Visualization for Weight Loss -The Gabriel Method

Creating Your New Body

That’s all you have to do. You imagine a negative experience, and by doing so, create a negative association with the particular food you wish to eliminate. However, the key to making the negative association stay with you for life is making the associa- tion while you are in SMART Mode (chapter 5). In SMART Mode, you become as impressionable as a child. A friend of mine used to come over from time to time, and I would always make something for him to eat. I noticed that he always had an excuse for not eating whatever I had prepared. Finally, I confronted him on the matter, and he said that once when he was a kid, one of his friends prepared a sandwich for him and, as a joke, the friend had secretly spat in it. His friend eventually told him about it after he had eaten the sandwich. This incident left such an indelible impression on his mind that for thirty years he has never been able to eat anything if one of his friends has prepared it. Think of how many meals he has missed over the last thirty years because of that one chance incident. That’s what can happen when you have a neg- ative experience like this as a child. In SMART Mode, your brain can’t differentiate between real and imagined experiences, so when you visualize in SMART Mode, your brain really and truly believes that it’s actually hap- pening. So, when working to kill a craving, the more negative the better! And the more personally offensive the association, the more useful it will be. One woman once told me that mussels made her nauseous because, as a child, she ate a bad one and got food poisoning. So I told her to imagine mussels on the food. This worked very well for her. It’s also useful if there is something repulsive that the food resembles. For example, sugar looks like ground glass. You can imagine eating a sugar-coated doughnut and discovering that it’s laced with ground glass—glass that is cutting you up inside. Another woman told me that after making this association, she could not even walk by a bakery without feeling nauseous. Chocolate is also an easy one because chocolate looks like so many repulsive things, like dirt or mud or things that are too

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