The Tapping Solution for Weight Loss & Body Confidence (27 page)

As you use tapping to get in touch with what your body needs to be truly healthy, here are some general guidelines to consider:
Listen to what your body is trying to tell you.
Start noticing how your body feels after a meal. Do you feel energized or are you experiencing symptoms like heartburn? Notice how you feel an hour after a meal. Did the food cause your energy to crash after a while? Become curious and be your own investigator to figure out what works best for you and your body.

Slow down, and notice when your body
feels
full.
We live in a world where food is the most abundant it’s ever been, but too often we forget that. When we’re used to dieting and depriving ourselves, we eat quickly and consume more than the body needs and wants out of fear that we won’t be able to have more later.

As Brian Wansink shares in
Mindless Eating
, the idea that we have to clean our plates disconnects us from the body. Rather than paying attention to signals the body may be giving us, the “clean plate mentality” encourages us to “dish it out, space out, and eat until it’s gone.”

Instead of worrying about finishing what’s on your plate, stop just as you’re beginning to feel satisfied. It’s generally accepted that the body and brain need about 20 minutes to figure out whether we’re full, so eating until you actually feel full will leave you overstuffed. Remember, you can always have more later when your body is truly hungry again.

Go for quality.
When it comes to choosing quality food that provides our bodies with the most nutrients, Dr. Mark Hyman says it best in
The Blood Sugar Solution
:

The take-home message is that the
quality of the food
we put in our bodies drives our gene function, metabolism, and health. It is not simply a matter of your weight, or calories in/calories out. Eating powerful, gene-altering, whole, real, fresh food that you cook yourself can rapidly change your biology … not starving yourself.

Dr. Hyman calls himself a “qualitarian.” I like to think of myself the same way. For me that means choosing the freshest and highest-quality food I can find at any given moment. When I’m at home, that’s easier. When I’m traveling, I prepare healthy snacks ahead of time but then also make some compromises, which I do without guilt or shame. Wherever I am, I do my best to choose the highest-quality options I can. That’s enough to keep my body healthy and feeling great.

If I’m going to indulge in a sweet treat, I don’t grab something from the gas station. Instead, I search out the real thing, like real chocolate in its purest form. When I have some, I take time to be present and really enjoy it. I love chocolate!

Get in the kitchen (and make cooking fun!).
Your food should be made in a kitchen, not a lab. Grab your cookbooks; get your kids, spouse, partner, or friends involved; and make cooking fun again. Try new recipes that call for tons of fresh ingredients and perhaps new herbs and spices you haven’t typically used. Make delicious food your latest and greatest adventure!

Excited about traveling to a certain part of the world? Pick recipes local to the region that use lots of fresh ingredients, and create an exotic adventure in your own kitchen.

If you’re a salad fan, try adding fresh ingredients that are in season. It’s a fun way to introduce variety into your bowl throughout the year.

Whatever you’re planning to eat, do as much as you can to make preparing and cooking food enjoyable.

Make it convenient.
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Junk food is so convenient, and most of us live fast-paced, super-busy lives. We need to make healthy eating convenient by preparing ahead of time. Every Sunday I spend some time cutting up fresh vegetables and storing them in the fridge, so I can quickly add them to my salads throughout the workweek.

Whether it means preparing your lunches the night before, meal planning for one week at a time, or creating grocery shopping lists for yourself or your family, take some time to plan ahead so healthy and wholesome eating is both tasty and convenient.

The Myth of the Perfect Diet

I’d like to take this moment to apologize to all my friends and family for lecturing them every time I found the “perfect” diet. Each time, that new diet became my new religion and anyone not following the rules was sinning. As the religion’s most fervent preacher, it was my job to lecture everyone and save them. Let’s be honest—I was annoying.

When we are running the pattern of panic that we addressed earlier in this process, it’s easy to get trapped in the mentality that there is some secret diet that will solve all our problems. We want to learn the one secret fruit that burns belly fat. We want to know exactly what we should eat and at what time in order to see a physical difference within 24 hours. That panic creates unrealistic expectations and robs us of the body’s wisdom as well as our own common sense.

We’ve seen how damaging extreme dieting is to our emotions and our relationship with food. Eating as little food as possible also puts the body into starvation mode, which causes the body to hold on to fat because it doesn’t know when the next meal will be. If we don’t fully address how the pattern of panic affects our relationship with food, food soon becomes scary, even when we’re focused on eating wholesome and nourishing food.

Amy shared that she became so health conscious that she’d walk into the grocery store and feel panicked because everything she looked at seemed bad for her. There’s no question that our current food landscape needs attention, and the more aware of it we are, the more we see just how harmful ignorance can be. That said, awareness shouldn’t equal panic. We can’t learn new habits and be resourceful and creative when we’re overwhelmed with panic.

When we approach eating healthy with curiosity and excitement, we are able to see the abundance of foods and flavors there are. Nutritious doesn’t mean boring.

We also see that there is no “perfect” diet. I still occasionally drink wine and indulge in chocolate. My brother Alex still occasionally eats cheese that he knows won’t make him feel great. The point is not to obsess about always eating the perfect food but to be conscious and do our best to enjoy the freshest and highest-quality food we can.

That’s why the guidelines at the end of
Chapter 4
are so vital (see pages 75–76). By being present with our food we can really enjoy that chocolate instead of inhaling it because we are searching for a feeling. Even when we choose to eat something that isn’t ideally suited to our body’s health and well-being, we can be present, enjoy it, and then move on to making a healthy choice the next time we’re hungry.

We need to become friends with food again. It’s a relationship we need to spend time on and really invest in. When we go from obsessing about diet foods to eating foods that nourish us, from obsessing about losing weight to obsessing about learning how to thrive with better health, we enjoy the journey of discovering what is best for us.

Food Shouldn’t Just Be Fuel or Medicine—It’s Also about Pleasure

As we create a new relationship with food, one of the healthiest and best choices we can make is to experience true pleasure from it. While many of the food products on the market are devoid of nutrition, food itself isn’t the enemy. The issue is that we have lost touch with what real food is. As a result, we’ve unintentionally been starving the body of the nutrition it’s begging for.

That said, I don’t ever want to look at food as
just
fuel. I don’t think anyone should. We’ve lived for thousands of years enjoying and celebrating food. We deserve to honor that tradition and savor every delicious bite!

I always try to experience as much pleasure from food as possible. That doesn’t just mean making tasty salads. It also means that when I eat something decadent and full of sugar, I get to enjoy every bite. Thanks to tapping, shame and guilt are no longer on my plate. When my sister-in-law makes her delicious dark chocolate cake for special occasions, I enjoy my piece fully, without guilt or shame. It goes right through me, without leaving stress, emotional residue, or added weight behind.

That’s the power of allowing ourselves to experience pleasure from food, including occasional indulgences. And as we’ll see in the next chapter, when we feel pleasure, our bodies can function at the highest level, supporting us as we support them.

Chapter 11

Self-Care and Pleasure

S
o far we have learned about the consequences of stress, negative emotions, and limiting beliefs on our hormones, overall health, and weight. Now it’s time to look at the other end of the spectrum—happiness.

Happiness creates a different set of internal circumstances. As I’ve been saying throughout the book: weight loss is not the key to happiness; it’s the other way around. When we make our own happiness a priority, we can create a new relationship with the body we have and create an internal environment that supports weight loss. More important, when we experience more happiness, our lives open up in new and amazing ways.

Happiness: The Weight Loss Drug

Like stress, happiness floods our bodies with hormones. The difference is that the hormones released by happiness and pleasure promote better health, improve digestion, increase metabolism, and even lengthen our life spans. Dr. Lissa Rankin, M.D., discusses the impact of happiness on health and well-being in her
New York Times
best-selling book,
Mind Over Medicine
:

People with higher levels of “subjective well-being” live up to ten years longer than those who don’t. Happiness also affects some health outcomes, including success rates of stem-cell transplantation, control of diabetes, rates of full-blown AIDS in HIV-positive patients, and recovery from stroke, heart surgery, and hip fracture.