The Tapping Solution for Weight Loss & Body Confidence (12 page)

Top of Head:
I choose what I want from this calm and centered space.

The point of this exercise isn’t to prevent you from ever indulging in your favorite treat but simply to pinpoint the emotions that may be causing you to overindulge.

Over time you may find these triggers reappearing or discover new emotional eating triggers. Don’t let this discourage you. Simply take note of the triggers and then tap through them until they’re fully cleared.

What Are You Really Eating?

When emotional eating becomes a habit ingrained over many years, it can be hard to see all the ways in which our relationship with food is working against us. That became clear to me one evening while I was out with my friend and mentor Ariane de Bonvoisin, best-selling author of
The First 30 Days
. She had been raving about a gelato place in New York, claiming they had the best chocolate gelato in the entire city, so finally one night we went there to enjoy a treat.

After getting a serving each, we crossed the street to sit in a little plaza and enjoy our gelato. It was a beautiful summer evening, and for a moment we ate in silence, taking in the beauty of a nearby fountain.

Suddenly Ariane broke the silence. “You know we’re eating two different things, don’t you?”

I looked down at her cup. “No, I ordered the same thing as you.”

“We are still eating two different things,” she said. “I’m eating gelato—you’re eating guilt. My body will enjoy and process this gelato perfectly and it will go right through me. That guilt will stick to you and you’ll gain weight.”

I was stunned into silence, shocked both by what she had said and how true it felt. I had been eating a healthy diet for some time but couldn’t seem to lose weight. I suddenly realized that evening that the food group I had forgotten to cut out was guilt and shame.

Living in a culture that’s obsessed with food and fitness, we’re taught from a young age that carrying extra weight means that we’re “less than,” that we’re overweight because we have no self-control. Deep down we know that’s not true. We know we’re amazing, inspiring, beautiful, and talented. And yet, through all of our years of struggling to lose the weight, we come to doubt ourselves. We come to downgrade our worth. Slowly but surely, we let our culture’s fixation on thinness eat away at our self-confidence. Little by little, we put our own value into question. We feel ashamed of ourselves because our bodies don’t meet our culture’s strict and limiting standard of beauty. We wonder if we are actually flawed, when the real problem is that we haven’t yet learned how to love and respect ourselves as we are. Food is not the enemy. It’s time for us to end this cycle and stop inhaling a side of shame and guilt—and any other negative emotions—with each bite.

Take a moment now to think about how you feel when you eat. Ask yourself,
What emotions am I eating? Do I harshly judge myself and my worth when I eat?
As always, you may find the process easier if you do some tapping while thinking about and answering the questions.

Let’s Make Eating a Pleasurable Experience

Now that we’ve explored emotional eating in detail, I’d like to discuss an equally important topic: pleasure. While we’ll explore the subject of self-care and pleasure in greater depth later in this journey, for the moment it’s important to discuss the role pleasure plays in eating. What happens once we’ve used tapping to get rid of emotional eating behaviors? Are we left with nothing but wheatgrass and kale?

As you know, I don’t believe in dieting. I believe in getting in tune with what your body needs and wants to feel great and be healthy. Again and again, I have seen that the weight naturally falls away once we’ve used tapping to clear the underlying issues around the relationship between ourselves and weight. At this point in the journey, however, when we think about eating healthier foods without doing the tapping around stress and the other underlying causes of emotional eating, we often equate healthy eating with deprivation. That’s not what I want for you or for anyone.

I believe passionately in our need for pleasure of all kinds, including the enjoyment we get from food. I want you to eat nourishing food not because of its nutrient content but because it’s so delicious. I want you to take time to enjoy your food and savor each bite. I want eating to be something you look forward to, not because you need it to fulfill an unmet emotional need but because you’re hungry and the healthful meal you’re getting ready to eat looks and tastes amazing. I want eating to be even more pleasurable for you than it has been, and without the extra serving of guilt, shame, and regret.

While tapping is often the fastest and most effective way to re-create your relationship with food and your body, I also want to share some tips clients have found useful for making eating a pleasure-infused experience.

1. Before you begin eating, take three deep breaths and notice how you feel.
If you feel guilt, anger, frustration, or any other negative emotion, do some tapping before you begin eating. Then choose the emotions you’re putting on your plate. I no longer eat ice cream and guilt. All of the food I eat, including ice cream, comes with a side of love and gratitude.

2. Eat slowly and chew consciously.
So many of us are living fast-paced, action-packed lives. We’re always searching for more time, so it’s no wonder that we’ve developed a habit of inhaling our food, often chewing just enough—but no more—than we need to swallow it without choking. Taking time to eat more slowly gives you a chance to be aware of how you really feel. Being conscious about chewing your food has a big impact on how much pleasure you experience from your food. Also, because digestion begins in the mouth, when you chew your food thoroughly, your digestion also improves.

3. Sit down while you eat.
Kitchen counters are meant for preparing food, not enjoying it. Kitchen sinks are meant for washing dishes, not for catching crumbs. When we eat while standing, we tend to feel rushed. Many of my biggest binges happened while I stood in front of my kitchen cabinet, holding the doors wide open. It would start with some nuts, then a cereal bar, maybe a few more nuts—but wait, I forgot about those pretzels. Okay, now I might as well open that bag of cookies and have one (or two) final handfuls of nuts. Inevitably, what started as a healthy snack turned into a binge. It’s much easier to connect with how we feel, how hungry we really are, and how delicious our food tastes when we sit down at the table to enjoy the experience.

4. Add other kinds of pleasure that relax and soothe you.
Pleasant and relaxing music, candlelight, nice cutlery, and pretty plates—all of these things add to the pleasure of your meal when guests come over. Why not do some of that for yourself? If you’re short on time, just pick one additional source of pleasure that’s fast and easy, like lighting a candle or putting on your favorite classical music. If it’s music you’re adding to your meal, just make sure it’s calm and relaxing music, as fast and/or jarring music can act as a distraction, causing you to pay less attention to what you’re eating and how it tastes.

5. Be present and enjoy your food
without
distractions. (No TV, phone, or reading.)
When we’re distracted by TV, reading a book or magazine, talking on the phone, or surfing the Internet, we can’t fully enjoy and appreciate the food we’re eating. Our brains numb out, quickly going on autopilot and preventing us from being conscious about what we’re eating, how much we’re eating, whether we’re full, and—most important—how delicious our food tastes! It’s time to be present with food and really enjoy it to the fullest.

As you read through these tips, did you notice any resistance? If these five simple guidelines feel impossible, ask yourself why and record your answers on a piece of paper or somewhere else you can refer back to. Your answers are tapping targets.

If you have young children, these guidelines may be more challenging. If that’s the case, focus on working toward them and bringing as much presence to your eating as you can.

For others, these tips may seem overly simplistic and easy to just skim over, but being fully present with myself and my food as I’m eating has been one of the biggest game changers in my own weight loss and body confidence journey.

When we begin to practice this new way of being with food, we realize that we’ve avoided being present with food. This is because when we choose to be present, we also become present to our negative self-talk and emotions. It’s important that we allow ourselves to be present with these uncomfortable voices and emotions and then do tapping to clear them instead of turning to food for comfort.

Just by following these simple guidelines, Jill realized that eating without the TV made her feel lonely. Then her negative self-talk about being single would come up. When she used tapping to address the belief that eating alone meant she was a “loser,” she was able to release her judgment and enjoy her own company. She explained that she felt a shift by simply tapping as a surge of emotions came up.

Michelle realized that she felt guilty every time she took time for herself. She believed she needed to be productive while she ate, whether that meant reading a book or answering e-mails on her phone. When she felt this guilt, she wrote down all the thoughts that ran through her mind when she took time with her food. Then she simply read the list out loud while she tapped.

In the next chapter, we’ll dive a little deeper in our efforts to figure out what got us to this point. We’ll look at the events that occurred in our past, so we can understand better how they have affected us. But first, let’s do a tapping meditation around being present with food and making eating a more pleasurable experience.

Chapter 5

How Events Impact Weight and Body Confidence

O
n and off over the past 35 years, Holly had turned to bingeing in times of extreme stress. Although she had sought various forms of help with weight loss and had success, she had never been able to keep the weight off for more than a few years at a time. More than three decades later, she found herself losing hope that she could one day lose the weight for good.

About a month into my online weight loss class, Holly had a major breakthrough. While tapping, she realized that her bingeing had begun when she was eight years old. That was when her mother returned to work full time, and soon afterward, her dad had left. Afraid of living alone with her mother, a strict and unforgiving disciplinarian, Holly was angry at being abandoned by the one parent capable of expressing love and affection. Feeling like she had nowhere to turn, she began overeating, finding short-lived but much-needed comfort in bingeing.