Jessie’s Law

Weight Loss: Jessie’s Law
Video class with Jon Gabriel

 

Join Jon Gabriel as he talks about:

• How his cat Jessie taught him the basic principle of The Gabriel Method
• How to get your body to shift its set point
• The real reason your body wants to be fat

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Read The Lecture Transcripts Here

So to illustrate a real-life example of why your body would want to be fat or why your body would want to be thin and how it really does adapt, I’d like to tell you the story of my cat Jessie. I have a cat, a beautiful cat, named Jessie and we’ve got a next door neighbor that’s got a big mean dog named Buddy; he’s a big bull mastiff. And every day Jessie goes over to Buddy’s house and just lies around in the grass on the front lawn. Buddy hates cats. Buddy is screaming, Buddy is barking, Buddy can’t get out, and Jessie just loves – Jessie stretches like this, loves to taunt him. One day my neighbors got sick of this and they let Buddy out. Buddy took off like a freight train. I never saw a dog that big move so fast. I mean, it was a bullet train. Jessie ran as fast as he could. I didn’t see Jessie again for a day and a half. I didn’t know if he was alive or dead. Buddy came back with a smile on his face; I didn’t see Jessie. A day and a half – Jessie comes back, he’s limping. Buddy had gotten a hold of his back leg and I took Jessie to the doctor and they gave him the shots or whatever it was. Over the next week or two Jessie got better. And then something amazing happened. About two weeks after that Jessie, who was always a pleasantly plump cat, became bone thing. I mean Jessie looked like a rat with just – a drowned rat – and people were coming up and saying aren’t you feeding him? And I was feeding Jessie an all-you-can eat diet of chicken, fish, everything, and people are saying you’ve got to take Jessie to the vet he’s got worms.

I said Jessie doesn’t have worms, I know exactly what’s wrong with Jessie. Jessie got the message that there’s Buddy next door that can be let out, and Jessie’s body understands that in order to keep Jessie alive he’s got to be as thin as possible.

So Jessie really did get too thin and I decided I had to do something about it. So what I did was I put Jessie on a diet. This is a true story. I put Jessie on a diet because I knew from firsthand experience that if I wanted to get Jessie’s body to want to be fatter I had to give it a reason. Right now Jessie can eat all he wants, an unlimited fare of chicken and fish and everything, and he’s not getting any fatter because his body wants to be bone thin. I put Jessie on a diet. For three weeks I gave him just what I thought he needed from a nutritional standpoint and he was hungry all the time, and he was meowing, but I gave him certainly more than he needed, but I didn’t give him all you could eat. And you can say this is cruel that I would do this to my cat, but we do this to ourselves all the time; this is exactly what I diet is. So I put Jessie on a diet. The last week I only gave him dry food. Then after that, I went back to an all you could eat diet and Jessie chowed down because Jessie could not eat enough. What happened was Jessie’s body got the message that food is limited. And when Jessie’s body got the message that food is limited it shifted Jessie’s set point back because Jessie’s body said hold on a second, this is a stress now, there’s not enough food out there. So we have got to start conserving fat. So I shifted Jessie’s set point is what I did. And after a month of dieting I gave him all you could eat. Within two weeks he was back to his perfect pleasantly plump weight. And then what happened was he found a balance because Buddy kept turning off his fat programs and then I kept turning his fat programs back on basically. Whenever he got too thin I put him on a diet for a while and then shifted back, and his body got the message that he can’t be too thin because there’s a famine, but he can’t be too fat because he’s got to run away from Buddy, and his body settled on a perfect ideal weight that kept him safe from famines but also kept him safe from Buddy. And that’s a real life example of how your body shifts its set point.