Surprising Mental Wellness Tools with Jon Gabriel
Jon Gabriel
Jonathan Bailor: Hey everybody, Jonathan Bailor back with another SANE show. And very excited about today’s show because I get to bring back to you one of my personal friends and someone who I got to tell you when I’m just out looking on the Internet about people that are maybe talking about SANE, there’s one guy whose name keeps getting brought up over and over and over again about I wish Jonathan would talk to this guy, they seem to have similar stories and we certainly do. He’s an awesome guy and I’m so happy to have him back on the show. Jon Gabriel, welcome brother.
Jon Gabriel: Jonathan, it’s great to be here. Thank you.
Jonathan Bailor: Jon, I am extremely jealous. I’m looking in your backdrop there and where are you, man? You look like you’re in heaven.
Jon Gabriel: I’m in heaven. That’s exactly where I am. I died and went to heaven. Nope, I’m in Noosa Queensland. So Noosa Queensland is on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, Australia which is about two hours north of Brisbane. It’s a beautiful spot. The water behind us goes right into the a couple of hundred meters it feeds right into the ocean and there’s paddle boarding all over here and lots of beautiful wildlife and it’s just a great spot, yeah. A very inspirational place to be.
Jonathan Bailor: Well, Jon, I love that you brought up the word inspiration because I know that you have been an inspiration to just millions and millions of people over the past years, and I know you’ve been up to some really exciting stuff because you’ve been doing this for quite some time now. So for the listeners who didn’t see the first time you were on the show could you give us a quick bit of background on leading up to today Jon Gabriel and what’s been keeping you busy most recently?
Jon Gabriel: Yeah. So my story is I gained and lost 220 pounds. So back in 1990, I started working on Wall Street. It was a very high stress job and I just kept gaining and gaining and no diet would work for me, Pritikin didn’t work for me. I worked with Dr. Atkins face-to-face for two months. We met every week and at the end he just yelled at me for being so fat and I just kept gaining and gaining and it was almost like this fat switch went off in my body. And people have this stereotype that overweight people are just weak and lazy and that wasn’t the case for me. I was pretty much effortlessly thin when I moved to New York and this was in my late 20s and then I’m making an effort to lose weight and I’m gaining and gaining and gaining, and I got to the point where I was over 400 pounds and that was in 2001.
And I had this turning point where I decided I was never going to diet again. Instead I was going to try to figure out what tripped the switch. What the switch was. What this fast switch was that was causing me to gain and gain weight and how I could turn it off so that I could get back to where I was before and I had a couple of things that helped me a lot. So I went to the University of Pennsylvania, [inaudible 00:02:45] the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and at the same time I was thinking of becoming a doctor so I was pre-med. So I also studied organic chemistry, and molecular biology, and calculus, and physics and all of these things and I wrote research reports in biochemistry so that gave me a really good foundation. And then I spent years working on Wall Street so the combination of that helped a lot.
And the Wall Street part helped me because I was doing a lot of systems development of trading and analysis. So I had a lot of different analysis and then I had the biochemistry background so I put those together, but I started looking in a very different direction. I started looking in terms of stress for starters and how stress can possibly cause you to be fat because I knew that it wasn’t until I moved to New York and I was in this high stress job that I started gaining weight.
I started studying stress reduction, I started learning more about nutrition and digestion, and rather than diet what I started to do was address all these different things that I had discovered were hormonal triggers that were causing me to gain weight. For example, I had very sleep apnea which was elevating cortisol levels and we all know that cortisol causes you to gain weight. I had very bad digestion issues and a leaky gut and all these things were causing chronic low grade inflammation and as we know now chronic low grade inflammation causes you heaps and heaps of stress and emotional trauma from childhood. I had to work through all these different things so I took a mind/body approach where I was really nourishing my body.
I got a CPAP machine for my sleep apnea so [inaudible 00:04:11] healing my [inaudible 00:04:12] and then started doing a lot of visualization and meditation for the stress reduction and that combination started to really work and I started to lose weight without dieting. When I say without dieting, I still ate chocolate, I still had all these things, but things went away over time. It’s like the hormonal triggers, the chronic low grade inflammation and the stress that was causing me to want the chocolate in the first place started to go away and it started creating healthier and healthier. And so over a 2½ year period I lost all of my weight and went back to a very fit 183 pounds with stomach muscles and almost no trace of ever being overweight and that was ten years ago, and I can tell you in the last ten years I’ve never dieted. I do not diet, but my diet has evolved into one of the healthiest diets in the world. I eat lots and lots of live foods and super greens and I mean really, really crave them and it’s very rare that I ever crave processed foods. It was a very organic process.
So after I lost my weight, I was on a lot of national TV because of the dramatic before and after changes. And then I wrote a book which got translated into 16 languages and is in 60 countries and is international best seller in three or four different countries. And I think it really touched a cord with people because people were sick of hearing, and you know, this too, that you should just eat less and it’s just calories in/calories out and it’s just like you’re a sink where more water in/less water in and it’s just not that simple and I knew it was not that simple. And when I was losing the weight, I knew I had a message for the world that it is not that simple, that you’ve got to address the hormonal triggers that are causing you to gain weight. And if you’re looking at the hormonal triggers, you’ve got to do it from a mind/body perspective because stress and emotional issues cause hormonal problems the same way that processed food does or medications or things like that.
So I put this approach together and I wrote the book and it’s touched a cord and since then, I’ve been reaching out to as many people as I can through seminars and coaching and more support things that we have. We’ve got a 21-day meditation for weight loss and all these different things that we have to get people to understand the mind/body connection between health and weight and to start focusing on health, mind/body health, as a function of fitness as opposed to restriction and it keeps evolving now. So it just keeps going pretty much and that’s where we’re at.
Jonathan Bailor: Jon, well you know that I love everything you’re saying here. I know the viewers and listeners are going to love this as well. And I want to get your insight because to me what you’re saying of course mind/body connection is deeply there. You’ve got to heal the system first, you can’t just white knuckle it.
Jon Gabriel: Yeah.
Jonathan Bailor: So for example imagine going into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and just standing up and saying, I have something I’d like to share, all you people just need to try harder to stop drinking. What’s your problem …
Jon Gabriel: Exact.
Jonathan Bailor: … just try harder.
Jon Gabriel: Yeah. Yeah, just man up, quit being a wuss.
Jonathan Bailor: Yeah. So why is it that for food which is just a series of chemical informations, I mean everything that we put into our body is stuff that’s going into our body, why is food treated so much differently in the mainstream media?
Jon Gabriel: That’s a really good question. Because if you look at the brain and the way the brain processes urges and cravings so we’ve got this survival brain we call the hypothalamus, the animal brain, the lizard brain. Whatever you want to call it, it’s a survival brain that makes certain determinations about what you need. For example, the survival brain will determine how much sleep you need, right. That’s not a calculation that we do that’s our brain doing a calculation so you need X amount of sleep. Your survival brain will determine how much you need to breathe. That’s not us doing that, right. So that’s our brain says we need X amount of oxygen to keep going. Our survival brain will also determine how much we need to eat and how much weight we need on our body. That’s not a calculation that we do.
Now if you look at things like sleep and breathing now imagine you went to your doctor and your doctor said that your problem is you sleep too much and you should just sleep two hours a night and everybody in the world shamed you for being weak and lazy because you couldn’t sleep those two hours a night. So you try right. You try sleeping two hours a night, you set your alarm, it might well the first day. You’re going to be miserable the third day. By the fourth day you’re going to be falling asleep at the wheel and by the fifth day you will sleep more than two hours guaranteed. Why is that? Because the brain that’s in charge of this is forcing you.
Jonathan Bailor: Yeah.
Jon Gabriel: And the same mechanisms that force you to sleep or force you to eat, and I lived through this …
Jonathan Bailor: Yeah.
Jon Gabriel: … so I lived through a body that for whatever reason, and we can talk about the reasons if you want, but for whatever reason my body said I need to gain weight, I need to eat more. So when I was in that body and I’m not in it anymore, my body’s different right, but when I was in that body if it was 11:00 at night and I didn’t have enough during the day I wanted pizza, I wanted donuts, I wanted chips and it wouldn’t go away the same way sleep wouldn’t go away or the same way that if you try to hold your breath how long would you last. And I always tell people when your doctor tells you to eat less, you should just tell them to breathe less …
Jonathan Bailor: Exactly.
Jon Gabriel: … because it’s the exact same thing so instead you’ve got to understand the chemistry and it’s very, very subtle, very dynamic and it’s evolving. The research is evolving all the time, and you’ve got to understand the dynamics of what causes your body to want to hold onto weight from a theoretical standpoint, and from a scientific standpoint, and what would make your body want to be thin. And so what happened was my body did not want the weight anymore, the issues were addressed. So there were issues that were causing chemistry that was making my body say, you need to gain weight. The issues went away, the chemistry went away, and my body said you need to lose weight. So it was the easiest thing in the world. I wasn’t hungry, I wasn’t craving, and now it’s the easiest thing in the world. So I say figure out what’s causing your body to want to gain weight, address that, and then it’s the most easy natural thing in the world, but we don’t do that in a society. We have this prejudice that it’s just about calories in/calories out and it’s kindergarten medicine.
There was a great researcher, Dr. Ron Rose, I love this guy who understands Leptin and insulin resistance before anybody was ever even talking about it and I used to follow him back in the late 90s and early 2000. And he says that this idea of calories in/calories out is kindergarten medicine and it is. It’s irresponsible in my opinion. Given the research that’s out right now, it’s irresponsible kindergarten medicine. You’ve got to address what’s causing the body to hold onto and then it becomes automatic.
Jonathan Bailor: This paradigm shift, Jon, is so …
Jon Gabriel: Yeah.
Jonathan Bailor: … because I think once someone understands the model …
Jon Gabriel: Yeah.
Jonathan Bailor: … that you’re describing which is you to need to heal the system not just try to brunt force override the system. That type of logic really applies to many other areas in addition to just weight problems, right. I mean if you have diabetes and you’d like to manage that better and you could just pump yourself full of insulin or you could look at the underlying causes and try to heal that system. The same thing with arthrosclerosis or any other kind of medical condition. So how do people take that step back and say, I’m not just going to try to treat the symptoms, I’m not going to take that pharmaceutical model that Western medicine sometimes approaches, I’m going to address the causes, the internal causes. How do we do that?
Jon Gabriel: Yeah. So the first place to do it is as you say to make the paradigm shift. As soon you do that, you start looking in a different direction. So if you take Type 2 diabetes for example treating Type 2 diabetes with insulin is just treating the symptoms which is blood sugar, but it also makes the Type 2 diabetes worse.
Jonathan Bailor: Yeah.
Jon Gabriel: So the same things that cause weight gain cause Type 2 diabetes which is insulin resistance. You got to look at what causes insulin resistance and when you understand that that’s what’s causing your weight gain or one of the things that’s causing your weight gain then you start looking in a different direction. Well hang on, what’s causing my system to be resistant to insulin? What’s causing my system to ignore Leptin which is the most important component? And when you start looking in that direction then you start looking at things like digestion. Now hold on a second, my digestion’s screwed up. It’s causing leaky gut which is elevating the toxic level in my blood which is causing an immune response which is elevating my pro inflammatory cytokines which is causing insulin and Leptin resistance, etc., etc., etc. You’ve got to start looking at the causes. But all it takes in my opinion, especially today when there’s so much information, all it takes is that paradigm shift. You’ve got to step back and you’ve got to say there’s a cause and to me that’s the biggest step. After that everything flows.
Jonathan Bailor: Yeah.
Jon Gabriel: Once you do that, you start looking and you start saying well what is that cause and then you start reading. Well hang on a second, it turns out that when I do eat processed foods it elevates my insulin levels too much. It’s not about the calories of the donut, it’s the hormonal effect. And when I have dairy it causes an immune response. It elevates my pro inflammatory cytokines. It’s not that I’m having X amount of fat or sugar or anything like that, it’s the hormonal response. And when I’m chronically stressed out, it’s the hormonally response. And when you bring it back to that, you go in the direction of the cures and then it becomes automatic.
Jonathan Bailor: Jon …
Jon Gabriel: … you’ll find …
Jonathan Bailor: So to make that paradigm shift, I know that’s one of those things that’s easier said than done because for 40 years for a lot of us, for 20 years, for 60 years, whatever it is, we’ve been told that isn’t the way. You’re just weak, you just need to do …
Jon Gabriel: Right.
Jonathan Bailor: … better. So how have you personally and now around the world helped people to actually address the issues in the mind first and then the issues in the body address themselves because the mind takes care of it for you?
Jon Gabriel: Right. Well for me, I knew while I was gaining weight that something had to be there because I was different. So I’m 28 years old, right, I’m 183 pounds and I don’t have to worry about weight, I’m not counting calories, nothing. I’m not eating a lot of junk food yet, I’m a pretty healthy person, but not counting calories and then all of a sudden boom something happens. I’m hungry all the time and I’m gaining weight and then all these people are telling me you’re just weak, you’re lazy and I’m knowing it’s not true. But I’m listening to it because that’s what’s out there, right, there’s nothing else out there.
But what I discovered is that when I figured out that it wasn’t true for me and when I proved it wasn’t true for me and changed that and started communicating to people. To me it’s like there’s this oil all over the floor and that idea is a spark that just spreads because there are people that have been struggling with weight for 30 years that have been buying this dogma that they’re weak, and lazy, and they just need to cut their carbs. Well first we’re told to cut fat, then we’re told to cut carbs, and we’re told all these things and there’s always some piece of the puzzle that’s true about it. But the part that’s not true is that they’re weak, and lazy, and they just need to white knuckle and gut it out and they know that. And as soon as you’re able to explain it in a logical way of why your body wants to be fat and why it would want to be thin, people, they get it. They really are receptive to it and they move in that direction and sometimes it takes a long time.
In my coaching, I’m working with this one lady as an example, but this is a typical example where for eight months she worked really hard. And when I say really hard, she wasn’t restricting herself, but she really worked hard at making changes to heal her digestion, reduce toxins, learn to meditate and visualize, all this stuff, no weight loss. And what I told was don’t think about weight loss. We’re creating a foundation, we’re changing your body on a cellular level so that you’re reducing for example the insulin resistance so your insulin levels get low enough so you can start burning fat. This can take time. Eight months and then all of a sudden [inaudible00:15:46] she reached this tipping point, this crossover point, she is losing weight left and right. Every week it’s just dropping off of her. She lost 50 pounds in two months now and it is dropping off of her and she’s still not dieting and it’s because she’s addressed the issues.
So not only do you have to make the paradigm shift if the diet white knuckle thing doesn’t work, you also have to make the paradigm shift that when you do it the right way it’s not necessarily overnight. It’s not lose 20 pounds in 20 pounds, it’s spend some time creating a foundation and laying the groundwork to heal yourself on a cellular and hormonal level and then your body wants to be thin and then it becomes automatic again. So that’s an important component to it.
Jonathan Bailor: It’s a huge component, Jon. And I love that you use the word heal because if we think about any other aspect of our body that could break, if you break your ankle it takes a while for that to heal. But once it’s healed you can–just like on Monday you couldn’t really walk on it, but on Tuesday after four months now you can walk on it. And I see that so much is we tend to have this myth of linear progress …
Jon Gabriel: Yeah.
Jonathan Bailor: … which is not the way it works, right?
Jon Gabriel: Right. Well, the linear progress is the calories in/calories out model, right?
Jonathan Bailor: Yeah.
Jon Gabriel: So every day you have 1,000 calories and you burn 2,000 calories and every day you lose half a pound, whatever it is, so that’s the model and our body’s going to work that way. Our bodies have survival programs in them to keep weight on or cause us to gain weight or lose weight for survival reasons and I’ll just paint the picture real quickly. If you look at how we evolved 10,000 years ago we were living outdoors, right, so there’s different environments. So as humans we were able to populate the entire planet. Now, there’s living environments where it’s cold all the time and there’s no food and there’s living environments where there’s lot of food, it’s warm all the time, but there’s predators chasing us. And you look at those two different models and you see what the correct evolutionary adaptation or survival adaptation is for those models. One of them is to be fatter and one of them is to be thinner.
So if you were living in Alaska for example or a place where it’s always cold and you’re living outdoors, there’s no fruit trees, everything’s frozen in, there’s not many animals, and you’re cold all the time that is a chronic low grade inflammatory stress that causes chronic low grade elevations of stress hormones like cortisol, elevated triglycerides, and pro inflammatory cytokines and that signal change of hormones communicates to your body that you need to be fat for survival reasons. It’s the hormonal message to your brain that you are in a cold starving environment and so your brain does certain things to basically transform you into a fat storage machine. You become hungry all the time, your metabolism slows down, your thyroid slows down, you become insulin resistant, and you lose the ability to burn fat. And when you combine all those things, and you crave sweeter foods, when you combine all those things it’s like your body’s been transformed into a fat storage machine.
Now in today’s world, we don’t have to worry about being outdoors and not having enough to eat, but we have stress. We have toxins, we have mental and emotional stress, we have digestion issues, we have processed foods that are causing hormonal chaos, we’ve got medications. We’ve got all these things are causing low grade chronic inflammatory stress in our body and the changes in those hormones signal your body from our pre historic survival mechanics to gain weight. It tricks your body. It activates this survival program that says we need to gain weight. And when this survival program which I call the fat programs is activated in a world of all you can eat excess empty calorie junk food, it’s a recipe for disaster and that’s why we get morbid obesity.
But if you look at some other living environments thousands of years ago, let’s say that we were living in a tropical paradise where it was warm all the time so there was no stress of trying to keep warm so we didn’t need fat to keep us warm. There’s food everywhere live fresh real greens and fruits and nuts and seeds and animal protein, all we want and we can eat whenever we want and we do eat whenever we want. So now we’re in this environment where we don’t have those stresses anymore so our body’s saying you don’t need the weight for survival reasons. And then if you take it a step further and you imagine in that environment there are tigers that are chasing every once in a while. Once a week they come in and if you’re not lightning fast or at least not faster than the guy running next to you, you’re dead, right?
Jonathan Bailor: Yeah.
Jon Gabriel: And now that stress, that periodic 30-second life or death run away from a tiger stress causes a different type of hormonal experience in your body. That stress makes your brain more sensitive to Leptin and it makes your cells more sensitive to insulin. And then the hormonal experience changes to your body saying we don’t need anything for survival reasons because we’re going to be dead. And there’s plenty to eat so we don’t have to worry about holding onto fat and it’s warm out and so we don’t need to worry about holding onto fat. We need to be thin or we’re dead. So what we need to do is understand these mechanisms and create an artificial living environment that mimics the living on an island 10,000 years ago running away from tigers model, which means that you eat lots of real live fresh foods whenever you want and every once in a while you may pretend you’re running away from a tiger. Do you understand?
Jonathan Bailor: Absolutely.
Jon Gabriel: But the calories in/calories out model is the starvation model.
Jonathan Bailor: Yeah.
Jon Gabriel: So you need to eat less food and then our brain’s already thinking we’re in a famine and then when you eat less food it just reinforces that, causes more of those hormones that makes your body want to be fatter even more, and then you go to war with your body.
Jonathan Bailor: It’s brilliant, Jon. And I love the phrase you said about creating this external environment …
Jon Gabriel: Yeah.
Jonathan Bailor: … that simulates what you described. But I also I know that you are one of the leaders in creating an internal environment.
Jon Gabriel: Yeah.
Jonathan Bailor: And I’d love to know–because I know that’s been a lot of your focus recently and I think you even have a new book coming out which is very exciting about creating this internal environment. So can you transition into this internal environment a little bit?
Jon Gabriel: So as I said before stress and emotional issues will cause you to gain weight. And the way I dealt with stress and emotional issues is through visualization. And what I found with visualization is that it not only works to help reduce stress because it’s a form of meditation and we all have learned now that meditation rewires your brain so that you are inhibiting the stress response and you’re feel more calm and more safe. So it does that, but it also helps you create healthy habits and I found that it’s a way of communicating with your body. What I did was I used visualization to communicate to my body that it’s safer to be thin in this environment than fat so I would imagine a visual imagine.
And to me, and obviously you can’t prove this, we’re hundreds of years in my opinion away from even testing this, but what I do believe is that this part of our brain, the survival part of our brain, this animal brain has a consciousness. It’s got a survival consciousness and you can’t communicate to it in words because it doesn’t speak English. You can’t say I want to be thin, it doesn’t understand that. But when you make a visual imagine of the weight melting off of your body and I used to imagine when I exercised running away from tigers, when you make these visual images then your brain, it’s a language that you can communicate to your brain. The same way that if you were to get off in a foreign country in someplace in China, you speak the language and you can’t even read the characters of their alphabet and you have to go to the bathroom well how are you going to know where the bathroom is. The only way you’re going to know where the bathroom is is there’s going to be a picture of a man or a woman. It’s a symbol and symbols are the way you communicate with someone that doesn’t speak your language.
And I honestly believe that we’ve got this survival brain that’s in full control of how fat or thin we are that’s activated by survival programs that are ancient for different living environments that’s so confused by our world that we can’t talk to it, that’s in total charge of our weight and we’re stuck with this. But when you make a visual image, it’s like you’re communicating to it and I have experienced this. When I was 400 pounds, I made a visual image every night as I was going to sleep of exactly the way I wanted to look with stomach muscles, 183 pounds, in perfect shape. Two and a half years later, I became that exact image. I couldn’t have sculpted it more just exactly happened.
And I learned afterwards that bodybuilders when they want to make their biceps bigger, they visualize this. And Olympic athletes, when they want to have the best ski course go down the course and win. And Carl Lewis who won nine gold medals he used to visualize being first in the race. And Tiger Woods would visualize where he wants the ball to go. And all these incredible athletes, mind/body people, the most successful ones use visualize.
So I think we’re like I say hundreds of years away proving this, but visualization is a language that you can use to communicate to your body and so you’re tapping into the power of your mind to transform your body and so I’ve used it in so many different ways. I’ve used it to help give up junk food, I’ve used it to heal emotional trauma, to reduce stress, to improve sleep, to communicate to your body that it’s safer to be thin, to imagine while I’m running really fast that a tiger’s chasing me because your brain doesn’t know the difference between real and imagined experience. So it really thinks that and it goes holy shit, sorry, holy whatever. Excuse me. A tiger’s chasing me and that really, really works.
Jonathan Bailor: Yeah.
Jon Gabriel: And in fact I’ll just tell you this one thing about how I discovered that if I can. When I was about three-quarters of the way into my weight loss, I was riding up a hill and I was thinking I really need something to take my weight loss to the next level. The second I had that thought this dog comes out of nowhere and it starts chasing me and it’s going [inaudible 00:25:34]. So this far away with its canines from taking out my Achilles tendon.
Jonathan Bailor: Oh, jeez.
Jon Gabriel: And I’m standing up and I’m biking as fast as I can trying to get away. For a mile it’s on my tail. Finally it gives up. The next two weeks I dropped weight like crazy. I didn’t know what happened, major plateau breakthrough and nothing changed. And I thought to myself what happened and then I realized it was that experience of my body, that primal experience, of thinking if we’re not thin we’re dead. And so what I used to do after that is every time I got to that place in the ride, I would stand up and imagine that dog was chasing me and your brain doesn’t know the difference between a real and imagined experience and they’ve proved this with athletes many times. And so that worked really well. And then I got to the point where I wasn’t even exercising for a while just imaging that I’m sprinting as fast as I can and something’s chasing me and that worked really well.
So in so many different ways I used visualization and now in all of my coaching I must have created 30 or 40 visualizations now for so many different things. Everything from giving up smoking to reversing Type 2 diabetes to giving up junk food and it’s become my most popular and most consumed product. People love my visualizations in our support group and that’s what they do more than anything is they practice and talk about the visualization. So I decided to write a book about visualization and why it works, how it works, and teach people how to tap into themselves and really give them that power that we all have and just teach them how to access it basically.
Jonathan Bailor: Jon, this description of visualization as a language to communicate with this animal part of your brain, I’ve actually never heard you say that before and that really resonated with me because I’ve experienced the other direction and I think we all can. So if you ever have had a gut feeling, the point of a gut feeling is you can’t put into words …
Jon Gabriel: Yeah.
Jonathan Bailor: You cannot verbalize your brain is telling you something that you can’t verbalize. Well, that’s that animal part of your brain. That’s your amygdala. It’s communicating to you, but it’s not communicating with words that’s why it’s …
Jon Gabriel: Right.
Jonathan Bailor: … a gut feeling.
Jon Gabriel: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right …
Jonathan Bailor: And what you’re saying is you can flip that almost.
Jon Gabriel: You can flip that. And you know what? You can create a two-way conversation and this is me talking 12 years down the road so this is kind of weird stuff. But I had this experience where I remember when I was just finished losing my weight, I had this image of–I made this image of looking like really in great, great shape because I thought let me see how far I can go with this. So I really imagined being in perfect, perfect shape and when I did that I got an image back of me lifting weights in a certain way. Now that was like my body saying, okay if you want to do this you have to do this so it was like talking back. It was doing exercise in a different way than I was doing it.
Jonathan Bailor: Yeah.
Jon Gabriel: In other words, I was exercising in a certain way. I saw this image of me exercising. So it’s almost like the brain was talking, you want this then you need that and I created this communication. And since then now ten years down now I have this communication with my body where if I’m feeling like something’s not right or I want something to happen, my brain will communicate to me or my stomach or my feeling or the image will be that I need to eat more sauerkraut for example or I need to have a juice of this or I need to go out and do that. There’s this language. And then when you have that language that’s when you become your best teacher because your body has infinite intelligence. You just have to learn how to tap into and communicate with it.
Jonathan Bailor: Jon, this is a goldmine and clearly we could talk about this for hours and that’s why you wrote a book about it. So please tell us the name of this book, where …
Jon Gabriel: Yeah.
Jonathan Bailor: … we can learn more about it. And we’ve got some cool bonuses right here for the SANE audience which is really exciting.
Jon Gabriel: Yeah. So it’s a Visualization for Weight Loss and that’s the name of the book and it’s coming out with Hay House. So obviously it’s going to be in all major book stores, but it’s also on my site, the gabrielmethod.com. And we’ll have information on your site with a whole link to a whole bunch of bonuses not just from me, but from a lot of the experts that you and I both enjoy talking with and working with. But there will be free visualizations and lots of other things too to get you started.
Jonathan Bailor: Oh well brilliant, Jon. Thank you again. And what is the name of the book one more time?
Jon Gabriel: It’s Visualization for Weight Loss.
Jonathan Bailor: Visualization for Weight Loss. And again folks if you’re not subscribed to the SANE solution free newsletter and email fun list make sure you do that because we’ll deliver all of these bonuses right into your inbox. And of course, Jon, it’s always a pleasure to chat with you so thank you so much for joining us and for this wonderful book.
Jon Gabriel: Jonathan, my pleasure. And I love talking with you, too. I love the work you’re doing, I love the way you’ve systematized it, and really proven that this paradigm shift has to happen. So your work is just awesome and I appreciate it.
Jonathan Bailor: Beautiful. Well, thank you so much, Jon. And listeners and viewers, I hope you enjoyed this chat as much as I did. Of course, just type in Gabriel Method into your favorite search engine, you could find all sorts of information on Jon and be sure to check out Visualizations for Weight Loss. And remember, stay SANE.