The Tapping Solution for Weight Loss & Body Confidence (25 page)

Chapter 10

Untangling the Myths, Facts, and Feelings Around Food

F
ood has become such a tortured topic for so many of us that it is often a stressful block in our weight loss and body confidence journey. We try and try to eat the “right” foods to lose weight, but in spite of our efforts to choose “diet” and “healthy” foods, we can never seem to lose the weight and keep it off. We then blame ourselves or wonder if there’s something wrong with our bodies, when in fact, as we’ll see in this chapter, much of the “diet” and “healthy” food we’re being sold works against us, robbing us of the essential nutrients the body desperately needs. Using tapping, we can finally put an end to this frustrating cycle and begin sensing what foods the body needs not only to lose weight but to feel energetic and vibrant.

Ending the Dieting Cycle

Whenever clients or students start to lose weight, I try to connect with them to learn more about their experiences. As we’ve seen, we have several layers of emotions and beliefs that can hold us back. I’m always interested to learn what has had the biggest impact on their journey.

I often find that before they lost weight, they changed their eating habits, but without dieting or following any “rules” of healthy eating. And often, they didn’t notice the shifts in their eating until I asked about them. As we’ve seen throughout this book, changes in eating seem to happen almost unconsciously. After tapping through their emotions and beliefs, many of these women gravitate toward more nourishing foods, and they enjoy the way healthier foods make them feel.

Anne, a 57-year-old retiree from Ohio, shared how the changes happened for her.

Without all the emotions in the way, I can focus on how my body really feels. I think at some level I knew what foods weren’t working for me, but I ignored how I felt and just depended on what other people told me I should eat. Dieting was so stressful! When I began to connect with my body through tapping, I was able to see what works for me, and which foods were causing symptoms … I used to try to push through these symptoms. Now I’m more in tune with how my body feels and what works for me. I’m not afraid of food anymore. It’s so freeing!

This is the magic of tapping. Once we address underlying emotions and beliefs, we can finally connect with the body and allow it to determine what foods work best for us. The body tries to get our attention through symptoms such as fatigue, bloating, gas, acid reflux, headaches, and stuffed sinuses, showing us that something below the surface isn’t right. Instead of welcoming this important information, we often feel like the body is betraying us. With tapping, we can break this cycle and make changes based on the signals the body is sending.

I see wellness as a pyramid; at the base are emotions and beliefs, then up from there, movement and nutrition. If we don’t work on the emotional aspects, not only do we suffer from stress hormones that work against us, but we also fall short in moving the body and eating food that supports health. The challenge is that we have become so inundated with nutritional information and fad diets that the question “What should I eat?” has become incredibly overwhelming. We often leave it up to the “experts” without realizing that our own body is the best expert of all. Or, consumed by our stress, we give up and settle for what’s convenient and cheap.

The Perfect Storm

When it comes to our relationship with weight, food, and the body, we’re stuck in a perfect storm of high stress levels, contradictory diet information, and an abundance of cheap and convenient food that is harmful to our health. With tapping we have a powerful way to manage stress and get in touch with the body. What is less obvious is the truth behind the diet, nutrition, and food information we’re exposed to every day through the media and other sources.

To begin exploring some of these hidden truths, let’s first take a look at a couple of national health statistics: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) more than 69 percent of Americans are overweight. In 1973, 4.2 million Americans were diagnosed with diabetes. By 2010, that number had climbed to 21.1 million.

We’re so used to seeing outrageous numbers like this that we rarely stop to think about them. So take a moment now and let them really sink in. That’s almost a fivefold increase in diabetes
in fewer than 40 years
.

Many people explain away the problem by saying that Americans are lazy. We eat too much and we don’t exercise. I don’t buy it. We’re a country of intelligent, hardworking people. Something else is in play. It’s not just how much we are eating but also
what
we are eating.

Why You Can’t Have Just One

Most of us don’t realize when we walk into a grocery store that many of the options we’re looking at, particularly packaged goods, have been specifically designed to make us eat more than the body needs.

Inside the food industry, it’s called the “bliss point” and billions of dollars are spent finding it. According to Michael Moss’s
New York Times
best-selling book,
Salt Sugar Fat
, the bliss point was originally perfected in soda and has since been applied to other processed foods and drinks.

Much of the packaged “food” we see in our stores is made in laboratories run by high-level scientists and mathematicians who engineer ingredients like salt, sugar, and fat as well as “food formulations” to create food products that produce high profits. These “food formulations” are not recipes. There are no chefs or bakers, and very little, if any, of our packed food is created in a normal kitchen.

We need to understand that the cards have been stacked against us. We’re not low on willpower. We’re not pigs or slobs. Food manufacturers are investing enormous amounts of money in creating food products, including supposedly healthy foods, that overwhelm our taste buds and keep us reaching for more. By design, these food products force us to ignore the body’s signals that it is full and eat something that doesn’t make us feel good. They are literally engineered to make us overeat.

The bottom line is that there’s nothing wrong with us, but there is a lot wrong with much of the so-called food we’re sold in boxes and packages. While our emotions may initially cause us to turn to these foods for comfort, once we taste them they grab hold of us and we can’t stop. Millions of dollars are also spent on producing and distributing commercials that depict thin, happy people eating these same processed foods. The ads are designed to play on our emotions, selling us on ideas that make no sense and aren’t even remotely true. We hear slogans like Kit Kat’s “Gimme a break” or “Hungry? Grab a Snickers” and get tricked into associating these so-called foods with positive things, when in truth they don’t give us the break we need or fully satisfy our hunger.

Many of us aren’t eating real food anymore; we’re eating boxes of food products. As Michael Pollan, author of
In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,
writes, “… while it used to be that food was all you could eat, today there are thousands of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket.” Comedian Mike Birbiglia made a similar point on Twitter, although in a more humorous way, sharing, “I think maybe the key to eating healthy is not eating any food that has a TV commercial.” I think he has a valid point!

Food Manufacturers Feed Our Fears

Food manufacturers have also caught on to our cultural obsession with health and weight loss and are now covering their boxes with labels like “whole wheat,” “real fruit,” and “heart healthy.” Unfortunately, as we’ve seen, many of these so-called healthy foods are also highly processed. As just one example of how deceptive food labeling can be, here’s a list of cereals that are labeled as containing “heart healthy whole grains”:

• Kix
  
• Trix
  
• Count Chocula
  
• Cinnamon Toast Crunch
  
• Lucky Charms
  

While these cereals may contain a select few whole grains, they’re also loaded with sugar and artificial ingredients that can be harmful to our health. When we stop to pay attention, we can begin to feel the way these foods impact us.

The Low-Fat/Fat-Free Trap

Fat-free and low-fat products are often just as bad; they’re also full of sugar and artificial ingredients. Usually when food manufacturers remove fat, they add extra sugar (and often salt, or sodium, as well) to enhance the flavor. Two great examples are low-fat fruit yogurt and fat-free salad dressings. Both are sugar bombs.

Eating diet foods can also trigger an unexpected response. According to Michael Moss in
Salt Sugar Fat
, when food manufacturers want to boost sales of a certain product, they create a “healthy” and/or diet version of that food, knowing that people will get tired of eating the “healthy” version and return to buying the original. That’s exactly what happened when Oreos introduced its 100-calorie packs. Not long after the “diet” 100-calorie packs hit store shelves, sales of original Oreos took off.

Like so many of my students and clients, for years I lived on diet foods and other foods I thought were healthy. I ate rice cakes not because I had a craving for Styrofoam but because I thought they’d help me lose weight. When I was able to calm my stress and emotions around food by using tapping, I could clearly see that I didn’t want one rice cake; I wanted the entire pack. As it turns out, rice cakes quickly raise your blood sugar, leaving you craving sweets and other “quick fix” carbohydrates. So in my attempt to eat well, I was actually feeding my cravings.

The same is true of diet soda. In spite of its “no calories” claim, diet soda has increasingly been linked to Type 2 diabetes, regardless of body weight. Because the artificial sweeteners are a lot sweeter than real sugar, they trick your body into pumping out insulin, which slows your metabolism, increases belly fat, and increases cravings for sugar and starchy foods like bread and pasta.

These days, if a food label says it is diet, fat free, or sugar free, I don’t eat it. If it says gluten free or organic, I look closely at the label and ingredients list. Real food doesn’t need a label to clarify that it’s healthy, so if it has a label, we need to stop and see if it’s real food or a processed food product. When we can see what’s really in our food and use tapping to clear our emotions and stay in touch with the body, we can notice how various foods make us feel.

Overcoming the “Never Enough” Mentality

Another challenge we often face is a mentality of lack around food. When we first met Dr. Peta Stapleton, we were looking at her study results about how tapping supports weight loss. Just as she and I were finishing our interview about her recent study findings, I spontaneously asked her one last question: “Dr. Stapleton, by any chance, in your years of working with overweight and obese patients, have you noticed any pattern in their mentality and/or behavior?”

“Yes,” she responded with a quick and firm certainty. Many women who struggle with obesity, she told me, also tend to be hoarders. She found that even after they had eliminated their cravings, the women in her study didn’t want to throw away the unhealthy foods they no longer wanted to eat.

Dr. Stapleton and her team realized that these women, who were generally 40 to 50 years old, had been taught never to throw away food by their mothers and grandmothers, who had grown up during the Great Depression and World Wars (I and II) when food was scarce. As a result, they felt that they needed to stuff their kitchens and pantries full of food products “just in case.”

As Dr. Stapleton shared, “We’re living in an interesting time. We are constantly surrounded by food in the Western world but we have a lack mentality.” People feel they need to hoard food or eat it all even though we live in a world where food is incredibly abundant.

This lack mentality is also reinforced by dieting. We often overeat sweet treats because we know that tomorrow we’ll start a strict diet and suffer from deprivation. When we focus on foods we’re “not allowed to eat” instead of focusing on learning about healthier options, we’re more likely to fall back into a diet mentality, which often comes with a little voice that says, “Eat all of this now, as fast as you can, because you won’t be allowed to later.” Anytime we experience emotions of lack or deprivation around food, we are more likely to resort to overeating as a form of rebellion.

One woman in my class shared that she ate leftover pasta late at night. She reasoned that if she didn’t eat it, no one would, and tossing out the pasta simply didn’t feel like an option. When she tapped on this habit, she had a big Aha! moment. She had grown up hearing her mother say she needed to eat everything on her plate because there were starving children in Africa. By eating the pasta, however, she wasn’t showing gratitude for the food or solving world hunger; she was simply hurting her body by consuming more food than it could handle.

Let’s do some tapping on the inability to throw food away—even if you don’t want it.

Imagine you have food in your house that isn’t aligned with your health goals. If you don’t have the ability to donate it to a food bank, how do you feel about tossing it out? Does it create any anxiety? What thoughts come to mind? Do you believe throwing it away is “wasting money” so you’d rather eat it even if it’s harmful to your body? Take some time to reflect on any emotions or thoughts around letting go of food that doesn’t serve you. Measure your emotions or belief on a scale of 0 to 10 and begin to tap. This tapping script may help.

Karate Chop:
Even though I have to eat all of this so it doesn’t go to waste, I accept how I feel and I choose to see this another way. (
Repeat three times.
)
Eyebrow:
I have to finish this.

Side of Eye:
It would be wasteful if I didn’t.

Under Eye:
I’d seem ungrateful if I didn’t.