If you can vividly imagine it, you can have it!

Visualize your healthy and fit body!

I wondered whether I might find success using visualization — a meditative technique used by athletes, celebrities, and people like you and me to relax, improve performance, and achieve personal and career goals. I'd used visualization to solve other problems in my life, such as relieving headaches and quitting smoking, so I decided to try it for weight loss.

1. I visualized my ideal body.

I targeted my weight problem through visualization by creating a vivid image of my ideal body. I imagined myself thin and fit, with defined stomach muscles and tight skin. Anyone who knew me at that time would have thought I was insane: This ideal body seemed like an impossible, crazy goal to set for myself. However, I didn't care how unrealistic this image of myself seemed. I wanted to make sure that I had a clear vision of where I was headed. Eventually I became the exact image I visualized.

As it turns out, picturing clear, vivid images is the perfect way to communicate to your brain. Research found that when your mind enters the state of deep relaxation brought on by visualization and other mind-body practices, it becomes primed for suggestion.

2. I used visualization to help reduce stress.

One thing obesity studies have clearly established is that stress can drive weight gain. When we're under constant pressure, the body releases stress hormones that spur hunger, slow down metabolism, and encourage our body to convert calories into fat. What I later discovered was that visualization, meditation, and other mind-body practices are proven tools for reducing stress. Even though my daily life was still filled with challenges, visualization helped me stay calm and kept me relaxed and immune to potential stressors. As a result, the stress hormones that were causing hunger and fat storage in my body started to dissipate.

3. Visualization helped me work through my emotional issues.

When I reached my heaviest weight, I was working alongside an extremely angry, aggressive business partner. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was using my weight as a protective barrier between him and myself. While he wasn’t a physically violent person, he triggered past memories of being abused as a child.

Many people unconsciously use weight as a barrier when they feel threatened, but I found that I could use visualization to create a proactive barrier that helped me feel safer. I would imagine being engulfed in a column of light that was impenetrable. It created a safe barrier around me that others could enter only with my permission. Yes, this was all in my mind, but when I created this barrier using visualization, I was able to convince myself that I was safe and didn't require the excess weight to insulate me from the world. Once I felt safe, the fat began to melt away very quickly.

4. Visualization helped me eliminated my junk food cravings.

Once I figured out how suggestible my brain was during visualization, I tried an experiment. I had always been susceptible to sweets and sugar, and I wanted to see if I could eliminate this craving. Once I reached a state of deep relaxation during my visualization, I imagined that sugar granules were actually pieces of ground glass. I pictured what would happen if I put these sugar granules — which were ground glass — in my mouth. They were tasteless. Worse, they would cut up my mouth and destroy my insides. I was repulsed. After just a few days, I didn't want sweets or anything with sugar in it. The effect was so strong that I haven’t craved sweets or junk food of any kind for almost 12 years now. I've since taught this method to other people, and they've found it equally effective. One woman wanted to control her chocolate cravings. During visualization, she imaged that chocolate was in fact stinky, foul mud. Within two weeks, she no longer craved chocolate.

5. I activated the “Get Thin or Get Eaten” adaptation using visualization.

Way back in our evolutionary past, certain adaptive behaviors helped us survive. People who lived in cold climates with long winters and scarce food supply survived by developing the ability to slow down their metabolism and conserve the fat stores in their abdomen and thighs. Conversely, our ancestors who faced the threat of large predators developed what I call the “Get Thin or Get Eaten” adaptation: They were able to go at a full-out, life-or-death sprint to escape the jaws of a bear or tiger. When the Get Thin or Get Eaten adaptation is activated, your body wants to be thin for survival reasons, because the thinner and faster you are, the better your chances of surviving an attack. This adaptation still exists within all of us — we just need to activate it. The problem is there aren't too many tigers out there chasing us anymore. But you can activate this primal survival response with visualization.

I discovered the power of using visualization to activate the Get Thin Or Get Eaten Adaptation by accident. One day while I was riding my bike a dog started chasing me, barking ferociously. Before I knew it I was at an all out sprint with this canine snapping at my heel. I escaped, and then discovered over the next two weeks the weight just melted off my body. I never got chased by that dog again, but while I was biking I would visualize that I was being chased. I imagined the dog was chasing me, and I would experience the same surge of adrenaline, and then I would imagine myself outpacing the dog with a smile on my face. This worked really well and my weight loss continued to accelerate. Sometimes I wouldn’t even exercise, I would just image I was biking really hard and the dog was chasing me and that still yielded results. That’s because our survival brain doesn’t know the difference between a real and imagined experience, so when you visualize your being chased, to the body it still feels real. If being chased by a predator feels too threatening, you can achieve the same effect by imagining yourself being chased by a friend in a game of tag, but still running really fast to escape.

In these various ways I was able to use the power of my mind, through visualization to help address the real issues that were causing my body to hold onto weight and get my body to once again want to be thin, naturally and sustainably, from the inside out. 

Visualization is uniquely suited to retraining your body to be thin, much more so than dieting or exercise are, because it works from the inside out to change your biochemistry and neural pathways. With regular practice, visualization will ease the stress in your body, and you’ll build up the defenses to protect yourself from deadly diseases.

Now, here are 7 simple steps to help you create the perfect visualization.

STEP 1: GET INTO SMART MODE

The first thing is to get your mind into the more powerful, highly programmable state of SMART Mode. All you need is to find imagery that relaxes you simply and relatively quickly.

STEP 2: MAKE AFFIRMATIONS

You can use an affirmation to make any desired change you’d like, whether it’s to change a habit, belief, or food choice; break an addiction; or anything else. Just make sure that the words you use in your affirmation focus on the positive and take place in the present (not future) tense.

STEP 3: MELT THE WEIGHT OFF

There are lots of ways you can imagine weight melting off your body, but I like this imagery a lot. See the excess weight being transformed into life force energy and being stored in your body as a much purer form of energy than fat. You’re storing it as invisible, healing life force energy.

STEP 4: CREATE YOUR IDEAL SELF

Now that the fat is melting away and becoming energy, turn your inner attention to your ideal self. Picture your desired body shape, and imagine what it feels like to be sitting inside that perfect shape. Feel your skin tight, muscles toned, belly flat, and a lightness of being.

STEP 5: ENVISION COMING DAYS AND MONTHS

After you’ve imagined scenes from your day-to-day life, turn your attention toward the future. Picture scenarios that you want to happen. See yourself becoming fitter, healthier, calmer, more confident, and more desirable. You may want to envision more success in business, more loving relationships, or healthier boundaries.

STEP 6: MAGNETIZE YOUR FUTURE

As you see yourself months and years down the road, in your perfect, ideal shape and body, imagine that this future version of you becomes a magnet that’s pulling you toward the direction of total success.

STEP 7: BRING IT BACK TO YOUR BODY AND GET RECHARGED
Finally, bring that bright image of your future self back to your body and imagine that super-successful future self becomes you right now, as you’re sitting there. Feel the new you that you’ve just created charging every cell of your body with success.

And then, just before you open your eyes, feel and affirm that the visualization you’ve just done will change your life forever. Say to yourself, With the power of my mind, I’ve created my ideal body. My excess weight easily and effortlessly melts off me, and I allow myself to achieve success in every area of my life, now and always. Below is a visualization exercise you can do to help fast track your weight loss.

She first started imagining pac man type beings eating all the fat cells from the bits she wanted to lose weight from. She was doing it five times a day. She began to lose weight but then was faced with a dilemma. She said, “The first part of the female body to go down during weight loss is the breasts.” She didn’t want that. She’d always been proud in that arena, she relayed.

So she adapted her visualization so that when the pac men were full, instead of just exploding they travelled up the way and deposited the fat onto her breasts. It seemed to work magic.

After 5 months she dropped 21 pounds in weight and gained half a cup size.  She said, “It’s just marvellous.”

And amazingly, she said, she didn’t have any cravings for chocolate and other stuff she was eating so much of.

In a seminar in Sweden that I taught, some of the ladies were laughing heartily through the breakout session. During group feedback on their visualizations, I asked what had been so funny. One of them said they had created the BEST EVER weight loss visualization. Now I was intrigued, as was the rest of the group.

They shared that they imagined themselves as lollypops and Brad Pitt was licking them. And as he did, they got smaller and smaller. I’ll leave that one to your imagination!

In many ways, the brain doesn’t distinguish between real and imagery. If we visualize something happening then the brain can process it in some of the same ways as if it was actually happening.

Of course, you won’t turn into a lollypop, in case you were thinking of trying out that visualization, but the symbolism of the volume of fat getting smaller and smaller and smaller is what the brain might process as real.

I have come across many people who have used visualization as part of their weight loss strategy. Part of the reason it works, I believe, is that the brain is tricked into thinking that the fat is reducing and so it subtly alters our behavior, cravings, motivation, as well as, perhaps, even how the body stores fat and where it is stored.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University might be onto another novel way of using visualization to control weight.

They asked volunteers to imagine eating before they actually ate.

The study involved 51 people who were asked to imagine eating either 3 or 30 units of a particular food. The food in one of their experiments was M&Ms.

One set of volunteers had to imagine eating 3 M&Ms and they also had to imagine putting 30 coins into a laundry machine. Another set of volunteers had to do it the other way around. They imagined eating 30 M&Ms but were to imagine placing only 3 coins into the machine. A third set of volunteers just imagined placing 33 coins into the machine.

The reason for the coins in a machine was because the muscles used are similar to lifting food into your mouth and it was important that the volunteers all imagined the same number of hand movements.

After they did this, they were invited to eat some M&Ms from a bowl in preparation for what they were told was going to be a ‘taste test’. But it wasn’t really a taste test. It was really so that the experimenters could secretly record how many M&Ms they ate.

Incredibly, they found that those who imagined eating the most M&Ms (30) ate much less from the bowl than the other two groups.

The conclusion of the study was that imagining eating the M&Ms suppresses the appetite to eat more of them, just as if we had physically ate them. It kind of makes sense. It’s almost as if the brain thinks, “OK, I’ve had enough now. I’m full,” even though the person hasn’t actually eaten anything at all.

This is known as habituation. As we eat more, after a point our appetite reduces otherwise we’d keep on eating. It’s amazingly that the same thing seems to happen when we just imagine eating.

So if a person actually imagines the full process of eating – i.e., repetitively chewing and swallowing the food – it produces a similar effect in the brain to actually eating the food.

To the brain, the difference between real and imaginary is a thin line. In fact, in the words of Carey Morewedge, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University who led the study, “The difference between imagining and experiencing may be smaller than previously assumed.”

It might be that we can imagine eating a meal, bite for bite, before we eat and then find that we don’t feel like eating as much and therefore weight loss is a natural side-effect. However, the research is still in its infancy and there is no data yet on whether imagining eating affects any of the body’s other systems, like blood sugar, for instance, or even whether it causes us to eat so much less that the body lacks the nutrition it needs.

You might get a kick out of this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5KNoIhir-Q

Source: https://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-12931/5-tricks-to-visualize-and-get-the-body-you-want.html