Weight gain and weight loss is a constant battle which emotions – no matter how hard you try, we are constantly ruled by the way we feel. The way we feels controls our beliefs, our weight and everything that is around us. You attempt to tackle the reason behind your emotions but it’s easier said than done. The way we feel often dictates what we eat, and how we’re feeling, determines our mood, which in turn determines what we feed on. Our diets can sabotage our exercise regime in a flash, and very quickly can lead to weight gain. When we feel angry, or fearful, guilty or resentful of a certain situation, it impacts our biological production of certain chemicals. Too much Cortisol, also known as the ‘stress hormone’ can be activated by our stress-response system, and can disrupt all your body’s processes, putting you at risk of weight gain, that becomes uncontrollable.
And let’s be honest, starting a diet is hard enough anyway. And perhaps it is of no surprise that the average weight loss diet lasts 15 days, with just 35% of dieters gaining the weight quicker than they lost it. And with so many diets out there, there’s bound to be a few that don’t work, and perhaps it’s this inability to find one that works, that causes you to reassess what you need to do to lose weight.
If you’re looking for new ways to truly tackle your inner emotions to combat weight gain, tapping, a form of EFT – Emotional Freedom Technique can help. This very idea of tapping is how Jessica Ortner, an American author of The Tapping Solution: For Weight Loss and Body Confidence lost a whopping 30 pounds in just five months.
So how does tapping work?
Well, EFT is a form of psychological acupressure which helps reduce anxiety and emotive feelings. You simply lightly touch eight parts of your body known as ‘energy meridians’. These areas of your body were identified by Eastern medicine, and includes your eyebrow, the outer edge of your eye, the area under your nose, your chin, beneath your armpit, the top of your head, and under your eye. Whilst tapping, you’re meant to repeat a mantra that acknowledges and accepts that you wish to override the way you’re feeling, which is affecting certain aspects of your lifestyle such as weight gain.
So for example, you need to think of the times where you have tried to rid yourself of an emotion, and to try not to make you feel a certain way. If you’re using tapping to lose weight, you will undoubtedly consider how to cut out the junk food you’re eating, and the emotional turmoil you feel after you hit that pack of sweets or biscuits, too many times in a working week. Tapping bridges the gap between your mind and physical needs – combining a gentle touch which sends signals to your brain to calm down. This combination of kinetic energy from the tapping and what you’re trying to persuade yourself to do dissipate the root cause of these cravings, removing a sudden urge to eat and eat.
The first thing to reminder is your goal from tapping is to reduce your stress score and to make sure you lessen the amount of negative thoughts you experience. Once you can safely say your stress score I as low as possible, you can begin the process of tapping again. You can now assert certain statements like ‘I’m happy now that I look at photos of myself without feeling like I look like a whale’. The moment you realize for yourself the positive energy tapping can have on your mental well-being, the more likely it is you will lose weight more naturally.