’t need the weight. I also believe that there’s just — visualization is just such a powerful tool that you can use for so many things. You hear about so many super successful people that have used visualization in so many areas of their life. Olympic athletes. All the best Olympic athletes use visualization to visualize their sport, and they’ve also discovered when they do studies on Olympic athletes, that when they visualize their ideal sport, all of the different muscles and neurons are all being fired in the exact coordinated sequence as if they were actually doing their sport because your body doesn’t know the difference between a real and imagined experience or real and imagined visualization. You hear about body builders like Arnold Schwarzenegger and how he used to use visualization in body building and then he used visualization in business and then in acting and then in politics. He used it everywhere he went.

And I've talked to many other super successful people that used visualization in business and these things. So tapping into the power of your mind and using it to transform your body is extremely effective and as you get better and better at it, you can use it for every other areas of your life, too.

We just have to go to a break, and I don’t mean to cut you off, but my producer’s telling me to wrap it up. But I just wanted to say speaking of visualizations, in chapter three when you talk about the mental causes of obesity, you say if we fail to follow our heart, obesity is often the result. Yearning causes emotional starvation and activates these FAT Programs. And I love your simple rule to follow and your rule is this, and this is also the key to your visualizations which you’ve been kind enough to provide for us. If you have something that you’d like to do, long to do, urn to do but are afraid to do, take the chance. Don’t weight, and I love that you spelled it W-E-I-G-H-T, don’t weight, follow your heart. And heart is the word that you’ve given to all of the listeners that they can listen for free to this visualization that will help us and is really the key to creating the life that we want to create. So the password is heart, H-E-A-R-T. Please go over to GabrielMethod.com/LisaJ, put in that password and you can download this.

And I have to tell you, Jon, I have heard so many — well, I’ve been doing the visualizations, but I’ve heard so many amazing things for so many listeners who got your book, are starting to do The Gabriel Method and really starting to transform their lives the way you transformed yours and your body.

We’re going to take a short break. When we get back, I want to talk about the emotional causes of obesity now that we talked about the mental a little bit and the thinking part. Let’s talk about the emotional part. This is Lisa J. Smith. My guest is Jon Gabriel the author of The Gabriel Method. Again, GabrielMethod.com/LisaJ is the website. Get yourself the book, do yourself the favor. Thousands and thousands of people are doing this and transforming their bodies as well. Be right back. This is Lisa J.

[Commercial break]

All right. Nothing like a little Pina Colada song. That’s called Escape by Rupert Holmes. I love that song. Jon Gabriel is my guest. He’s the author of The Gabriel Method. The revolutionary diet-free way to totally, totally transform your body, and we are so, I’m just going to say lucky, to have you here with us, Jon, every Monday at 4:00 eastern and if we have to do 5:00 so you can sleep in an extra hour down in Australia we can make that happen and definitely start having — well, we’ll talk about that. But we’re going out of your —

I don’t mind 4:00.

Oh, you don’t mind? Okay, well you are a rock star for sure because there’s no way, you would hear silence from me if I had to get up at 4:00. That’s not easy to do. Well, we’re doing the weight loss challenge and we’re doing it with our listeners, and GabrielMethod.com/LisaJ is the place to go.

We’re now on chapter four and we’re going to be talking about the emotional obesity versus emotional eating is how you start, and we’re so used to hearing buzz words all the time like emotional eating, and you talk about emotional obesity, and I think that that’s really interesting. And what is emotional obesity and briefly — I mean you really have to get the book to go through this, but what is emotional obesity and how do we overcome that now?

Okay. Emotional obesity is the need to be fat in order to feel safe emotionally. That’s very different than emotional eating. Emotional eating is eating for comfort. This has nothing to do with eating or how much or how little you’re eating. It has to do with how safe you feel being thin or being fat.

If you feel safer having more weight on you, then you have emotional obesity and nothing is more important than addressing the emotional reasons why you have emotional obesity if you have it. And I have talked to thousands and thousands and thousands of people all over the world about weight loss, and I have discovered that I would say about 80 percent of people that have had a lifetime of weight issues or have substantial weight issues can trace it to some sort of emotional basis.

A perfect example is the first time I was on television here in Australia, a lady called me up and she said that when she was a kid, when she was 10 years old, she had a babysitter and she was being abused by the babysitter. And it was actually a female babysitter, and this went on for three years. And the whole time that she was being abused, she was gaining weight. Eventually she gained so much weight that the babysitter stopped abusing her. The babysitter said, "Oh my God, you’re so fat you’re gross," and left her alone.

Now in that instance, the weight left such an indelible impression that weight keeps you safe that in her mind and in the consciousness of her cells and in her subconscious and in every part of her being, weight was making her feel safer. Now this lady tried to diet for 30 years and it was always the same thing. She would lose weight and then she would get to a point where she would freak out. Maybe somebody would say to her, "Oh my God, you look beautiful, you’ve lost so much weight," and she would get scared and she said to me, "I’d freak out," and she would have a big binge.

But what was happening isn't that she didn’t have willpower or didn’t have discipline or any of these things that we berate ourself over. She wasn’t sabotaging herself. At the very core of her being she felt safer, she felt protected. If you have that issue —

That’s me.

— no diet or exercise or program is going to work in the long term. You’ve got to address the real issue. Now when I talk to people and I always ask them, "When did the weight start?" And they say, "Well when I was 16." "What happened when you were 16?" "Well, my parents separated or I had a car crash or somebody died," or this or that, there’s an issue. If there’s a specific issue you can trace your weight to, that has to be addressed, that has to be dealt with. You have to go into that, you can’t just leave it alone or say well I talked about it and that’s it or try to just focus on the diet and exercise. It’s not going to work.

Now do you work with people privately to help people with these issues?

I do do it on a casual basis for certain issues. If it’s the type of thing where somebody, God forbid, was abused when they were four years old or something like that, I refer them to certain people. But otherwise, I do talk to people and also use visualization to help work through those issues. Because you can’t just talk about the issue, you have to really go back and reprogram yourself on a cellular level.

You have to reprogram the cells of your body that had been affected by the trauma. So maybe if it’s something like somebody says, "Well my father was just so angry and nothing I ever did was good enough," then we go back and we do a visualization and we imagine that you’re 10 years old again and your father is talking to you and he is screaming at you and then you feel that, and then we go back and say well reprogram it a little bit so that your father says, "I love you, I’ll never scream at you again," you hug. And people always have this big cry and big release, and then all of a sudden they’re losing weight. They say, "Oh I lost 10 pounds last week. I don’t know what’s happening. I’m not hungry anymore." It’s because you’ve released the real cause, the true cause, of why your body is holding on to the weight, and 80 percent of the time it’s emotional. You feel safer with the weight.

No. I’m just saying that’s exactly my issue. Like emotional is absolutely was my issue, and I’ve tried every diet, and it’s not like I’m obese and I have to lose weight, but I do and every time I would get thinner I would start to feel unsafe again. And I’d start to feel myself feeling thinner and I’d go okay, something is not right here, and then I would put it back on because I felt safer being thicker, let’s put it that way. And it’s really, really interesting when you — we have to do our work. If we want to be healthy, physically, and then mentally, emotionally, it is so tied together with the mental and the emotional and I really think that’s such a big part of it.

It’s huge.

You talk about the mental and emotional abuse, physical and sexual abuse, rebellion, self punishment, hiding from the world, big is the boss, grief, testing love. I mean there are so many issues and so many reasons why we do this. I just can’t tell you how grateful I am that — not that you had to go through this process yourself, but really that you wrote about this and you teach about this and you talk about this and I tell people this, personally, my personal friends about you and I tell my listeners about you, I tell my private sessions about you, that truly it is amazing the work that went into this book, The Gabriel Method, truly amazing.

Well, I appreciate that.

And just so — yeah because really the work that you’re doing is so important to help people find a healthy balance in their life, I truly mean that, and I tell people listen, I’m not selling you anything. I’m not a salesperson. I’m not here to sell you — I don’t care. Either you get it or you don’t, but truly this book has the ability to help you not only get thin because getting thin is the bonus, but to help you emotionally and mentally get to where we need to be so we can have productive lives.

Yeah. Well, it deals with the core of the issue. You talked about earlier following your heart, and the reason why that is so crucial is because when you’re not following your heart, all of the stresses in your life are really there to remind you that you’re not living a life you’re meant to be living. Whether it’s the boss that you can’t be good enough for or the partner that screams at you. Whatever it is, it’s there to remind you that you’re not living your true life.

And when you do take that chance and really follow your heart, somehow everything falls into place. The stresses go away, the weight goes away, you don’t need it anymore, your body doesn’t feel like you need to be protected, you feel safer, you feel more excited about life, you have more energy, you’re not looking for an escape through food. Everything starts to flow.

So it really does deal with the core issues. And from emotional side, I always say that it’s a little like — dealing with the emotional obesity is a little bit like you know when you’re looking for your keys, and I do this all the time, you’re looking for your keys and you have a feeling that they might be — for some reason they might be under the bed, but you don’t feel like bending down and looking under the bed so you look on the counter, you look in the drawer, you look in the kitchen, you look in the same places over and over and over again, I do this all the time, but it’s not until you actually bend down, look under the bed, get the keys, go to where they are that you’re going to find the keys. You’re not going to find them until you look where they are.

And that’s the exact same with emotional obesity. You can try this diet, that diet, this program, that program, every new thing that comes around, but if the cause of it is some core, emotional issue that happened at some point in your life, it’s not going to go until you deal with the real issue.

Absolutely. Well, we’re going to have to wrap it up, but you’re back every Monday at 4:00 eastern time, Jon, and you say this in your book and if people want to reach you definitely go to GabrielMethod.com to get your book and to contact you or to learn more about you, but I just have to say this and I read this in your book and I have it highlighted, and you always say, you make this point very strongly. If you’re not addressing these issues then you’re not following The Gabriel Method. No one can say for sure how long it will take before the issues are resolved. The process is deeply personal. The issues might be resolved at this very moment simply by reading this chapter, by listening to the CD which you can get the download over at GabrielMethod.com, or it might take months or intensive counseling. There’s simply no way to predict what it will take, but starting the process is the key.

You are awesome, Jon. You are a spiritual warrior. Today on the show I’ve been talking about being a spiritual warrior. You truly, truly are one. Thank you for being here for us. Again, GabrielMethod.com/LisaJ. I’ve been talking about it throughout this whole show for the past almost three hours. The link to your page is also on my page over at CBS, NewsSkyRadio.com, or you can email me and I’ll get you in contact with Jon.

Really important work that you’re doing, Jon, and keep it up, and only the very beginning for you and for what’s to come. I hate to tell you, I hope you’re getting lots of rest because wait till Oprah hears about you.

Okay. Well, thanks very much.

Jon Gabriel, thank you. Thank you so much.

I’ll see you next week on time, okay, sorry about that.

Hey you know what, no worries. It’s all in divine order. It actually gave me more time to talk about being a spiritual warrior so it all worked out perfect as always. Thank you, Jon, we’ll talk to you soon.