The Tapping Solution for Weight Loss & Body Confidence (4 page)

I had just walked into a conference in London where Dr. Church and I were both scheduled to speak on tapping. Happy to see him at the other end of the hall, I stood on my tippy toes to wave hello. (At five feet two, I’m rarely in his direct line of sight.)

I’d had the pleasure of working with Dr. Church several times since we first met in 2007 while I was filming
The Tapping Solution
. I’d always appreciated his jovial nature—he has a laugh so jolly, it could make Santa Claus jealous—so I was excited when he excused himself from the crowd that had gathered around him and came rushing over.

Right away I could tell he had something exciting to tell me. After some quick “how’s the family?” chitchat, Dr. Church explained that he’d just returned from a medical conference where he’d presented the test results of his latest study for the first time.

He explained that the research had confirmed the science behind what I’d experienced myself and seen in thousands of others—that tapping is an incredibly effective way to decrease the negative impacts of stress on the body.

Dr. Church’s research, which I’ll share in this chapter, and several other groundbreaking studies help explain why tapping helps us lose weight and keep it off without dieting, deprivation, or extreme exercise.

Tapping and Weight Loss

Dr. Peta Stapleton is a clinical psychologist in Queensland, Australia, who has spent the past 20 years treating eating disorders in her patients and researching weight loss and specific eating behaviors. At the time of our interview, she had concluded the first (and most important) phase of her study on how tapping impacts food cravings and weight loss. The results were, and still are, incredibly exciting—proof of what I’ve seen repeatedly in my clients and students.

In doing this study, Dr. Stapleton wanted to find out whether tapping affects weight loss and food cravings, and if so, how effective it is. Because of the weight loss success she and her team had documented in study participants, Dr. Stapleton had actually released some of her findings to the international medical community before they were scheduled to be published.

All of the 89 women in her controlled study were between 31 and 56 years old, and had a body mass index (BMI) that qualified them as being obese. Over an eight-week period, they completed approximately two hours of tapping per week, which averages out to just over 15 minutes per day. Just by doing the tapping—without dieting or exercise—participants lost an average of 16 pounds by the end of the study!

While Dr. Stapleton expected that participants would lose weight from doing the tapping, she admits to being surprised by how much weight these women lost. What’s even more exciting is that the weight loss they achieved during the initial eight weeks seemed to last for six or more months afterward, even though most of the study participants stopped tapping once the initial eight-week period ended.

How is that possible? How can tapping lead to such dramatic and lasting weight loss in such a short period of time? To understand Dr. Stapleton’s research results, let’s first take a look at how stress affects the body.

Your Body’s Weight Gain Cocktail

You have a pharmacy inside you. At all times, your body is pumping out the hormones and chemicals it needs to function properly. Unfortunately, many of us are taking a drug that, in excessive amounts, causes weight gain. We take it daily, and that drug is called stress.

Stress begins in the amygdala, an almond-shaped component located in the limbic system, or midbrain. The amygdala has been called the body’s smoke detector. When it senses danger, it tells our brain to initiate a physiological stress response called the fight-or-flight response. This creates an overproduction of a hormone called cortisol, which studies have linked to increased appetite, sugar cravings, and added abdominal fat. Even mild stress, like worrying about why your jeans feel too tight or that you’ll never lose the baby weight, can cause your body to go into the fight-or-flight response. This same stress response happens when you experience common negative emotions like anger, fear, and guilt.

The fight-or-flight response prepares the body for danger, getting it ready to either fight off an attacker or take flight, as our ancient ancestors had to do when they encountered a tiger in the wild. Since this stress response was intended to save you from an immediate threat, all of your body’s defense systems are quickly activated. Your adrenaline levels increase, your muscles tighten, and your blood pressure, heart rate, and blood sugar all rise so that you can react quicker, run faster, and climb higher.

Because all of your body’s energy is being channeled toward self-defense, less essential functions such as digestion are either slowed down or shut down altogether. (Indigestion doesn’t register as an urgent issue when you’re literally running for your life!) But that inability to digest food properly and efficiently has a negative impact on your metabolism and prevents your body from absorbing the nutrients it desperately needs. Without essential nutrients and nourishment, your body may then trigger a feeling of hunger, not because it actually needs more food, but because the stress response has rendered it unable to properly digest the food that
is
available.

Unlike our ancestors, we are subject to a complex assortment of stimuli and stressors that means our stress levels remain higher for longer periods of time, and this means that our bodies are in the fight-or-flight response more frequently and for longer periods of time. That creates more potential for negative effects on our digestion, metabolism, and hormones on an ongoing basis.

So even if you’re exercising and eating right, stress can disrupt your weight loss efforts. This is where tapping becomes such a powerful tool. What tapping does incredibly well is disrupt the fight-or-flight response, quickly allowing your body to return to a more relaxed state in which it can digest food properly and support healthier digestion and faster metabolism. Let’s take a look at how this happens.

How Tapping Lowers Your Stress

In a randomized controlled study—the gold standard of scientific research—conducted by Dr. Church (the jovial giant you may recall from earlier), he and his team focused on the changes in cortisol levels and psychological symptoms in 83 subjects. The study participants were divided into three groups: one group was led through an hour-long tapping session, another group received an hour of conventional talk therapy, and a third control group received no treatment.

While the control group and talk therapy group showed only a 14 percent drop of cortisol over time, the tapping group showed a 24 percent decrease in cortisol levels, on average, with some experiencing as much as a 50 percent decrease in cortisol.

The dramatic drop in cortisol in the tapping group was so significant that the lab initially believed there was either something wrong with the samples or with its equipment. To ensure accuracy, it delayed the results by several weeks in order to recalibrate its equipment and run the tests again. After running them repeatedly and getting consistent results, it finally released them to Dr. Church.

In addition to having been rigorously checked and rechecked by the lab, Dr. Church’s research findings support earlier research conducted at Harvard Medical School over the last decade. The Harvard studies show that stimulating selected meridian acupoints decreases activity in the amygdala, as well as other parts of the brain associated with negative emotions. In fMRI and PET brain scans, you can clearly see the amygdala’s alarm bells being quieted when acupoints are stimulated.

Although the Harvard research focused on stimulating meridian acupoints with needles (acupuncture), a separate double-blind study confirmed the same positive impact when acupoints were stimulated without needles—which is what happens during tapping.

Tapping on acupoints while sorting through emotional challenges is part of an emerging field known as “energy psychology.” Much of the existing research in energy psychology is getting more and more attention, partly because it compares favorably to standards set by the Society of Clinical Psychology (Division 12 of the American Psychological Association) as an “evidence-based” approach.

While many psychologists and other mental health professionals are beginning to incorporate tapping into their practice, what my brother and I are so passionate about is the ability everyone has at their own fingertips to experience relief. Once you know tapping, you always have a tool to support you through times of stress. It’s incredibly self-empowering.

If you’re interested in reading more about dozens of other studies that have demonstrated how effective tapping is for a wide range of disorders and conditions, you can visit
www.TheTappingSolution.com/science-and-research.php
or check out my brother Nick’s
New York Times
best-selling book
The Tapping Solution: A Revolutionary System for Stress-Free Living
.

A Groundbreaking Discovery

Now that we’ve looked at some of the more recent science indicating how tapping impacts weight loss and stress, I’d like to share a brief history of tapping, which also shows how effective tapping is at improving overall health and wellness.

It was 1979 when Dr. Roger Callahan, a traditionally trained psychologist, experienced his first major breakthrough using tapping with a patient. It came after he studied the body’s meridian points, which are the basis of the ancient Chinese medical technique known as acupuncture. The meridians in the body are energy channels that carry our vital life force, our
qi
, to the various organs and systems in the body. They run up and down both sides of the body, and each meridian is linked to a separate organ—stomach, gallbladder, kidney, and so on. You can access the energy in each meridian through its “endpoint,” a specific location on the body’s surface.

These “meridian endpoints” are where acupuncture needles are inserted and also where we tap to balance or increase the energy flow within a specific meridian. They’re also places we often touch unconsciously during moments of stress—for example, our forehead, chin, and collarbone—perhaps as a way to calm ourselves down.

When he experienced success in using tapping with patients, Dr. Callahan continued his study of meridian points, focusing on merging traditional psychotherapy with tapping. Over time he developed a set of “algorithms,” or tapping sequences, to address different issues. For instance, he created one tapping sequence to treat fear and a separate sequence to treat anger. He eventually began teaching his tapping sequences to students.

One of his students, a man named Gary Craig, began experimenting with tapping and discovered that it was the tapping itself rather than the specific sequences that was so effective. To simplify the process, Gary created a single tapping sequence, which has since become the basis of what he later called EFT, or Emotional Freedom Techniques. Many different approaches to tapping are based on Gary Craig’s EFT model. Tapping and meridian tapping are the generic names used.

The EFT sequence Gary pioneered includes all of the major meridian endpoints and can be used for all issues. The EFT sequence, which we’ll explore in detail in
Chapter 2
, begins with the side of the hand, then moves to the inner eyebrow, the outer eyebrow, underneath the eye, under the nose, the chin, the collarbone, the side of the rib cage, and finally, the top of the head.

During the same period of time when Craig was simplifying his tapping sequence, Dr. Patricia Carrington, a psychologist and then faculty member at the Department of Psychology at Princeton University, was independently using a single algorithm method and seeing great results in her clients. She created the Choices Method, which we’ll explore shortly.

As Gary Craig’s and Dr. Carrington’s work began to spread, their results caught the attention of psychologists and researchers who have since given us a far better understanding of how tapping helps retrain your brain.

Retraining Your Brain

To understand why tapping works so well—not just for anxiety, fear, and trauma but also for losing weight—it’s important to understand the
limbic response
.

The limbic system is the part of our brain that contains that feisty amygdala that initiates the fight-or-flight response when it senses danger. This same process can take place when we experience stress around food. For instance, when you experience a craving for chocolate, you may be in the throes of a limbic response. If your brain has been trained to respond to stress by inhaling a box of chocolate chip cookies, that’s probably what you’ll do after a long day at the office.

Because tapping quickly halts the fight-or-flight response and lowers your cortisol levels, you’re able to change how your brain reacts to stress and chocolate chip cookies. Instead of being made to feel like you must devour every last one of those cookies, you can stop and figure out whether cookies are really the best way to unwind.

If you have intense food cravings, the idea of being able to pause and determine whether you really want or need to eat the food you’re craving may sound impossible. As someone who used to inhale a box of six organic cereal bars in one sitting (a favorite during one of my “healthy eating” phases), I completely understand why you feel that way. In those moments when you feel like you’ll die if you don’t eat that food, you’re at the mercy of a limbic response that’s been ingrained in your brain, probably for many years.

The idea that you can train your limbic system to respond differently to familiar stimuli lines up with recent discoveries about
neuroplasticity
, which shows that the brain’s pathways can be altered. Scientists speculate that when we train our limbic system to respond to a long day at work in a new way, we’re actually changing our neural pathways, training our brain to react differently than it has in the past.

After working with thousands of clients on food cravings and emotional eating, I’m still amazed at how quickly tapping can change behavior. After tapping on the stress they’re feeling, clients will often say, “Wow, it’s actually not about the food.” Once we use tapping to clear the stress that’s causing them to overeat, they’re able to eat less without even noticing. The situations or foods that once triggered them to overeat simply lose their power.