Visualization for Weight Loss -The Gabriel Method

Jessie’s Law

As a result of his adaptation, Jessie stayed lean and lanky— too thin in fact, by my estimation. Even though I started feeding him an all-you-can-eat diet of rich, canned cat food, chicken, and fish, he wasn’t putting on any weight. His body got the urgent message that being thin equals being safe, and all of the sudden he had the metabolism of a greyhound. I knew that no matter how much food I gave Jessie he wasn’t going to gain any weight. In fact, as long as his body knew that food was limitless, his body would have no need to store fat. The land of excess he was living in just didn’t make his body want to be any fatter. So I decided to do something about it. I put him on a diet. That’s right, I put him on a diet because I knew from experience that the best way to get your body to want to be fatter is to diet. Rather than give him an all-you-can-eat buffet of scrumptious foods, I fed him sparingly, only once a day, despite all of his protests. I made sure that I gave him what he needed, but there was no excess. I did this for a month, and in the last week, I only fed him dry food, something that he was definitely not accus- tomed to. You may think that this sounds cruel, but this is exactly what we do to ourselves all the time when we go on a diet. After a month of this minimalist fare, I went back to giving him an all-you-can-eat buffet of all his favorite foods, and sure enough, he gained weight. I basically turned on his Fat Pro- grams. That’s what dieting does. And this is exactly why diets don’t work: they trick your body into thinking you’re living in a time of famine and make your body want to be fatter. Let’s face it: if diets worked there’d be one diet (maybe two), everyone would go on it, everyone would lose weight, and that would be the end of it. There wouldn’t be thousands of diets out there and hundreds of new ones coming out every year, all operating on the same premise that you can somehow force yourself to lose weight. If diets worked, the issue would be done. No one would be talking about it anymore. The reason everyone’s talking about it is because the very premise is flawed, and every approach founded on that same premise is, unfortu- nately, doomed to the same fate.

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