Visualization for Weight Loss -The Gabriel Method

Mental Causes of Obesity

Update —I’ve since lost touch with Gina, but I heard from a mutual friend that she’s lost weight and is doing fabulously as an artist and just had her first big art exhibit. Mental Obesity: Beliefs That Get In The Way What I call “mental obesity” is when your beliefs either cause you to gain weight or prevent you from losing weight. To a much larger extent than people would like to admit, our beliefs create and affect our reality. If beliefs are useful, they make everything flow smoothly. But dysfunctional beliefs only get in the way, and you may need to reexamine them, update them, or acquire new beliefs. I once heard of a railway worker in Canada who worked on a train that had refrigerated cars. His greatest fear was that he would accidentally be locked in one of the cars one day and that he would freeze to death. Sure enough, one day he was inadvertently locked into one of these cars. He wrote a letter to his daughter about how he was always afraid of this happening, and he died in the car that night. The next day they found his body, and the coroner’s report stated that he had indeed frozen to death. The only problem with what would have otherwise been an obvious diagnosis was that the refrigeration in the car wasn’t turned on that night . He had frozen to death simply because he believed that he was going to freeze to death. A well-known phenomenon in Australia is the aboriginal practice of “pointing the bone.” A medicine man will point at his victim with a sharpened bone extracted from the body of a goanna (a species of giant monitor lizard) or a kangaroo. Victims believe so strongly in the power of the bone that they quickly sicken and refuse to eat or drink. Unless a Ngangkari healer intervenes, they die, victims of their own beliefs. “Pointing the bone” works because it’s common knowl- edge—an accepted belief—that the bone is fatal. It works and has done so for thousands of years. People die because they truly believe the bone will kill them. If beliefs can kill, then there

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