The Tapping Solution for Weight Loss & Body Confidence (16 page)

By the time we left his house, two and a half hours had passed. Every moment we had spent with Bruce Lipton had been amazing. It was, and still is, my favorite interview from the movie. Talking to him was fascinating, and by the end Nick Polizzi and I felt like giant sponges soaked to maximum capacity with incredible new knowledge.

Since we’d already missed our flight home, Nick and I had no choice but to drive six hours to Los Angeles and catch a different one. During that drive, we talked at length about Bruce’s work. It’s really a pretty amazing idea—that our beliefs, emotions, stress, and nutrition can change how cells behave and function. His work shows us that we’re not victims of genetics but instead products of our thoughts. According to this way of thinking, there are only very rare and occasional instances when genetics play a significant role in our ability to overcome weight struggles. While this puts a lot of power in our hands to change our own lives and, for example, create an easier and more enjoyable weight loss journey, it also robs many of us of the excuse that our weight struggles come from “bad genes.”

Take a moment now to think about the internal environment you’re creating for yourself and your cells. Is your body living in one that is loving and nurturing, or an environment of self-hatred and punishment? Feel free to write down your thoughts.

Remember: the point of this process is not to blame anyone or anything—including yourself—for your past weight struggles. The point now is to get curious about your beliefs and how your internal environment may be impacting your weight loss journey.

Keep those questions and your responses in mind as we begin exploring beliefs around weight loss next.

To watch a segment of my interview with Bruce Lipton, go to
www.TheTappingSolution.com/chapter6
.

Beliefs Around Weight Loss

“I really want to lose weight, but it doesn’t seem worth it,” Polly confessed in our first coaching session. Losing weight and being thin, for Polly, had always been about deprivation and struggle. After weeks and months of dieting and hard work, the weight would come off, but even when she felt thin she couldn’t enjoy herself. Always obsessing about calories and exercise, she worried about when the weight would return, which it inevitably did. As much as she still wanted to lose weight, she couldn’t stand the thought of going through the process all over again. Absolutely nothing about the experience of losing weight had ever been enjoyable.

Polly’s experience is incredibly common, and like most beliefs, the belief that weight loss is about struggle and deprivation quickly turns into reality. If you believe you must suffer to lose weight, you will either fail to lose it or you will drop a few pounds but regain them soon afterward. I’ll say it again: our bodies can’t be healthy and thrive when they’re constantly being scrutinized and subjected to a stressful internal environment.

One of the most common responses I hear from women who follow my online weight loss program is “I’m losing weight and I don’t feel deprived!” They’re amazed, but why is deprivation-free weight loss such a shock? Since diets typically don’t look at the underlying beliefs and emotions that lead us toward self-sabotaging behaviors, in many ways they set us up to fail. Relying on diet and exercise alone, we’re forced to use willpower as our sole source of motivation, and that makes weight loss feel difficult.

If you have a belief that it’s hard to lose weight, you will continue to make it hard. If you have a belief that losing weight can be pleasurable, you can more easily adopt new behaviors such as eating more nourishing meals and exercising regularly. Take a moment now to explore your beliefs about weight loss and do some tapping on it.

YOUR BELIEFS ABOUT WEIGHT LOSS

To begin exploring your own beliefs around weight loss, ask yourself the following question: “What if having a healthy and strong body could be a fun and pleasurable experience?”

Does this idea make you scoff or roll your eyes? Does it make you feel anxious or angry or frustrated? Write down any emotional reactions you have, whether it’s resistance, self-blame, curiosity, excitement, or some other emotion. You can use these emotions that come up as tapping targets, but you can also look to tap directly on your beliefs.

To discover what these beliefs are, ask yourself the following questions and write down your answers.

1. What beliefs do you have about your genes and body?

a) It’s my genetics.

b) I have a slow metabolism.

c) My body is working against me.

d) Other(s): ________________________

2. What are your beliefs around what it takes to be healthy and strong?

a) If it’s not hard, I’m not doing it right.

b) I have to deprive myself.

c) I have to eat perfectly.

d) I have to suffer to see results.

e) I have to obsess over calories.

f) I need to criticize myself to “get my act together” and be healthier.

g) Other(s): ________________________

I’ll teach you later how to tap on these beliefs. For now, I just want you to identify them.

Beliefs about Others

To this day Lisa remembers how much it hurt when the skinny girls in high school turned their attention toward her. They always seemed to have so much fun taunting and teasing Lisa about her weight. It seemed like their favorite pastime.

As we tapped on her memories, Lisa was able to release the emotional pain she had been holding inside for all these years. During that process, she also realized that she had formed a belief in high school that all thin women are mean. Not wanting to become “one of them,” she was shocked to realize all the ways she’d been unconsciously sabotaging her own weight loss for many years.

The judgments we make about others, especially other women, often seem like our dirty little secrets. Whether we voice them to a precious few friends or keep them to ourselves, our judgments feel bitter and shameful—but also completely true. It’s not that we want to feel this way, we tell ourselves, it’s that we can’t help but form logical conclusions based on years of experience.

When we dig deeper, we see that our judgments are reflections of our own beliefs that contribute to self-sabotaging behaviors. I remember rolling my eyes years ago whenever I saw a physically fit woman running. I didn’t understand why you would run unless you were being chased. I judged physically fit women as vain. The truth was that I was annoyed that I wasn’t born with the “love to work out” gene. And if I couldn’t be like them, at least I could judge them. Judging them somehow felt more empowering to me. I finally realized my judgments were a painful reflection of the limiting beliefs I had about myself and created a block to my own success.

Are there thin women who are vain and cruel and have a bad attitude and an unhealthy relationship with exercise? Of course there are. But there are also overweight women who are vain and cruel and have a bad attitude and an unhealthy relationship with exercise. There are 8 billion people on the planet. Weight and body mass index do not determine a person’s attitude!

When you pass judgment on someone else, you are teaching your subconscious mind that it’s not safe for you to have what they have because you may be judged in the same way you’re judging them. So when you look at someone’s Facebook picture and pass judgment on how easy life must be for them, you’re telling yourself that it’s not safe for your life to be easy or else you may be judged. Then you’ll unconsciously continue to find ways to prove your value through struggling.

Instead of being judgmental when you see someone who has more money or a healthier body, get curious. Befriend them. Ask them what motivates them to stay healthy. More important, cheer them on. The more you can celebrate someone else’s success, the more congruent you will be with creating similar success for yourself.

Take a moment now to think about how you judge others, including those little snap judgments you make while in line at the store, in meetings, with your neighbors, or when you see other parents at your child’s school. Do you criticize other people more often than you praise and appreciate them? Do you tend to make big assumptions about who they are based on how they look or on little things they say or do?

Once you’ve made an initial list of your judgments about others, you may find yourself discovering new and different judgments you make as you go about your day. There’s no need to feel discouraged by this or to shame or blame yourself for being judgmental. The more aware you are of how you’re seeing others, the more quickly you can uncover your own beliefs, do some tapping on them, and make positive changes in yourself and your life.

Now that we’ve explored how you may judge others, let’s look at what you believe about yourself.

Beliefs about Yourself

Every time Isabelle gained weight, she would get frustrated and say to herself, “God, I’m so stupid!” She’d continue by saying, “I know what I should be doing. I don’t understand why I’m not doing it.” I asked her one day why she was so quick to judge herself as stupid. As we did tapping on that, she remembered working in her father’s office as a child, starting when she was only eight years old. He was a doctor, and every time she made a mistake, he would say, “What, are you stupid?” His words stayed with her into adulthood, and every time Isabelle made a mistake she called herself stupid. Over time, her failure to lose weight had become her biggest “mistake,” a constant reminder of how stupid she must be.

As we did some tapping together to clear the emotions and stress behind her memory and the “You’re stupid” belief it had created, Isabelle’s mood lightened. Once we’d tapped through the emotional intensity of her belief, we continued tapping while asking each other, “What, are you stupid?” As soon as I asked her that, she replied, “No, but thanks for asking.” Her old belief that she was stupid for not being able to lose weight had suddenly lost its power, and after several rounds of “What, are you stupid?” we both broke into laughter.

When we begin looking at how we judge ourselves, we’re often shocked at the beliefs we’ve been carrying around. They’re often things like
You’re so stupid. You’re a fat slob. You have no self-control. You never do anything right. You can never stick to anything. You’ll never be good enough.
As one client said to me, “My biggest Aha! moment was when I realized that if someone spoke to my five-year-old daughter the way I speak to myself, I would knock them out, so why am I speaking to myself like this?”

Our beliefs about ourselves sometimes leak out at random moments when we fall into old language patterns. One day I was filming a video with a friend. As she was struggling to set up a light, she muttered, “I’m so stupid.” Without thinking, I yelled, “Hey! Don’t talk about my friend like that!” We both looked at each other and burst out laughing as she pointed to me and said, “Good catch.” We need to do our best to catch ourselves in these moments.

If you look at every time you eat a cookie or skip exercise as a mistake, you’re reinforcing beliefs like
I never follow through with things, I can never lose weight,
and
Losing weight is impossible.
Such beliefs keep you locked inside your old self-destructive story. If you find yourself falling into an old self-sabotaging behavior but have the belief that you are smart, healthy, and worthy, you will quickly align yourself with your positive story about yourself and make a better and more empowering decision.

So what do you say to yourself when you make a mistake? If you respond with negative self-talk, you are more likely to make more bad decisions. Beating ourselves up for emotional eating doesn’t stop the destructive pattern. If we believe these negative beliefs about ourselves, we will use that one binge to prove our point and continue to repeat the same habit because it seems congruent with who we think we are. If we have empowering beliefs about ourselves, we don’t need to judge that experience of overeating. Instead, we can quickly move on to make a better decision.

The words
I am
are the two most powerful words in the human language. How we end that sentence determines our fate.