It’s not uncommon for people to lie to others about their weight.
One Michigan woman took a different approach — she repeatedly lied to herself until she lost weight. She took advantage of the malleability of the mind, a technique supported by experts.
In a viral TikTok with almost 4 million views, content creator Leaha Ureel revealed how she used self-deception to successfully trim her waistline.
“I gaslit myself into losing 40 pounds by just pretending I’m already skinny,” she explained.
Ureel applied literature about the subconscious mind, which posits that you can effectively “trick” your brain into wanting to do things you didn’t want to do through visualization exercises.
Ureel credits the method not only for helping herself shed dozens of pounds — but also for convincing herself she loves to clean the house after years of being “messy.”
“What really got me is that the body will convince the mind that maybe the hobbies you like are active hobbies,” she said. “It’s really fake it ’til you make it.”
“Gaslighting” may get a bad rap — but Dr. Meghan Garcia-Webb, an obesity expert at Weight Medicine MD, believes this type of psychological exercise can be surprisingly effective.
“The term ‘gaslighting’ has negative connotations but — overall — I agree this is possible,” Garcia-Webb, who also hosts the YouTube series “Weight Medicine with Dr. Meghan MD,” told The Post.
“What she is talking about is a concept we discuss in coaching all the time, which is adopting the mindset of someone who already has the desired result and essentially reverse engineering it,” Garcia-Webb added. “It’s purposefully creating an identity shift.”
The method taps into a proven psychological principle: act like the person you want to become — and your brain starts to believe it.
“So if you want to lose weight, what are the habits that you are doing at your goal weight that you are not doing now? What does your day look like? How do you act at work, at parties, at night when you get home from work?” Garcia-Webb mused.
Instead of doing whatever you want to do — do what the person you want to be would do.
“The better idea you have of who that future version of yourself is and what she does, the more you can bridge the gap between who you are now and who you want to be,” she said. “The more you start to live ‘as if’ you are that person, the easier it is to become her. You are giving your brain the map.”
So there’s a method to the madness, but Garcia-Webb cautions that there also potential pitfalls, health-wise.
“Of course depending on your sources, this can have positive or negative repercussions on your health,” she said.
“If someone thinks that the goal weight version of themselves has a significant caffeine addiction, or severely restricts calories, that’s not going to bode well for their overall health, even if they are losing weight. So it’s important to step back and think about if these habits would actually be healthy and sustainable.”
As such, she recommends visualizing someone who is healthier in a more holistic way instead of concentrating on numbers on a scale.
“I like to frame it less as the identity at a particular weight and more the identity of your healthiest self,” she said. “When we frame it like this, it’s an identity that’s 100% attainable through our actions, and not dependent on a particular scale number.”
