Visualization for Weight Loss -The Gabriel Method

Introduction

I didn’t lose weight quickly at first; I lost it slowly . I lost about 25 pounds over the first six months. That’s around a pound a week. For someone who weighed over 400 pounds that wasn’t setting any record. But then, instead of slowing down, I started losing weight faster. I lost another 150 pounds at a rate of 2 pounds a week, and I lost 20 more at a rate of 3 pounds a week. I lost the last 20 pounds—the weight that most people say is impossible to lose—at a rate of 5 pounds a week . A rate that was five times faster than the first 20 pounds. Not only were those last few pounds possible to lose, they actually flew off me. My body simply couldn’t stand to have an extra ounce of fat on it. It shed every ounce of those last remaining pounds. I could see all of my stomach muscles again, which was something I had dreamed of doing but hadn’t been able to do since I was a kid. What’s more, I showed almost no signs of ever having been morbidly obese. My skin became tight and firm. This fact contin- ues to astound doctors and laypeople alike. I didn’t have to do much to make this happen and neither will you. It simply wasn’t a struggle. There are really only three things that I did from day one: 1. I never let a day go by without making sure I had given my body the nourishment it needed in a form that it could digest and assimilate. The focus was on adding what was missing. 2. I spent at least some time every day practicing tech- niques I developed to address the mental and emo- tional causes of obesity. 3. Every night, as I was going to sleep, I visualized my ideal body exactly the way I wanted it to look and feel. Eventually that vision became a reality. I also used visualization in many other ways. For example, in May of 2003 I entered a twelve-week weight-loss challenge. By then I had already lost over 110 pounds and I figured, since I

xxiv