Visualization for Weight Loss -The Gabriel Method

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

it. I was doing the accounts and tax reporting on the laptop from my hospital bed. The nurses couldn’t believe it. I do believe that I fell into a, well, not a post-partum depres- sion but just a really, really hard time. I couldn’t exercise because breastfeeding was every three hours, and for the first three months my baby had colic; she was just crying from early morning to about six o’clock in the evening. And my Portuguese blood makes me feel that if the house isn’t clean I am even more stressed. I like to have a clean house because, if it’s clean, then life’s good. There was all that going on. I was so drained that there wasn’t enough time to realize how drained I was, and it’s really easy to get into that downward spiral. I started having chats with Jon about how I felt really big, and he said not to worry, that after the breastfeeding stage, things should just go back to normal. But I’m such an impatient person. Now, I was expecting Jon to talk about what I was eating and how much exercise I was doing—you know, the standard approach . . . But then he asked me “What do you do to relax?” and I thought, whoa! That’s a bit left of center! He said that my mind and body were reading all these things that were going on in my life like a tug-of-war and that there was “no time for you.” So he wrote up this prescription. And the first thing he said was, “I want you to take one day off a week, just for your- self. I want you to put your baby into daycare, and I don’t want you to do any housework or cleaning; I just want you to have that day for yourself.” And I did, but I felt really guilty because there was my hus- band, working really hard, and I was putting my baby into day- care. [I thought,] “Oh, God! What kind of mother am I?” But I took the day off anyway. I took Fridays off, and for the first five or six weeks after taking my prescription, I just slept the whole day. I’d drop my baby at daycare, go home, and just pass out. Eventually though, I started taking the time out for myself, and I did go for the walks and get massages, and I guess, because I was really refilling myself, my body didn’t feel deprived. It wasn’t starving any more and I really didn’t need the

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