The Tapping Solution for Weight Loss & Body Confidence (28 page)

She goes on to add:

Studies show that positive psychological states, such as joy, happiness, and positive energy, as well as characteristics such as life satisfaction, hopefulness, optimism, and a sense of humor, result in lower mortality rates and extended longevity in both healthy and diseased populations. In fact, happiness and related mental states reduce the risk or limit the severity of heart disease, lung disease, diabetes, hypertension, and colds. According to a Dutch study of elderly patients, upbeat mental states reduced an individual’s risk of death by 50 percent over the study’s nine-year duration.

While we may be excited to learn that happiness, the natural outcome of pleasure, improves our overall health, the question remains: how does pleasure impact weight?

Sally, one of my online students, experienced the power of pleasure during a two-week vacation in Italy. During her trip she continued tapping and also made sure to enjoy some special treats, including her first sfogliatelle, a cone-shaped filled pastry, in Naples. When she returned home from the trip, Sally noticed that her clothes felt looser. Much to her surprise, she had lost seven pounds!

Most of us hear stories like that and wonder how they’re possible. We assume we’re missing information or being misled in some way. That’s because we haven’t been taught how crucial pleasure is to weight loss, as well as to overall health and well-being.

In
The Slow Down Diet
Marc David discusses the vacation weight loss phenomenon, which is an experience many people have at some point. Even while indulging in richer foods than they eat at home, they come home lighter than before they left. “Remove vitamin P, pleasure,” he writes, “and the nutritional value of our food plummets. Add vitamin P and your meal is metabolically optimized.”

He goes on to explain how endorphins, the body’s pleasure chemicals, impact metabolism and weight loss:

What’s most unusual about the endorphins is that not only are they molecules of pleasure, but they also stimulate fat mobilization. In other words, the same chemical that makes you feel good burns body fat. Furthermore, the greater the endorphin release in your digestive tract, the more blood and oxygen will be delivered there. This means increased digestion, assimilation, and ultimately greater efficiency in calorie burning.

What Happens When We Relax

If relaxation and pleasure are so good for our health, why aren’t they priorities in our lives?

The reality is that we live in a culture that values speed and productivity, so relaxation often gets a bad rap. We’re taught that taking time to sit outside means we’re lazy and unproductive; solutions to problems come through hard work, not relaxation. As a result, when we’re stressed and overwhelmed, we often limit or cut out all forms of pleasure and self-care except food. We rely on stress and worry to carry us through even though they can damage our health and well-being.

When we look at what happens when we relax, we see how important it is to our health and well-being, as well as the flow of our lives. Think for a moment how often you’ve gotten your best ideas while in the shower. That’s because water is relaxing, so the brain can solve problems in the bath or shower that it can’t solve when you’re under stress.

The same is true of taking a walk. We’ve already seen that many of the greatest minds in history have relied on walks as a way to boost their creativity, solve problems, and live more productive lives. That’s because walking is pleasurable and relaxing, so it allows us to think better and be more effective.

Tapping has a very similar relaxing effect, of course, and it allows us to get in touch with our intuition and access the solutions that are all around us and inside us. That’s why we at The Tapping Solution regularly get hundreds of e-mails about Aha! moments people have while tapping.

Why We Don’t Make Pleasure a Priority

While it’s true that our culture discounts the importance of relaxation and pleasure, often the real reasons we deny ourselves self-care and pleasure are less obvious than we realize. Although we may blame our lack of self-care and pleasure on our fast-paced lives, or perhaps on a shortage of time and/or money, when we dig deeper we discover that deeply ingrained cultural beliefs about our value as women have been holding us back.

Looking back through history, our culture has been dominated by the belief that women are less valuable than men. For thousands of years, our value as women has been measured
only
by our ability to nurture others. While we are natural caretakers who do love to nurture others, it has only been very recently that our other gifts—our intellect, creativity, and much more—have been recognized as valuable. Because we have always wanted to be valuable and contribute to society, we learned a very long time ago that we should spend all of our time and energy caring for others. Taking time for self-care and pleasure, then, became something we shouldn’t do because it decreased our value as women and as caretakers.

While I don’t believe in using this cultural heritage to blame men or make ourselves victims, I do think it’s important that we acknowledge this societal programming because during this journey, most women run into a lot of resistance around self-care. We need to understand that countless generations of women have been taught that self-sacrifice makes us better and that self-care and pleasure make us selfish and wrong.

These ideas tend to be passed down from one generation to the next in ways that are both conscious and unconscious. Often, we’re taught to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of others in incredibly subtle ways. I love the way my friend Regena Thomashauer, who runs Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts, explained it to me one day. She said, “Our mothers never sat us down and said, ‘Baby, darling, it is a privilege to be a woman and the best thing that you can do is learn what pleasures you, what lights you up and excites you.’”

Because we haven’t been taught to appreciate and love ourselves in this way, we don’t feel like we deserve self-care and pleasure. Instead, we cling to our To Do lists and sacrifice our health and well-being for the sake of others. Then, when we feel deprived of our basic human need for relaxation and enjoyment, we turn to food as our sole source of pleasure. When we then try to deprive ourselves of food through dieting, we deny the last bit of pleasure we have in our lives. And that strategy never works!

Body confidence, weight loss, and better health are about understanding that we deserve self-care and pleasure and that our value extends far beyond our ability to care for others. Self-care and pleasure are, in fact, basic requirements for our well-being. Only when we truly believe that can we seek out healthier and more fulfilling ways to feel good will we be able to lose the weight and gain confidence in ourselves.

The Real Reason for Self-Care and Pleasure

We’ve all heard it said that we can’t take care of others if we don’t take care of ourselves. That’s a socially acceptable reason for self-care because it reinforces the idea that our value lies in our caretaking abilities. It also happens to be true. When we skip self-care, we burn out, and when we burn out, everyone and everything in our lives suffers.

What we realize when we prioritize self-care and pleasure in our daily lives, though, is that it’s about a lot more than being better able to help others. During an interview I did with Cheryl Richardson, best-selling author of
The Art of Extreme Self-Care
, she made a very powerful point about the real reason we need to practice self-care. Here’s what she shared:

The acceptable thing for me to say is, honey, if you take better care of yourself, then that means you’ll be a better person to be around. While that’s true, what I really want to say as I’ve gotten older is, honey, if you take better care of yourself, the negative self-talk is going to stop. Honey, if you take better care of yourself, you’re going to feel stronger in your body. Honey, if you take better care of yourself, you’re going to care more about what you think and less about what other people think. And then you’re going to be more powerful in the world. You’re going to effect change in your life and in the lives of the people around you. You’re going to have a huge impact on the planet because one of the ways that women sit on their power is by not taking care of their bodies.

I was almost stunned into silence by these words. Although I had practiced and even preached self-care, it didn’t hit me until that moment just how incredibly vital it is. It’s not until we make a practice of connecting with ourselves on a regular and frequent basis that we can dim our negative self-talk and truly appreciate ourselves. Only then can we feel confident and beautiful in our own skin. Only then can we step into our power and live our dreams. Self-care can’t be looked at as a luxury; it’s a necessity.

Why We Avoid Self-Care and Pleasure

While the practice of self-care and pleasure may quiet our negative self-talk, that same negative self-talk is often the biggest reason we deny ourselves self-care and pleasure.

When we have spent so many years denying pleasure and hating the body we have, spending quiet time alone is often when our negative self-talk is at its worst. That makes self-care and pleasure feel unpleasant, even painful.

Speaking to my friend Kelly, who has three young children, I was reminded of how difficult it can be to reintroduce self-care into our lives. She called me one day while her kids were napping and casually mentioned how tired she felt. When I suggested she lie down for a bit, she said she couldn’t. “Every time I try to nap, all I hear is my dad’s voice telling me to stop being useless,” she explained. She knew she needed the extra sleep, but she couldn’t get the memory of her dad’s words out of her head.

So many of us have had some version of that same experience: we want to take the time for ourselves but then struggle to quiet the negative self-talk or other critical voices in our heads. At those times it often feels easier to seek out a distraction like food, television, or the Internet than to face our self-talk and the emotions it creates. When we give a voice to those emotions while we tap, we can learn to truly enjoy self-care and relaxation.

Is there a voice telling you that you’re doing something wrong when you’re eating slowly and being present with your food, sitting outside, or taking a nap? Tap while you express that voice to release its power over you.

As we add self-care and pleasure back into our lives, we also need to remember that self-care takes practice. Even after tapping, it may feel like a foreign experience. Allow yourself to experiment with new ways to relax, and feel free to refer to the list of different kinds of self-care at the end of this chapter (pages 237–239).

Let’s do some tapping now on quieting the negative self-talk so you can enjoy self-care. When you think about taking time for yourself, what voice comes up? Is there a particular emotion or sensation in your body that accompanies that voice? Write down your answers and measure the intensity of that voice, emotion, or feeling in your body on a scale of 0 to 10. That becomes your tapping target. This tapping script may help.

Karate Chop:
Even though I hear this critical voice when I try to relax, I love and accept myself. (
Repeat three times.
)
Eyebrow:
This voice that I hear when I try to relax …

Side of Eye:
It tells me, “Stop being lazy.”

Under Eye:
“Work harder.”

Under Nose:
“Go make something of yourself.”

Chin:
“Stop being selfish.”

Collarbone:
“Do something constructive.”

Under Arm:
“You should be further along than this.”

Top of Head:
“Keep pushing.”

When the intensity of your initial tapping target is 5 or lower, you can move on to the positive.

Eyebrow:
I was given the gift of this life …

Side of Eye:
And I honor it by enjoying it.

Under Eye:
As I take care of myself, I see my true value.

Under Nose:
Self-care is an essential way …

Chin:
To discover my power.

Collarbone:
As I replenish my resources, I can shine my light.

Under Arm:
As I relax, answers become clear.

Top of Head:
It feels so good to feel good.

Take a deep breath and check in with how you feel. Measure the intensity again and continue tapping until you experience relief.

The Hidden Rules in Your Head

While tapping through resistance to self-care and pleasure, many of us also realize that in addition to negative self-talk, we’ve created limiting rules about when and why we’re allowed to take care of ourselves and feel happy. Because these rules have become so ingrained, we often forget to notice them.

While tapping, Kavita realized that her happiness had always been dependent on her family. If they weren’t happy, she couldn’t be happy; and if her children didn’t behave in a certain way, she felt she needed to punish herself for not being a good enough mother. Another client, Doreen, didn’t feel she could be happy or take care of herself until all of her son’s needs were met. Because he had severe autism, that meant putting her happiness on hold until there was a cure. And there’s always that old standby: we can’t be happy or feel confident in our body until we lose the weight.

Too often, the rules we’ve created around our right to experience happiness make self-care and pleasure difficult, even impossible. When we’re able to see these rules for what they are—excuses for depriving ourselves of self-care and pleasure—we realize that we alone are responsible for our own happiness. Only we can decide that we’re worthy of good things. Making other people responsible for our happiness puts an unfair burden on them and drains us. Being responsible for other people’s happiness creates an equal burden and stress.