The Tapping Solution for Weight Loss & Body Confidence (5 page)

Does that mean they’ll never succumb to cravings and emotional eating ever again? No. But it happens so infrequently that it doesn’t sabotage their goals. They often describe finally feeling a sense of peace around food. For the first time in years, clients tell me they can attend parties and have great conversations with people they’d never gotten to know previously because all they could focus on was the food. And for the first time in years, they can take a walk or go to a yoga class and actually enjoy themselves.

The success stories around tapping, weight loss, and body confidence cover a wide range of circumstances, issues, and challenges. Whatever the specifics of the story, time after time when clients do the tapping, they lose the weight and keep it off. More important, though, even before the weight loss happens, they’re able to feel beautiful in their bodies.

Why Tap When You Just Want to Lose Weight Now?

People often ask me how quickly tapping will help them lose weight. While many of my clients begin losing weight in our first weeks working together, everyone loses weight at their own pace. When we begin tapping to release the stress and pressure we put on ourselves to lose weight, it’s counterproductive to obsess about the result. When we are truly on this journey, weight loss becomes a pleasurable side effect of feeling better about ourselves.

The great thing about tapping is that it also works on headaches, backaches, and almost any kind of physical pain as well as insomnia and negative emotions such as fear, anger, and more. You can use it to relax after a long day or to get more focused when you’re feeling sluggish. The physical and emotional benefits are endless, so try tapping whenever you want to feel better, and the weight loss benefits will soon appear as well.

Anyone Can Lose Weight with Tapping

As compelling as the science around tapping is, for me it’s the incredible results I’ve seen in my clients, myself, and my friends and family that offer the real proof that tapping is the most powerful weight loss tool I’ve ever seen.

When I began this process, I was a huge skeptic, and to this day I’m amazed at how well tapping works for weight loss, weight maintenance, body confidence, stress, illness, physical pain, and so much more. But over the years, I’ve become passionate about tapping as a health and weight loss tool because the results I see are so undeniable. My skepticism had no choice but to admit defeat.

Many clients I work with start out with this same skepticism. I always appreciate that they’re honest with me about it. Just like me, they’d already tried countless other methods to lose weight—diets, extreme exercise, hypnosis, meditation. And with each new attempt at losing weight, they’d either see no change or lose it only to gain it right back. Why would tapping be any different?

But once they start, they lose the weight, not because they’re dieting but because they learn to live life and be happy in the moment. Tapping helps decrease your cortisol levels, so your hormones can support your weight loss. Tapping also supports you in sticking with healthy lifestyle changes. I’ll share many client stories throughout this book, and the people in them are living proof that you don’t have to believe that tapping will help you lose weight for the tapping to work. Whether or not you believe it will work for you, if you do the tapping, you can achieve all of your weight loss goals and keep the weight off. So let’s get started tapping.

Chapter 2

Quick Start Tapping Guide

N
ancy’s stress levels were at an all-time high. A 53-year-old entrepreneur trying to run her business while relocating from New York City to San Francisco, she stepped on the scale one day while packing the contents of her bathroom. She was horrified to see that she was at her highest weight ever. This wasn’t the first time she’d felt surprised and heartbroken while looking at the scale.

Nancy had trouble remembering a time when she wasn’t stressed about her weight. She ran the pattern of starting the latest diet trend, working hard, losing some weight, and then gaining it back. When she did manage to lose weight, she often felt like “the wolves were at my door,” as she put it. One false move around food and she’d be back to her old ways of eating, and then she’d regain the weight.

As she began her new adventure in San Francisco, she decided she was ready to leave her pattern of chronic dieting and stress in New York. “I kept saying to myself that there had to be another way. I wanted to end this pattern.” Nancy had heard me speak at an event and soon learned that her brother had been using tapping to manage stress. When she heard about my weight loss program, she decided to take a leap of faith and signed up for it in the midst of her move.

By the time Nancy was settled in San Francisco, she had been tapping for four months, often using my tapping meditations. Although moving was stressful, she was able to use tapping to find relief every step of the way. When she finally got around to unpacking her scale, she was surprised once again—pleasantly surprised! She had lost weight during a time when she was unable (and unwilling) to follow a strict diet plan.

I came across Nancy’s story because she was so thrilled by her results that she decided to blog about it on a website for female entrepreneurs. This is what she wrote:

I no longer crave sugar, sweets, and carbs. I rarely eat them and don’t miss them one bit. And when I do, I savor a small portion guilt free, and it’s not a big deal. All the drama around food, weight, and body image has simply been unplugged. I’ve also lost 16 pounds, pretty effortlessly, I might add! And, most important, now I really understand how stressing about dieting and weight—and especially negative self-talk—only fuels the problem. Finally I get what I’ve been doing wrong all these years! This is the only program I’ve ever found that nails the emotional stuff that is really at the root of it all.

Are you ready to “nail” the emotional stuff like Nancy did? It begins with learning how to tap.

Let’s Start Tapping!

First let me just say that if you’re new to tapping, I understand that it seems weird. Here’s how I think of it. You know those times when you try to think yourself out of a thought? You’re an intelligent, self-aware person, and you feel like you should be able to use positive reasoning to get rid of that thought or emotion, but you can’t because you feel it in your body. It might be anxiety in your chest or a panicked feeling in your stomach. What tapping does is bridge that gap between your body and your mind. When you tap while focusing on the thought or feeling, you relax the body and send a calming signal to the brain, telling it that it, too, can relax.

In addition to its effectiveness, one of the reasons my clients have such success with tapping is that it works so well with their busy schedules. It’s easy, convenient, and makes you feel great in a matter of minutes. So let’s dive right in. Here are the basic steps for tapping:

• Step 1: Choose your tapping target, and create a reminder phrase (
  Step 1
  ).
  
• Step 2: Rate the intensity of your target on the 0 to 10 Subjective Units of Distress Scale (
  SUDS
  ).
  
• Step 3: Create a setup statement (
  Step 3
  ).
  
• Step 4: Tap on the karate chop point (
  Step 4
  ) while repeating your setup statement three times.
  
• Step 5: Tap gently through the eight points in the tapping sequence (
  Step 5
  ) while saying your reminder phrase out loud. Tap five to seven times on each point. Repeat this until you begin to feel relief.
  
• Step 6: Once you’re feeling better, take a deep breath and again rate the intensity of your issue using the 0 to 10 SUDS.
  

It’s that simple! I’ll lead you through the process in more detail in the rest of this chapter; however, if you’re a visual learner, you can watch a video on how to tap where I cover all of the steps. You can find that video at
www.TheTappingSolution.com/chapter2
.

Step 1: Pinpointing Your Tapping Target

You’re reading this book, so it seems safe to assume that you’re anxious to lose weight and feel more confident in your body. Like many women, though, you’re probably living a full life, perhaps juggling work, family, and friends, maybe also trying to manage physical pain or illness, and stressed about your finances or the fight you just had with your boss or husband. Whatever issue is bothering you most is a great place to start with your tapping target.

It might be one of these:

• Work has been really stressful lately.
  
• I’m so frustrated about my weight.
  
• I have a really bad headache.
  

Take a moment to answer these questions for yourself:
What’s really bothering me right now? What in my life feels really stressful right now?
You can either write it down or just remember it as you continue reading. Keep in mind, too, that your list doesn’t have to seem relevant to weight loss and body confidence. Very often the stress that impacts our weight doesn’t appear at first to be directly related to weight.

If several different issues come to mind, just start with the one that feels the most stressful. There’s no right or wrong answer, so just go with whichever issue comes to mind first or feels most pressing right now.

Once you’ve got your tapping target and have started tapping, you’ll want to get as specific as possible. For example, if work is your top source of stress right now, why is it so stressful? Do you feel like your boss never appreciates your work? Have you recently started a new job or business?

Tapping on a general issue can certainly improve your mood and make you feel better. But adding specific details—like the fact that you just saw a recent photo of yourself and you feel ashamed of how big you think you look in it—draws the focus more clearly to what you’re experiencing. By being as specific as possible, you’ll be better able to rewire the brain’s response to whatever is causing your stress. You’ll notice that you can still have the thought but without feeling physical anxiety in your body. This is when you’ll be able to relax and choose a better thought or action.

If you ever get stuck on what to say, just focus on the feeling. You can also visualize a picture of what happened (or is happening) and then describe it as you’re tapping. Do whatever it takes to get a clear memory or feeling while you’re tapping.

• Here’s an example of a broad tapping statement around being stressed about weight:
  I’m so stressed about my weight.
  
• A more specific tapping statement would be:
  I’m so stressed about my weight because I just saw a recent picture of myself.
  
• And an even more specific statement would be:
  I’m so stressed about my weight because I saw a recent picture of myself and felt angry at myself for how big I look.
  

You can get specific in many different ways. Sometimes focusing on the intensity of the emotion you’re experiencing is helpful. For example:

I’m angry at myself for how big I look in that picture.

How angry do I feel? So angry!

What would that be on a 0 to 10 scale? Ten!

Where do I feel the anger in my body? My stomach—it makes me feel sick just thinking about it.

Now you have specific details about the anger you’re feeling, how angry you feel, where you feel the anger in your body, and so forth. You can use a similar process for physical pain, focusing on exactly where your head hurts, when the headache started, and so on. Whatever the issue, always try to be as specific as possible.

CHOOSING A REMINDER PHRASE

The reminder phrase is short—just a couple of words that bring to mind your tapping target. You will speak this phrase out loud or in your mind at each of the eight points in the tapping sequence. For example, if your tapping target has to do with your feelings of anger about that picture of yourself, you might tap through each point in the sequence saying, “This anger… this anger… this anger…” Other examples of reminder phrases for different tapping targets might be:

This loneliness I’m feeling …

This frustration …

This back pain …

And so forth.

You’re repeating the reminder phrase to remind yourself of the issue at each point. You want to target the thought that’s creating the physical discomfort in your body. This reminder phrase serves to keep your focus on the target so you don’t get distracted. It also acts as a barometer, helping you determine along the way how true the target feels to you.

Once you get used to tapping, you can change your reminder phrase as you tap through each point. For example, you might say, “This anger … this burning anger … I feel it in my stomach … I feel so humiliated …” You will notice that the reminder phrase becomes more specific as you say it. In the meditations at the end of each chapter, I provide a tapping meditation that evolves in this way. Feel free to use these tapping meditations as prompts and then tailor them specifically to your experience and emotions. To begin, though, you can focus on keeping it simple by saying the same statement at each point.