Motivational Method

Below is a cut-and-paste article I got from 1stOctober'08's The Star, health section. Interesting read.

TRIM WITH EASE Tan Cheng Li

A new method to trim down espouses a nourishing diet and a healthy state of mind.

NO cutting down on calories, no heavy workouts, no surgery, eat whatever and however much you want - the Gabriel Method sure sounds like a dream weight loss programme. Jon Gabriel, a trim and taut 83kg in a 1.9m frame, is proof that his slimming method works for, just seven years ago, he was an obese 187kg.

The approach behind the Gabriel Method appears to be simple: you lose weight by getting your body to want to be thin. Huh?
Jon Gabriel with his old pair of pants. His weight dropped drastically after he stopped worrying about it.

Gabriel explains: “Your body has an internal logic that determines how fat or thin you will be at any given time. The way to lose weight is not to diet or struggle but to understand this logic and work with it so that your body wants to lose weight.”

Gabriel devised his weight loss technique through much hard-won lessons over 12 years during which he struggled to keep his weight down. Like many fat people trying to shed the extra kilos, Gabriel dieted and tried one weight loss programme after another, but none worked.

Instead, his girth kept growing until one day, in August 2001, he had a eureka moment.

“I realised that I was fat because my body wanted to be fat and as long as it wanted to be fat, I’d be fighting it and I would always lose. So I decided I’d never diet again and instead try to figure out why my body wanted to be fat in the first place.”

That quest saw him spending 10 hours a day learning everything about weight gain and weight loss.

“I researched biochemistry, neuro-biology, quantum physics, stress management, meditation and the mind-body connection. I started to get real answers. I started to lose weight and I wasn’t dieting,” he says in an e-mail interview.

The transformation is stark as the “before” and “after” photographs show: one of a morbidly obese Gabriel, the other a toned Gabriel with six pecs and handsome, chiselled features. With his new body came a new life - Jon gave up his stressful stock-broking job in New York and moved to Australia. He now travels worldwide to share his weight loss-without-dieting technique. He has also written a book, The Gabriel Method.

Gabriel, 42, concluded people are not fat solely because they overeat, lack exercise or are undisciplined, but because “their body wants them to be fat”. It is a genetic survival mechanism linked to times of ancient famine and extreme cold when it was a case of survival of the fattest.

“We don’t have those stresses any more, but we still have stress, which can trick our body into holding on to weight and fighting for its life,” says Gabriel.

To get your body to want to be thin, he explains, you have to address and eliminate the reasons why your body is holding on to excess fat in the first place. Some of these reasons are nutritional starvation, chronic yo-yo dieting, mental and emotional stress, toxins and devitalisation.

Sure, we eat, but we might be feeding our bodies with nutrient-poor food or we might not be digesting food properly and absorbing the nutrients. Our bodies sense this nutrient deficiency as famine and reacts by storing fat. We might also be loading our bodies with toxins from chemical-laden, processed food. To protect us, our bodies store even more fat since fatty tissues readily absorb toxins.

“The way that you address these issues is to add foods and nutrients that your body is craving, and practise certain visualisation techniques (that he talks about in his book) that eliminate the mental and emotional causes of obesity,” says Gabriel.

“The most common mistake with other weight loss methods is that they don’t address the real issues. I personally find that the mental and emotional stresses are a much more compelling cause of fat gain, and most diets or methods don’t even go there.”

Gabriel should know. He has, after all, tried everything from low-fat diets to low-carb diets and everything in between. He had spent a small fortune consulting Dr Robert Atkins (of the high-protein Atkins Diet), naturopaths, homeopaths, chiropractors and fitness trainers, spent time at Pritikin Institute (a health centre) and even had an acupuncturist tape seeds to his ear €“ all to no avail.

“They all followed the same pattern. I’d lose a little weight in the short term, then I’d get a rebound, then I’d be hungry all the time. I couldn’t fight it and, sooner or later, I’d binge. Weight that took me weeks to lose would be back in a matter of days and then I’d be even heavier than when I first started out.”

Hence the Gabriel Method renounces dieting. Gabriel points out that a nourished body will not demand for more food. Cutting calorie intake on the other hand, can do more harm than good because it will trigger chemical changes in the body that mimic a state of famine, making your body want to gain fat and hold on to it.

“The reason we have excess fat on our bodies in the first place is to protect us against famine. That’s why diet’s don’t work ... you can lose weight in the short term, but then you activate a famine response that puts your body into fat-storage mode for its survival. This inevitably leads to a rebound weight gain.”

Although you can eat however much you want, Gabriel advocates eating lots of greens (which are essentially low-calorie foods) and organic produce. He recommends a diet with ample water, proteins (from grass-fed meat, free-range chicken, cold-water fish and whey protein), essential fatty acids (Omega 3 from cold water fish and flaxseed oil) and, for efficient digestion, probiotics and digestive enzymes. Unlike other popular weight-loss programmes, the Gabriel Method does not deny you of any foods that you might be craving but instead, makes your body crave healthier foods. You are also not required to eat only certain types of food such as low-carb or high-protein.

Gabriel explains why: “It’s important to provide your body with the nutrients that it requires. But everyone is different and a low-carb or a high-protein diet, or any other diet of this type, is oversimplified and doesn’t necessarily address the real reasons that your body wants to be fat, such as mental and emotional stress, toxins and devitalisation.”

Another trick that Gabriel employs to stay slim is the “visualisation” technique, whereby he pictures his ideal body, as motivation. To help those with no experience with visualisation, he has developed a visualisation CD that comes with the book.

Gabriel’s method was the highlight of the conference of the American Holistic Medical Association in June 2007. He says there are doctors recommending the Gabriel Method. One of them is Dr Jean Vokelman, director of the Endo-Biogenic Medical Centre at the University of Idaho. Vokelman is now putting together a continuing education course on the Gabriel Method.

“Every other weight loss approach follows the same paradigm ... you have to force your body to be thin by restricting calories, or to make yourself exercise, or through behaviour modification or more radical methods such as drugs and surgical procedures. But if you can get your body to want to be thin, weight loss happens automatically,” says Gabriel.

Sounds simple enough to be given a shot, you think?

*http://thestar.com.my/health/