Carol Look - The Tapping Diet: Discover the Power of Emotional Freedom Techniques

Avon, Massachusetts

I hate diets. Always have, always will. How about you?

Most diets fail because they assume that you just need to modify your portion sizes and get more exercise. What they overlook is the emotional component of overeating. Many people eat too much because they use food to calm their emotions. When youre upset or tired or lonely, you eat. Traditional diet plans dont address that problem. What you need is a program that eliminates your cravings and heals what causes you to overeat for emotional reasons. That increases your ability to stick to a healthy food plan. That makes you feel better about yourself, and actually helps you lose weight for good.

Enter The Tapping Dieta diet that will help you feel better emotionally and physically because it offers a tool to help you stop emotional overeating, the missing piece to the weight-loss puzzle. When combined with the sensible food plan given in Part 2, this tool will help you finally be successful in your weight-loss challenge!

The tool is called tapping, a method that combines the benefits of traditional acupuncture with the insights of modern psychology to eliminate the emotional reasons you overeat. The technique uses your fingertips (instead of needles) to tap on acupuncture points throughout your body to reduce emotional stress. Research indicates that tapping calms down the fight-or-flight response, the response that all humans have when stress is introduced through thoughts, perceptions, or external circumstances. When you experience stress, you may often find yourself trying to protect yourself by using food to numb your emotions.

Unfortunately, you cant take stress out of your life. Your daily interactions with your family, your work, and the world around you will inevitably trigger this response. Fortunately, The Tapping Diet will teach you how to use tapping to reduce your stress; manage challenging emotions, such as food cravings, anxiety, insomnia, resentment, fear, sabotage, success blocks, and more; and increase your confidence and peace of mind so that the need for overeating unhealthy, high-calorie foods disappears. Throughout the book, youll find detailed information on what tapping is and how to use it to lose weight, sample tapping scripts, a daily tapping plan, and case studies that give you real-life stories from my clients who have used this technique to lose weight and keep it off successfully, which is exactly what youre going to do, too.

Skeptical? I was, too... until I started using this technique on myself and my clients. For eighteen years I have successfully shared this message in person during workshops in France, Brussels, Canada, Ireland, England, and Australia, and through my training products in numerous other countries. I have also taught classes in more than a dozen states in the United States and run a coaching program using tapping as the primary tool. The result is the same: People feel hope, see results, and feel inspired and reinvigorated to use tapping to reach their goal weight. I continue to be enthusiastic and passionate about sharing this tool to help you feel calm and confident, so you can feel hope, see results, and be inspired to use tapping to reach and maintain your weight-loss goals. You can do it!

In this part, well discuss the basics of tappingwhat it is, why it works, and the step-by-step method youll use to perform it (, well dig into the reasons why traditional diets dont deliver results. Well discuss the specific stressors and fears you may have about losing weight. This information will empower you to have the greatest success with tapping.

In , youll learn the step-by-step specifics of how to use the tapping technique to help reduce emotional overeating and to create weight loss. Youll discover exercises and strategies that you can use to help deal with your emotions (instead of using food to numb them).

In , youll develop a tapping plan that you can follow daily to help you lose weight and to stay on track with your new program, and youll learn some additional strategies, such as meditation and visualization, that will help support your new emotional resilience.

Finally, provides an enormous variety of sample scripts to use when youre tapping, covering a wide range of emotional issues you may be dealing with in your life.

Lets get started!

In this chapter, youll learn the history of the tapping technique, which is formally known as Emotional Freedom Techniques or EFT. Based on the ancient practice of acupuncture, tapping combines the theories of Chinese medicine with modern psychology to create an innovative system for resolving the stress responses that can lead to all kinds of emotional and physical problems, including overeating. Youll learn not just what tapping is, but why it works.

Additionally, well go through the actual process of tapping step by step so that you can understand how to use the technique. Its not complicated, requiring only that you tap on various parts of the face or body as you recite affirmations and intentions, but it does require practice and an understanding of how to create the necessary affirmations and intentions. Youll find that tapping can be useful for dealing with many of the emotional and physical challenges you may be facing.

Tapping is formally known as Emotional Freedom Techniques or EFT. Created in the 1990s by Gary Craig, a personal performance coach in California, EFT is a simple technique that requires the client to focus on an emotional challenge while tapping on acupuncture points. The acupuncture points used in tapping were identified centuries ago in Chinese medicine. In traditional Chinese medicine, it is thought that ones life energy, or chi, moves through ones body through energy meridians or circuits. If the energy becomes blocked, a person can suffer physical and emotional illnesses. Symptoms such as pain, fear, cravings, or stress can be signs that there is a blockage between and among your energy meridians. Chinese medicine practitioners apply acupuncture needles to points on these meridians, and the symptoms disappear. In EFT and the tapping therapies, we use tapping with our fingertips rather than inserting needles to break up this energetic or emotional congestion.

EFT is based on the 1980s technique called Thought Field Therapy (TFT), which also uses tapping on acupuncture points. Thought Field Therapy was created by Dr. Roger Callahan, a clinical psychologist in California. EFT is a simpler version of this form of tapping. Craig, like Callahan before him, believed that when we release the blocked energy caused by our negative thoughts or emotional conflicts, our emotional and physical symptoms disappear. Recent research seems to confirm that tapping on acupuncture points relieves the classic fight-or-flight response that is triggered instantaneously when you think of something stressful, or think you are in danger.