Emotional Freedom Techniques and Weight loss

Emotional eating sabotages most weight loss attempts

OK, so you don’t want to look like a skinny super model. You do want to lose anything from 3kgs (6.6lbs) to whatever will bring your weight back to where you know you’ll be healthier.

There are people who need to lose weight because – OMG how did it happen – they’re over fifty and they have definite signs of osteoarthritis. Weight loss won’t eliminate that sign of ageing but let’s face it, if you have arthritis in your knees or hips, the last thing you need is to be carrying around any extra weight.

Toxic waist

I’m not keen to talk about ideal weight for height or even about Body Mass Index. One metric that I think is very important is height to waist measurement. If your waist measurement is more than twice your height, you’re a prime candidate for diabetes and many other illnesses, including cancer.

The other you – the emotional eater you

So many of us are at least two different people. The one that will sabotage any effort you make to manage your weight in an ongoing way is that dreadful person you hardly know: the silly one who munches those potato chips and then follows the sodium-soaked, fat saturated chips with something highly nutritious like a bar of chocolate. You know you don’t want to do that.  You manage every other aspect of your life.  You’ve just spent the whole of last year on a regimen where you lost 10kgs and looked and felt fabulous and look at you now! You stood on the scale a fortnight ago, noticed that you’d stacked on a couple of kilos and then you rationalised that by referring to Christmas or summer or a party or…

You’re again, for the umpteenth time, back on the road to being overweight.

The real reason you LOVE chocolate

It soothes you. In a stressful world, it gives you pleasure. It’s what you received as a treat from your grandmother when you visited or from your parents when you were ‘good’. There’s an emotional charge to chocolate that no amount of spinach or broccoli can generate. It’s about emotions. Deep-seated feelings and connections you know nothing about when you open that packet of Toblerone or any chocolate.

That’s where Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) comes in. Through EFT your therapist can help you to identify your emotional eating patterns. It may not be about sweet things. If it is, chocolate may not be your downfall.  Through EFT you can identify why you do what you do to sabotage your maintenance of a healthy weight. When I say ‘your sabotage’ of course I don’t mean that you deliberately set out to undermine your healthy eating and your health. But that’s what you’re doing. Sometimes the emotional trigger is about happiness and sometimes it’s a deep-seated memory of trauma.  In both instances, if you don’t recognise what you’re doing subconsciously, you’ll keep on doing it.

One great thing about EFT.  It can’t do you any harm and I have seen it do splendid things for people who had given up the idea that they could be a healthy weight in the long-term.

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