Tapping Eliminates Childhood Food Beliefs

Childhood beliefs hold on to us so strongly without us even realizing they are still there. The use of tapping frequently helps adults quickly recognize what they are and then evaluate these beliefs to see how and if they still fit into their lives.

Recently, I worked with a client named David, a middle-aged businessman. He contacted me as a referral from a previous client and was seeking relief from his work stress level. During a session, we were discussing what issues were coming up from all of this stress. As a former athlete, he prided himself in staying in shape, but had recently noticed that in the last two months had put on 18 pounds. David said he had recently been assigned a special project at work, so he would often stay at work late at night and get home about 9:30 pm at night. His wife would leave a plate of warmed up food for him to eat when he got home. As a result, 3 or 4 nights a week, he was eating a complete dinner at 10 pm- which included several helpings of homemade deserts. It was easy to understand why he was suddenly gaining weight so quickly. David said he was always regretted eating this large meal every night. He wanted to be able to change his eating habits so he ate earlier in the day and avoid eating the very large meal at night before going to sleep.

We used the set up statement “Even though I’m eating a hot dinner every night before going to sleep, I completely love and accept myself”. Then we tapped, “eating dinner every night”. I find it often helps when a client isn’t sure about the issue that we need to start out tapping using more of a general statement and the tapping often opens the person’s mind so we can find out what the real issues are and get very specific to get the best results.

This reduced his initial suds from an 8 to 6- but also brought up a few core beliefs which we needed to tap on and revise what we were focusing on.

The first core belief was that his dinner at night was his reward for working so hard during the day. Eating dinner at night was his time to shut out the world and do something special for himself. First, we had to work with his reversal for believing food was his reward, so we tapped on the subject of him holding on to that belief. The new set up phrase was “Even though I eat dinner late at night to reward myself, I completely love and accept myself” and we tapped “dinner is my reward”. This new focus worked wonderfully and after several rounds, we got him to a zero on this specific issue.

The second belief that came up during tapping, was an important childhood belief. David grew up in the midwest and as a child, his mother had taught him the importance of eating “3 balanced meals “ every day. It was based on the pyramid food charts that schools often had. Also, growing up, snacking wasn’t allowed, as it would interfere with eating his meals. Therefore, it made sense that David would want his dinner every night, no matter what time he ate it. That belief had been one of the household rules established by his mother growing up. While tapping, David realized that even though he was in his 40’s he didn’t want to break his mother’s rules.

In tapping, as we often refer to different aspects that pop up, as chopping down the trees in the forest, so, we now proceeded to chop down the tree of this core belief.

David had a reversal for eliminating this belief, too, so, we tapped to remove that before using the set up phrase, of, “Even though I don’t want to break my mother’s rules by not eating dinner every night, I deeply love and accept myself” and tapped “my mother’s rule’s” on the different points. We tapped several rounds and David reached a 0 suds level.

Once we tested that David was at a 0, we then proceeded to tap in some values that he felt would make him more successful, such as: eating healthy snacks during the day, bringing a healthy lunch to work, and taking time for exercise.

I heard from him the next week, and he told me he had starting bringing snacks to work and was eating a bigger lunch during the day and wasn’t eating dinner late at night. Several weeks later, he told me he had lost 10 pounds, was eating healthier and earlier during the day. Now, when he gets home at late at night, he enjoys the summer weather by going for a long walk with his wife.

Kate is an EFT/MTT practitioner specializing in stress-related issues and can be reached at successcoachingwithKate@comcast.net or www.successcoachingwithKate.com