Visualization for Weight Loss -The Gabriel Method

The Positive Stresses

always dreamed of doing, such as skiing, surfing, hang gliding, skydiving, or mountain climbing. You can even win gold medals at the Olympics in swim- ming, sprinting, pole vaulting, or gymnastics—what- ever you want. • Whatever you’re visualizing, use all your senses. Feel the wind, taste the water, smell the fresh-cut grass, hear the sound of the turns you make on the snow—feel every part of your body alive with the joy of movement. Overtraining—Don’t Exercise Too Much! If you exercise too frequently and/or too long, exercise becomes a negative stress that can actually activate the FAT Programs. Overdoing exercise is called overtraining, and its effects are well documented. Many studies have shown that athletes will continue to get in better shape from exercise until they start exercising too much. 3 When that happens, they actually begin gaining weight. The reason is that overtraining elevates cortisol 4 levels, and cortisol turns on the FAT Programs. 5 The most glaring example of overtraining I’ve ever seen came from my friend Sasha. A year after Sasha had given birth, she still had an extra 30 pounds that she could not shed. Sasha became an exercise maniac, doing two, one-hour exercise videos a day, six days a week. After a few months of grinding away for hours a day, day after day, she really started to resent it. Yet, because of her tremendous endurance and perseverance, she kept going and going, like paying a toll each day just for existing. Because Sasha exercised too long and too often, she became overtrained and wasn’t losing any more weight. Eventually, she hit the wall. She just couldn’t go on beating herself up every day, and she was forced to let the whole thing go. Over the next three months, Sasha lost those thirty pounds without doing one stitch of exercise. It just fell off her. When she removed the chronic mental and physical stress of a punishing exercise routine from her life, Sasha allowed her body to return to its naturally thin state. This is a really important

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