How Chronic Dieting is Affecting Your Weight
If you’re like many clients I work with, you’ve unintentionally put your body into what’s referred to as a “famine state.” When you restrict the amount of food you eat, your body responds to this self-imposed famine by storing fat and making it nearly impossible to lose weight.
It’s a catch-22...
Worse still, restrictive diets reduce your essential nutrient intake so your body goes into a nutritional famine at the same time, leading to uncontrollable food cravings. To your body, dieting and any other type of restriction is seen as a threat, and it adapts by activating your FAT Programs. While fat might seem like your worst enemy, in certain circumstances, your body sees gaining and storing fat as the best way to protect you.
Want to Turn Off Your FAT Programs? Start now...
- Add “big 3” foods to your meals every day (protein, omega 3 fatty acids, live food)
- Forget about fad diets & gimmicks
- Remember that chronic dieting leads to chronic weight problems, while naturally thin people never diet or even think about it
Why You Should Stop Dieting Now!
When I was overweight, I spent countless hours (and dollars) plowing through different diet books searching for some miracle program that would actually work for me. There was Atkins, The Zone, Fit for Life, low-fat, all-carb, no-carb, you name it, I tried it!
And each new diet ended with the same old result, a result I was all too familiar with... failure. Not only did I gain back all the weight I worked so hard to lose, I’d often end up gaining more than I started with. With each yo-yo cycle, I’d lose con fidence, lose hope, and spiral deeper and deeper into despair. I felt as if I was destined to be fat.
And then it all changed.
Out of pure desperation one evening, I pulled my car over on the side of the freeway and rested my forehead on the steering wheel. At 409 lbs, I was borderline diabetic, I had terrible sleep apnea, my brain was in a constant fog, and I was struggling just to get through the day.
Right then, I declared (out loud) that I would never diet again. I was going to focus on getting healthy becauseafter over a decade of struggle, it was 100% clear to me that diets don’t work. I’m begging you too to make this shift today - to focus on adding not restricting, to focus on abundance and self-love not lack and self-hate.
That single statement on the side of the freeway is what led me down my path all the way to what has become my life’s work. What started as a best-selling book has now turned into an international movement for holistic, sustained weight loss; and I’m so excited to see the momentum growing with each passing year.
As humiliating and frustrating as it was for me to try and fail on so many diets, and as horrible as it felt to be 409 lbs (my highest weight), those experiences gave me an unparalleled insight that I now channel directly into my research and teaching.
Here are My Top 3 Discoveries:
- Dieting puts your body in a state of famine and ensures that you’ll gain back the lost weight.
- Exercising to battle overeating is like running away from a burning re... the moment you stop, you get burned.
- Real, sustainable results are archived holistically, by balancing your physical, emotional, and spiritual bodies.
So...What Should I Eat?
My Total Transformation students often send in questions, and one of the most common questions goes something like this:
“I know I need to stop extreme dieting... but then what do I eat?”
At The Gabriel Method we focus on adding what you’re missing back into your life, so here’s the question I’d like you to ask instead:
“Why is your body really hungry right now anyway?”
Most weight loss programs are all about rules and restrictions, behavior modi cation and supposed “willpower;” but life changes and so do circumstances.
It’s impossible to stay on a diet forever, and portion control and calorie counting happen all by themselves, unconsciously, when your FAT Programs are turned off. When you truly nourish your mind, body and spirit, you’ll eventually “crowd out” the foods that have been activating your FAT Programs and causing you to gain weight.
Is Your Body Able to Burn Fat Right Now?
Did you know that almost everyone who struggles with weight loss for 12 months or more has developed a chemical imbalance?
During the 12 years I spent dieting and doing grueling exercises, I wish I knew that gaining and losing weight again and again actually makes your body more and more prone to obesity. According to the latest research in metabolism*, when a person gains and loses weight repeatedly, their muscle fibers transform and end up burning as much as 11% less calories each day (compared to someone of the same weight who never dieted).
Here’s why this is important...
Two people of the same weight can require a difference in calories that’s equivalent to that of a small meal – talk about bad news! Not only that, the yo-yo dieter often experiences stronger food cravings and less desire to exercise as a result of the body’s recent famine.
If you’re like I was, you might have a lot of things working against you right now; and the realization that you’ve got a chemical imbalance might just fuel your frustration.
But don’t let it!
Understanding your biology is one of the keys to The Gabriel Method, and the better you understand what’s going on inside, you can quickly learn to work with your body rather than fighting it.
Eat Live a Caveman, Think Like a Physicist!
Your genetic heritage comes directly from our hunter-gatherer ancestors...
... and that means you’re better suited to hunting, foraging, and fi ghting for your food than you are trying to subsist on frozen dinners or take out.
Intuitively, you probably already knew that. What you might not know is that while your conscious mind is as modern as broadband internet, it does an extremely poor job of communicating to your primal body. In terms of weight loss, this means that no matter how much book knowledge you have about nutrition or how many hours you spend at the gym, your primal body, most often, remains boss.
So if your inner caveman feels it needs fat, it nds a way to make sure you stay hungry all day. Conversely, when your hunter body feels it needs to be thin, your hunger will decrease and you’ll lose weight without even trying.
Ask yourself this: “Why do you even need fat in the fi rst place?”
These days, you don’t need fat. You don’t suffer from long, cold winters exposed to the elements, and at any given time, most people have access to food within a few short steps to the kitchen. So excess body fat today is, by de finition, a biological mistake.
And the best way to reverse this is to reconnect your primal body and modern brain through the mind-body practice of visualization. Using mental images is similar to the caveman writing on the rock wall with ash. This type of communication goes beyond language and speaks directly to your subconscious in a language it understands: images.
Even if you’ve never done visualization before or if you’re weirded-out by the whole idea, I have to insist that you give it a try. For weight loss, it’s perhaps the single most effective thing I teach.
Source: The Gabriel Method
