Every diet I tried ended up the same way. There would be a whole list of foods I wasn’t allowed to eat. I’d follow the diet to the letter. I’d lose a little weight through sheer brute force and willpower. Then there would come an inevitable point when I couldn’t take it anymore and I’d have a huge binge. Whatever weight I had lost on the diet would come back in a matter of days, and a week later I’d be 5 pounds heavier than when I started the diet. This pattern of losing 10 pounds and gaining 15 pounds started in 1990, until by September 2001 I reached my peak of 409 pounds. So I decided to get off of the dieting roller coaster once and for all, and I resolved never to diet again. Instead I was going to try to figure out why my body seemed to be forcing me to gain so much weight. I decided to find out what I could do to get it to want to be thin again. Armed with a solid background in biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania, I spent 12 hours a day researching everything I could about the hormones, enzymes, neurotransmitters and chemical massagers that cause weight gain. I learned that losing weight sustainably isn’t about counting calories, but about creating the proper hormonal environment in your body that’s conducive to weight loss. Since stress and emotional issues can cause an unfavorable hormonal environment, the issue needs to be addressed from a mind-body perspective. We need to take a holistic approach that looks at our psychological and emotional life, as much as what and when we eat. Over a two-and-half-year period I lost 220 pounds, without dieting. I’ve been the same weight now for over 10 years and I still don’t diet. I eat whatever I want, whenever I want. These were the keys to my transformation: Most people who have sleep apnea don’t even know that they have it, although the people they live with would know, because people with sleep apnea snore very loudly. It turns out I had one of the worst cases of sleep apnea that my sleep study technicians had ever seen. From the moment I got the CPAP machine I started having more energy and less junk food cravings. And the weight started to melt away for good. Over the years I’ve found that 65-70% of the clients I work with are using weight as a form of protection. I call this “emotional obesity”. When you work through the issues that are causing emotional obesity and break the association that fat equals safe, the body is much more willing to let go of the weight. After I broke this association and the weight no longer served its purpose - that is, the armor of fat no longer made me feel any safer - the weight all but went away. Taking a mind body approach that nourishes the body and reduces the physical, mental and emotional stresses that cause weight gain is the most sensible and sustainable way to lose weight. I’ve now worked with tens of thousands of people in 60 countries teaching this approach and we’re getting amazing results. People who have spent a lifetime of yo-yo dieting have now lost weight - 50, 100 and 200 pounds, without dieting by following this exact formula. Then on September 11th 2001, Jon received a wake-up call. He was scheduled to fly from Newark to San Francisco that day, and it was only by chance that he was not on the United Airlines Flight 93 that was hijacked by terrorists and crashed in Pennsylvania with no survivors. Jon realized that life was a precious opportunity not to be wasted. He realized that his weight would eventually kill him and decided to do something about it. Over the next two and a half years, Jon lost over 200 lbs without dieting, pills or surgery. He also stopped feeling stressed and overworked and started living the life of his dreams. His book The Gabriel Method is an international best seller, translated into 14 languages, with over 350,000 readers worldwide. Learn more at TheGabrielMethod.com
