Week 4: Emotional Eating And Self Sabotage

Welcome to Week 4!

Emotional eating is the heart of the Naturally Thin You program. As you’ve noticed listening to the audio programs (and hopefully tapping along), emotions are a big part of why we eat. For overweight people, they’re probably the biggest part.

That’s why you’re likely to succeed using this program even if you’ve failed in the past. You’ve enrolled for other diet programs and perhaps you’ve made progress. But after you finish the program you gain back all the weight you lost, and probably more.

Why is this? The reason is that no amount of head-knowledge about diet and nutrition is going to help problems that lie in the heart. When our emotions take over, all our intentions and convictions fly out the window. Emotions are much more powerful than mental ideas. You can know intellectually that you shouldn’t eat that fattening food, but when your heart is hurting, you eat it anyway.

That’s why we dedicate Week 4 to Emotional Eating. You’ve already been controlling emotional eating since Week 1 using the audio programs and the Tapping Plan for Weight Loss. That’s why many of your cravings have gone away, you’re eating less, you’re eating more healthy food, and the scale is being kind to you.

When you really understand how much of our eating is driven by emotion, you have a powerful tool for change. You begin to assess the emotional component of your desire to eat, and you tap on that using EFT. When the emotional intensity subsides, the craving for that food usually subsides right along with it. You pay less attention to the food, and more to the emotion. When you have healthy emotions, you have a healthy relationship with food. That’s why Week 4 is so very important.

Read Chapter 5 of EFT for Weight Loss: Exploring Underlying Issues. Also read Karen Donaldson’s essay How Stress is Making You Fat. These will give you a good sense of the link between eating and feelings. I can almost feel the “Aha’s” you’ll be having this next week, as you realize that so much of your problem eating was emotion-driven. Tap down the emotions with EFT, and the food problems will go away by themselves.

Listen to the audio programs, and use the Tapping Scripts if you need them. By now you’ve heard me guide you through the process of finding childhood events linked to a traumatic feeling, and you’re learning to do it yourself.

Your #1 supporter on your weight loss journey,
~ Dawson