The Tapping Solution for Weight Loss & Body Confidence (15 page)

With tapping, you can change your beliefs by targeting the emotions and the stress response your beliefs create by focusing on the belief itself. Once that stress response is lowered or gone altogether, the old negative belief—“I’m not good enough”—no longer feels true. You can then create a positive belief that does feel true, helps you love yourself, and creates positive momentum for you on your weight loss and body confidence journey.

How Beliefs Affect Your Experience

Before we discuss beliefs in greater detail, let’s look at the relationship between beliefs and experiences. Louise Hay again sums it up perfectly in
You Can Heal Your Life:
“No matter what the problem is, our experiences are just outer effects of inner thoughts.” In other words, experiences are reflections of beliefs. To put it another way, your beliefs are your blueprint for the world.

If you have a negative belief like “I’m not good enough,” you can’t feel happy or experience real pleasure. Believing that you’re not good enough (or that you’re not beautiful/smart/strong enough) is like giving yourself a life sentence; it leaves no room for any other possibility. With that belief in mind, you unconsciously look for evidence to support that belief and take action (or refrain from action) that supports it. You interpret events in ways that support the belief even when it causes you pain. You also unconsciously seek out or are attracted to people who give you the kind of negative feedback that “proves” your belief.

The idea that beliefs create experience hit home for me one day several years ago when I shared with my friend Brenna what some guy had randomly said to me: “You’d be cute if you lost some weight.” It was yet another cruel and unsolicited comment about my weight, and again I was devastated. Knowing my history of being a target for comments like this, she looked right at me and said, “This is not normal, Jess. People don’t say mean things like that to most people.” As I thought about what she had said, I realized that I had been holding on to a belief in my body that
I
wasn’t good enough. For years I’d been unconsciously attracting and seeking out people who confirmed that belief. I also found myself rejecting and playing down compliments and only focusing on the times people told me I wasn’t good enough.

If you believe you aren’t worthy in your current body, you will gravitate toward people who reflect that belief back to you. When you don’t believe those things about yourself, you no longer tolerate people who treat you in a disrespectful way. Instead, because you believe you deserve love and support, you’re able to love and support yourself first and then cultivate a supportive community of people who can also love and support you.

When I began tapping on my belief that I wasn’t good enough in my current body, I was able to clear the emotions and stress response this belief had created in me. It didn’t happen overnight. I had to break down all the different events I was using as proof that the belief was true. (You can see in this example what we saw earlier in the Tapping Tree—that symptoms, emotions, events, and beliefs are often interconnected.) What began happening in the weeks and months that followed was amazing. I started to gravitate away from people who were judgmental and negative and toward relationships that supported the new positive beliefs I had created about myself. My entire life soon began to transform, and the weight began falling off faster than it ever had. And it all happened without focusing on weight loss or feeling deprived. Because I had created a new belief that allowed me to love myself, I was naturally making better decisions and no longer needed dieting and extreme exercise to lose weight and punish my body. Instead, I could trust myself and my body and still lose weight—and that is exactly what happened.

I see this same pattern repeat itself again and again in my clients. They’re amazed by how easy weight loss feels once they’ve used tapping to change their beliefs about themselves, their bodies, and their weight loss journeys.

The Key to Identifying Your Beliefs—Question Everything!

Holding on to negative beliefs is like wearing dark-tinted glasses all day, every day. When we’re wearing them, everything in our world seems scary and threatening. But when we take them off and put on clear glasses—which, in this case, means creating positive beliefs—the world around us seems brighter. Suddenly we feel hopeful, able to naturally seek out experiences that make us feel good.

As much pain as negative beliefs can cause, we aren’t always taught to evaluate them. Whether we adopted them from our immediate environment or they were passed down to us from our parents, they often appear disguised as facts. We may question authority and examine beliefs during our teenage years, but as we get older we tend to settle into beliefs and think what we believe is just how the world is—and, more dangerously,
This is just who I am.

Targeting a belief begins with first questioning the way we have been viewing the world and ourselves. When we tap while focusing on the belief, its emotional stronghold weakens and we have the ability to take a step back and ask ourselves,
Is this really true?
Then we have the freedom to choose a more empowering belief that supports us in creating the life (and weight loss journey) we want to have.

At first, we may resist and distrust the idea that by changing our beliefs we can change our lives. After all, we think, we have so much evidence to prove that what we believe is true. For starters, we’ve never been able to lose weight without depriving ourselves, counting calories, dieting, and subjecting ourselves to extreme exercise that feels like punishment. That is the truth; that is what happened, so why pretend otherwise?

While this seems logical and may initially feel true, that resistance we feel is most often rooted in the stress response that a negative belief has created in us. Until we do tapping to clear that stress response, we can’t create a new experience for ourselves. If we shut out the possibility that weight loss can be pleasurable, for example, we are closing ourselves off to having a positive weight loss experience.

Often when clients come to understand that their beliefs are just thoughts that they can change, they realize that their disempowering beliefs don’t even seem logically true. They’ll often say, “I know that belief isn’t true. I don’t even want to believe it but it just
feels
so true.” We saw that in the last chapter with Abby, whose cancer diagnosis created a disempowering belief that losing weight and being healthy had led to her illness. She knew that wasn’t the case but couldn’t seem to get rid of the
feeling
that it was. When she used tapping to clear the emotions and stress response that had been validating her belief, she could let go of it. That same principle applies to everyone: until we clear the emotion and stress response behind negative beliefs, we can’t fully let go of them.

The first step in releasing negative beliefs is to identify them, and we do that by learning to question everything, including what we’ve always known as “facts.” That’s what we’ll do next.

So take a moment to ask yourself the following questions. You may want to write them down, along with your answers.

• What negative feedback have I been replaying from others to support my limiting beliefs?
  
• When did I learn that I’m not (good/pretty/smart) enough?
  
• What events have I used as proof to support my negative beliefs?
  

Getting Clear on Your Story

As we begin to identify limiting beliefs, we often find that we have many of them and that they are spread across different areas of our lives. Over time these beliefs become the larger story we’re telling ourselves about who we are and what’s possible for us. Once we use tapping to address the limiting beliefs that have shaped our story, we can create a new story and make incredible progress in ways that feel natural and enjoyable.

That’s what happened when Lori discovered her own story and used tapping to clear her negative beliefs. “I went from obsessing about weight loss to obsessing about self-love. I realized that self-love was the key. I kept finding ways to take care of myself. Suddenly exercise and eating well became fulfilling and exciting. When I changed my beliefs about what it took to lose weight—and more important, what I believed about myself—losing weight and taking care of myself became easy and fun.”

Just as you used the Tell the Story technique in the last chapter to clear events, you can use that same technique to clear limiting beliefs. Let’s look at the story you may be telling yourself and then do some tapping to clear the way for new beliefs that support you and your weight loss journey.

DISCOVER YOUR STORY

The first part of this exercise involves writing, and then we begin tapping.

Start by finishing the two sentences below, which will help you see your own limiting beliefs. Write each sentence down and complete it in your own words.

• I can’t lose weight/be thin because …
  
• I want to lose weight but ….
  

Write down the beliefs you discovered by finishing these sentences. These are your tapping targets.

When you pinpoint a belief, say it out loud and ask yourself, on a scale of 0 to 10,
How true does this feel?
If it feels like a simple fact, it would be a 10. Then begin tapping while telling your story. A helpful setup statement may be “Even though I believe (state your belief here), I accept myself and how I feel, and I am open to a new way of thinking.”

We’ll explore the limiting beliefs within your story throughout the rest of this chapter and then learn how to tap on them.

Clients often tell me that when they tap on the story they’ve been telling themselves, they start to see their lives in a whole new way. They realize that they’ve used various events to support their limiting beliefs. Once they use tapping to clear their old beliefs, they can see events in their past in a new light and even discover a valuable lesson or hidden blessing in them.

To explore your story in more depth, you also need to look at your beliefs about yourself, your genetics, your body, and your weight loss journey.

Beliefs about Your Genetics

Growing up on an island off Scotland with a population of fewer than 100 people, Marjorie was an anomaly within her family. Since childhood she had been the only one among her seven siblings who was overweight. The consensus within the community was that she had inherited “bad genes” from her aunt, who had also always been overweight. “I felt like I had grabbed the shortest straw in the gene pool,” she explained. Those “bad genes” became part of who Marjorie was, a fact that she didn’t have the power to change.

Many of us who come from families where weight issues are common also point to genetics as the cause of our struggles with weight. “See,” we say, “this is just who I am.” At other times we may blame genetics because we’re tired of blaming ourselves and we feel exhausted by our unsuccessful attempts at dieting. The idea that we are victims of our genetics is not only scientifically inaccurate; it also strips us of the power to change.

Blaming the body is like blaming a car that won’t run when in fact we never bothered to give it the proper fuel and loving maintenance. The truth is that we don’t need to blame anyone or anything for our weight issues; the key is to replace blame with curiosity. Several weeks into my class, Marjorie began to do that and had an exciting breakthrough. By tapping on her beliefs about her body, she realized that she had grown up in a culture and family where food was an expression of love. Her aunt loved to bake, and piling people’s plates high with food expressed how much she cared for them. All these years later, Marjorie realized, she had been “eating” love in the form of baked cookies, scones, muffins, and cakes.

When we point to a family that is overweight, we don’t need to look at genetics but instead at the food habits within that family. We can then ask ourselves what beliefs we may have unconsciously adopted around eating, food, and weight. When we stop blaming the body, we can change our emotions, stress levels, and behavior as well as how the body functions.

Genetics obviously play a role in the body, but if we believe that we have no control over gene expression, it’s easy to give up and surrender to unhealthy habits that match the disappointment we feel. You have more power over gene expression than you think. Let’s take a look at the science behind that claim.

THE SCIENCE OF GENETICS

“We’re going to miss our flight,” I whispered to Nick Polizzi, director of
The Tapping Solution
movie and the longtime friend of my brother Nick.

“I know,” he replied, “but this is
so
worth it.” I nodded, excited to keep going with the interview.

We’d arrived at Bruce Lipton’s house a couple of hours earlier, ready to conduct an hour-long interview with this highly acclaimed scientist who is also a top-selling author. We assumed he’d be stiff and formal—scientist-like—but from the start he was one great surprise after another. He greeted us with a big smile at the front door of his house in the San Jose hills in a T-shirt and shorts. As we started setting up our camera equipment, he turned to me and said, “Let me know when you’re ready to start and I’ll put on a nicer shirt.” I was shocked by how casual and friendly he was—so different from the reserved scientist in a lab coat I had imagined.

I’d done extensive research in advance of the interview and knew how much Bruce’s work has revolutionized our understanding of how beliefs impact the body. In 1967, decades before the rest of us knew what it was, Bruce was already doing stem-cell research. He had started in that field while earning his Ph.D. in developmental cell biology under the mentorship of Dr. Irwin R. Konigsberg, one of the first scientists ever to successfully clone stem cells.

The pioneering work Bruce has done in the decades since has shown us that genes don’t predict health, success, happiness, or weight. In fact, gene expression is based on environment. That environment extends beyond particles and molecules to include emotions and beliefs. In other words, we can change how our cells develop and function by changing our beliefs, stress levels, and nutrition.