Visualization for Weight Loss -The Gabriel Method

Part IV: Positive Forces that Make Your Body Want to Be Thin

From a weight-loss perspective, the calories you burn during exercise are only a very minor consideration compared with the many other positive benefits exercise provides. In fact, focusing on the calorie burning aspect of exercise can be discouraging and demoralizing. At the gym, there’s an aerobic machine that’s supposed to be able to tell me how many calories I’ve burned, but whenever I use it I feel discouraged. I’m amazed at how few calories I’ve burned compared to the amount of effort I’ve put in. In reality, the machine can’t possibly calculate how many calories I’ve burned during the workout since it knows nothing about what’s happening at a biochemical level inside my body. The machine is only measuring calories in terms of the mechan- ical work I’m doing, which is based on a calculation of my age and body weight. This number is truly meaningless. A body with twice as much muscle might burn twice as many calo- ries—or more—doing the same exercise. Even if the measure were more accurate, it would be no indication of how much fat you are burning. A body that’s resistant to using its fat reserves as fuel will burn much less fat per calories used than a highly-trained, ath- letic body. If you pay attention to this counterproductive gim- mick, you’ll be left with the feeling it’s better to just eat three hundred calories less in a day than to exercise for an hour. And as you should know by now, nothing could be further from the truth! The calories burned during a workout are not relevant. Just like our food’s hormonal effects are more important to consider than the calories of what we eat, the hormonal effects of exercise are more important than the calories we burn during exercise. 1 How the Right Exercise Makes Your Body Want to Be Thin Your body wants to be thin when it thinks that it must be thin in order to survive. If you were living in an environment where there were man-eating animals chasing you and every couple of days or so you had to make a run for it to escape being

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