5 Tricks To Visualize (And Get) The Body You Want

When I was morbidly obese, I spent years trying to lose weight by dieting. But no matter how hard I tried, I just kept gaining weight. Exercising didn’t help much either, and even though I was riding a stationary bike for almost an hour a day, I just couldn’t get my weight to budge. I was over 400 pounds, frustrated with myself, and completely at a loss for a solution. 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.

To my surprise, visualization worked stunningly well. It seemed that as soon as I started practicing visualization for weight loss, a subtle shift happened inside of me. I just wasn’t as hungry. I started to crave healthier foods, and I started to become more active. I had more energy and less appetite. In just over two years I lost 220 pounds without forcibly restricting the quantity or quality of the foods I ate, and without forcing myself to exercise. In fact I lost the first 75 pounds without doing any exercise at all. It’s as if my body all of a sudden wanted to be thin and was actually helping me lose weight.

That was over 10 years ago, and I’m still the exact same weight. My body still wants to be thin, and it’s simply not an effort. To me, this inside out approach to fitness is the most sensible and sustainable way to lose weight, and it all starts with using visualization to get your mind and body to work together.

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.

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.

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 imagine 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 yourself 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.