Visualization for Weight Loss -The Gabriel Method

Part III: Physical Stresses that Activate the FAT Programs

weight. You may lose weight quickly at first, but then the rate at which you lose weight will start to slow. Eventually, you stop losing weight altogether. You find yourself in the unfortunate position of having to restrict yourself, count calories, or follow unnatural eating schedules, not to lose weight, but to simply maintain your current level of body fat. You feel like you’re run- ning on a treadmill that just keeps going faster. The longer you go, the harder it gets. From your body’s perspective, you’re now stuck in starvation mode; your appetite increases and it takes a lot more food before you feel full. Your taste buds become desensitized, and you start craving sweet and fatty foods. Your brain also sends a message to your thyroid to slow down your metabolism. This causes you to stop losing weight even though you are now eat- ing less. Also, your body goes into perpetual fat storage mode: you become very efficient at storing fat and you lose the ability to burn it. As a result, when dieting, you’re hungry all the time and con- stantly fighting cravings. Then when you finally give in to your cravings, you gain the weight back very quickly because all those excess calories turn into fat. If you now go back to eating the way you used to, you’ll get fatter on even fewer calories than before. Many experts now concur that dieting can actually make you fat . Studies have shown that teenagers who diet are statistically three times more likely to be fat in five years time. 1 And I am sure that you, or someone you may know, has been on the “roller-coaster” of weight as a result of a string of unsuccessful diets. Why would this happen if dieting actually worked? So why do so many people diet? People diet because they don’t know any better. Conventional wisdom—what you may have learned as a child or growing up—strongly stands by the idea that eating less equals weighing less, and the only differ- ence between a successful and unsuccessful dieter is will power. But the chemical evidence is clear beyond a shadow of a doubt: dieting doesn’t work. Dieting makes your body want to be fat.

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