A number of years ago I interviewed an excellent practitioner who introduced me to the emotional freedom technique (EFT).
Since then, this practice has become more widely used, understood and, of course, successful.
In that interview, I wrote about how EFT can help anxiety, stress, fear and trauma and gave some examples of celebrities using the technique to calm them before going on stage. But EFT can also help weight loss, which is the subject I’m going to explore today.
Tapping is a stress relief technique that involves tapping on acupressure points. To help understand better how this works, your emotions control your beliefs about yourself, such as your weight. They also control your actions. In fact, your emotions are the driving force behind every action you take.
Peta Stapleton is a clinical psychologist in Queensland, Australia, who has spent the past 20 years treating eating disorders and researching weight loss and eating behaviours. She has concluded the first phase of her study on how tapping impacts food cravings and weight loss and how effective it is.
All 89 women in her controlled study were aged from 31 to 56, with a body mass index (BMI) that qualified them as obese.
Over an eight-week period, they did about two hours of tapping each week, or just over 15 minutes a day on average. Just by tapping, with no diets or exercise, they lost an average of 16 pounds. Additionally, the weight loss they achieved during that eight-week period stayed with them for over six months, even though the women had stopped tapping. To understand how tapping leads to such dramatic and lasting weight loss in such a short time, it is important to understand how stress affects the body.
To keep tapping on issues as they arise peels away the onion, revealing layer after layer
Stress sets off a fight-or-flight response in the body (something I have written about in detail over the years). This response occurs when the body senses danger and, as a result, the brain begins an over-production of cortisol, which is linked to increased appetite, sugar cravings and added abdominal fat. Even mild stress can cause the body to go into fight-or-flight mode. Emotions such as anger, fear and guilt also trigger the same response.
The fight-or-flight response used to prepare our ancestors to fight off a wild animal or an attacker. In present times we can trigger this response just by sitting in a traffic jam and getting really angry at the driver in front.
Adrenaline levels rise, muscles tighten and blood pressure, heart rate and blood sugar all increase to prepare for action. At the same time, the body’s less essential functions either slow or shut down.
One of these can be the ability to digest food properly. Due to the lack of essential nutrients, the body automatically triggers a hunger pang, not because it needs more food, but because the stress has rendered it unable to properly digest the food that is available.
You may recognise what happens to you in a stressful situation, and there are more reactions, but today I just want to concentrate on the food connection. What tapping does incredibly well is disrupt the fight-or-flight response, allowing the body to quickly return to a more relaxed state in which it can digest food properly and support healthier digestion and faster metabolism.
In another study led by Dawson Church, founder of the National Institute for Integrative Healthcare and editor of Energy Psychology, as well as author of The Genie in your Genes, his team focused on the changes in cortisol levels and psychological symptoms of 83 volunteers. They were divided into three groups. One was given an hour- long tapping session, the other got an hour of conventional talk therapy and the third received no treatment.
The two groups who had talk therapy and no treatment showed an average of a 14 per cent drop in cortisol over the time period. The tapping group showed a 24 per cent decrease on average, with some experiencing as much as a 50 per cent decrease. This test was run several times to ensure consistent results.
The brain’s limbic system includes amygdala which initiates the fight-or-flight response. The same process can take place with stress connected to food. When you have a craving for chocolate, you may be in the middle of a limbic response. If your brain has been trained to respond to stress by devouring a packet of chocolate biscuits, then after a stressful day at work, that is what you will do.
As tapping quickly halts the fight-or-flight response and lowers cortisol, you will be able to change how your brain reacts to stress and chocolate biscuits. You can actually consider whether eating a packet of chocolate biscuits really is the right way to unwind.
It may sound unbelievable that you could actually stop and think before feeding the craving. However, scientists speculate that when we train our limbic system to respond to a stressful day at work, in a new way we are actually changing our neural pathways, allowing the brain to react differently to how it did in the past.
While tapping on a specific emotion or situation, other memories or feelings may arise. To keep tapping on issues as they arise peels away the onion, revealing layer after layer to create a new relationship with yourself and your body.
kathryn@maltanet.net