Turn Off Your FAT Switch: The Jon Gabriel Method

The Gabriel Method: Healthy Times Newspaper Inteview

By Mike Bundrant with Jon Gabriel

September 11, 2001. Jon Gabriel was preparing to book his usual non-stop flight from Newark Airport to San Francisco for a business meeting. The flight was United Airlines Flight 93, the very flight that heroic passengers forced to crash into a field in Pennsylvania, sacrificing their lives to prevent a terrorist attack on an unknown target in Washington, D.C.

This time, however, Jon’s business partner wanted to save $150 and booked him on a cheaper flight leaving in the afternoon. It was a fluke decision that saved him. If Jon had taken his usual flight on United Airlines, his life would have ended that day.

That experience forced Jon Gabriel to reevaluate his life. He developed an overwhelming desire to live purposefully and fulfill his dreams. At the top of the list was to lose weight and be fit again. At the time he weighed more than 400 pounds.

Drawing upon his experience as a biochemical researcher at The University of Pennsylvania with the internationally recognized biochemist Dr. Jose Rabinowitz, Jon went on a quest for tangible answers. He spent hours every day learning everything he could about biochemistry, nutrition, neurobiology and psychology. What he discovered is impressive and may represent a new paradigm in body transformation.

What follows are Jon Gabriel’s own words from our recent phone conversation.

Jon: I discovered that our bodies have a fat switch. It’s part of our genetic programming that we inherited from our ancestors. When this fat switch is on, there is almost nothing you can do to lose weight and keep it off, at least not in the long term.

But if you can turn this fat switch off, then your body wants to be thin, and weight loss becomes easy and almost automatic. You simply crave less food, your metabolism speeds up and your body becomes very efficient at burning fat. Your body starts working with you in your weight loss effort, rather than fighting you every step of the way.

I devised a method of losing weight that focuses solely on turning off the fat switch. That is how I lost my weight and that’s how everyone else who is following The Gabriel Method is losing weight also.

Most diets operate on the premise that you somehow have to force yourself to lose weight, either through sheer discipline or through behavior modification. The best you can hope for with these models is to successfully manage your body in some sort of program for the rest of your life.

My experience, and that of thousands of people out there, is [that] the body ultimately fights back against these restraints. If you don’t address the reason your body resists losing weight, your body will win the battle every time. You can control how much you eat, but you can’t control how hungry you are. You can’t control the types of food your body craves and you can’t control your metabolism. You can tweak it a bit, but you can’t control it. You also can’t control how efficient your body is at burning fat.

When your body wants to increase weight, you become insatiably hungry, crave fatty food and lose the ability to burn fat. Your body doesn’t hate you or want to rebel. It forces weight gain because fat is a legitimate survival strategy. When it thinks that you need the fat in order to stay safe, it starts what I call “fat programs” that nearly force you to gain weight. It is no different than other bodily needs. If your body decides that you need seven hours of sleep everyday and you are only getting two hours, you will be tired until you get the sleep you need.

Your body has a target weight that it wants to be. Some people call it a set point, but it’s based on what [your body] feels is the ideal weight for you based on your living conditions. Let’s say 180 pounds is what your body believes is best. If you are trying to get yourself to be 160 pounds, you may get down to that weight, but your body, interpreting the calorie restriction as a stressor that it associates with famine, will initiate these fat programs which will make you hungrier. It will simultaneously lower the metabolism until you get back to 180 pounds, if not higher, as your body compensates and wants to prepare for future famine. This is how I gained over 200 pounds. You can see that the homeostasis isn’t shifted by force, yet we try nonetheless.

Dieting is not the only thing that shifts the set point higher. Any stress on the body causes the same type of stress that a diet does. When I first started studying starvation, I learned that there are a few things that happen. First of all, your cholesterol and triglycerides elevate, the body becomes insulin resistant, and a couple of things happen inside the fat cells to cause cortisol levels to change. Along with a few other processes, these are what I have come to call fat programs.

In modern society we have thousands of small, chronic stressors that cause the triglycerides to elevate, the cortisol levels to elevate and so on. As a result of everyday chronic stress, the body is already being tricked into activating the fat programs even before you go on a diet. In a sense it is being tricked and this is where obesity comes from.

The body doesn’t understand emotional stress; it always experiences stress in physical terms. You could be worried about paying a mortgage payment six months from now, but your body experiences immediate, physical stress. The primitive brain’s only option is to consider that you are in some sort of danger, such as immediate physical harm, risk of exposure – freezing – or subject to the conditions of famine.

Your body may respond to emotional stress as if being chased by a tiger. The response to a tiger chasing you is to get as thin as possible. If you are walking in the woods and a tiger begins to chase you, that is a very different stress than if you were in a famine. You can’t run away from a famine. The best response to famine is to store as much fat as possible. What is interesting in today’s world is that some people get thinner from stress and some people get fatter from stress.

This happens because your body has to interpret the stress one way or the other. Stress means that our survival is being threatened. Is the stress that we are starving, or about to be eaten? There are different adaptations. If you are driving to work in traffic, you wonder if you are going to get to work because of the traffic. You are adapting to that stress. You are sitting in that car and your body is trying to decide whether it is supposed to be fatter or thinner. This is actually going on all the time for all of us. For some of us the daily chronic stress is the equivalent to being in a famine. Every day it is shifting our set point higher and that is why you see so many people who are obese.

How do we get the body to want to be thinner? First you have to address the stress that activates your fat programs. I go through a list in my book, The Gabriel Method, and give methods of handling them. Dieting is one of the stresses that activates the fat programs. That’s a little bit of a problem, though you need to be careful about coming off any diet. Nutritional starvation from too many empty foods is also stress that is going to keep us hungry and activate our fat programs, so it is critical to add healthy foods.

In all this there are two things that are counter-intuitive: Obesity is caused by starvation, and the cure is not to diet, but to add quality food. By adding the nutrients that you need the stress goes away. You become less hungry as you add good foods and the body stops activating the fat programs. Then the whole process gets reversed. If you were living on an island 1,000 years ago, pretty much every food available would nourish you. The foods we have now don’t nourish you. So adding more foods, Omega-3 fatty acids and especially live foods is important.

I’ve been on both sides of the struggle with weight and I can tell you that it’s not about willpower, it’s not about discipline and it’s not about taking control. The top biochemical researcher, Dr. Jeffery Friedman, who discovered the hormone leptin, says that obesity and weight is not about willpower and that we have to stop blaming people. Anybody who is insulin resistant is going to gain weight. If you give cortisol to your doctor, or to Jack LaLanne, he will begin to gain weight, no matter how disciplined he is. It’s very mechanical. It’s not about willpower and discipline, and I am very emphatic about that. When your fat programs are on, you gain weight. Learn to turn them off and you will lose weight. This is my message to the world.

Healthy Times wishes to thank Jon Gabriel and staff for their time in arranging and conducting this interview. To learn more about the Gabriel Method, click here.