The Gabriel Method, Part Three (What if You’ve Been on a Diet)
Saturday, September 19th, 2009Just in case you haven’t noticed… I really like the Gabriel Method.
Every night, lately, I fall asleep listening to Jon Gabriel’s soothing voice. Aww, that man has the most amazing voice. I feel almost as if I’m being hugged just listening to him.
I do have to admit that I have yet to hear the second half of that audio, and it’s only about 15 or 20 minutes long. To my (and his) credit, this is how it is supposed to work.
But that’s not what I wanted to talk about today.
Enamored as I am with the Gabriel Method, I had been feeling guilty because I was still reading other diet books, and experimenting with cobbling together a diet plan along the lines of a low carbish version of the Every Other Day Diet.
More on that in a bit.
But as I said, I felt guilty. And then, I heard Jon on his radio show where he talks about that exact issue, and I feel guilty no more.
Here’s what he said, approximately:
If you’ve been on any diet for a while, and habe been keeping your weight down with great effort, you’re going to put on weight if you just switch over to the Gabriel method.
Now we don’t really want that. So it’s helpful to find a way to ease into it, and finding a way to control intake of food/calories, but preferably a way that is relatively non-stressful.
And so I’m right back where I started — experimenting with various diets to find an approach that feels low-stress, won’t leave me feel hungry, and helps me lose weight.
And so that’s what I’ve found.
Here are a few ingredients:
1) listening to Jon’s magic audio each night (waiting for the morning audio to finally become available)
2) realizing that stress is hugely contributing to weight issues and therefore making it a priority to reduce stress,
3) adding healthy nurturing food stuffs (enough protein, live foods, veggies, and flax seed and/or fish oil.
Other Method(s)
1) Every Other Day Diet (it’s part of what finally got me unstuck), which involves eating a fairly low number of calories one day, and relatively normally the next, alternating one high day and one low day. How to deal with the hunger challenge will be discussed in a future blog post.
2) Learning from other sources about supplements and other tricks and in many cases using what knowledge I have accumulated over the years (much of it actually during the heyday of low carb and Atkins, learning much of it from the unfortunately now defunct maker of Keto products. I still miss Keto mac and cheese.
3) Using some of those helpful things that make the lower calorie days less stressful (i.e., by keeping hunger in check), to be discussed in upcoming post.
The thing is that between the Gabriel visualization exercises and the various dietary tweaks I’ve been making, it works very nicely together. It has actually lead to my weight moving in the desired direction, and is a lot less stressful than almost any other plan I’ve ever attempted.
More coming soon, along with some info on better sleep and stress relief.
Ellisabeth
