One of the key things that I always talk about in my weight loss training is that it’s less about weight and more about how our memories create triggers in our brains when it comes to food. Whether it makes us feel safe, or it makes us feel in control, food is a power struggle in many people’s lives. It’s a simple occurrence when we make connections in and around food: we have an experience that forms a memory, and that memory creates a link. That link then becomes the basis of our behavior and our reactions. We do this with everything. Money, feelings, food, people, places, smells… Anything we can program, we will. We do it automatically. The key to weight loss success is finding in our subconscious where the link was made, and breaking it.
Today, I wanted to share with you a story from Maggie. Her experience with eutaptics® FasterEFT™ has evolved in a way that many of you can probably relate to. Her story isn’t perfect, there was some struggle to get to where she wanted to be, and after a few times starting then quitting then starting again, she’s feeling like herself again.
Maggie comes from a huge family. She is the youngest of ten children. Everyone in her family has dealt with weight struggles their whole lives. At first, she chalked it up to being Latin. Her mom used to tell her, “We all have big butts, we all have thick thighs. It’s a right of passage to get a little belly jiggle.” Not only is that totally untrue, but for years she used it as a way to excuse her eating habits and the horrible way she felt as some kind of genetic disposition.
In addition to seeing weight struggles amongst her relatives, She’s also become accustomed to the idea that everyone in her family was pre-designed to suffer from depression, anxiety, suicidal tendencies, bipolar disorder, addictions and the lot.
They weren’t well off, not by any stretch of the imagination, and her mom often had to count up the last of her pennies to help the kids get the things we wanted or needed. Her dad was around, but not much help.
Growing up, she thought that these feelings of being sad and self-conscious were normal. She saw it in her sisters, brothers, mom, cousins… even her grandmother. The family matriarch that embodied strength and poise. She would hear her cry sometimes at family gatherings for what seemed like no reason at all.
As a teenager, Maggie became suicidal. She was often thinking the words, “Everyone would be happier without me,” and at just 105lbs, she also told herself constantly that she was fat. Her mother started to see some really dangerous habits forming, so she decided to put Maggie into therapy.
For a time, therapy was working. It was giving her someone to talk to that wasn’t one of her friends or one of her siblings. However, after months of nodding and not saying much, Maggie had decided that her therapist wasn’t helpful and she decided maybe it was time for medication.
She asked her parents to help her get some anti-depressants. The first ones made everything worse, the second made her numb.. This went on for about ten years until she found one that really worked. The only problem… One of the side effects was weight gain and with Maggie already struggling with eating disorders as a teen, she knew this was going to be an uphill battle.
Slowly, but surely it was getting harder and harder for her to maintain a healthy weight. At this time she discovered EFT and through that eutaptics® FasterEFT™.
“I have always dealt with depression and because of that I’ve dealt with weight fluctuation, but nothing as grandiose as what I was seeing on the scale recently. I have to do something. I’m going to put my money where my mouth is and do the work.”
When She began her eutaptics® FasterEFT™ journey after years of everything else she just really wanted to lose a few pounds and feel better in a bathing suit. What she got was more than she bargained for.
“I believe those things [Therapies] helped me a lot, but none of it really worked to FIX anything… it just helped me COPE and those are very different when you want real change.” She said.
So I asked her, what do you think the issue is? She knew that up until this point her many jobs had her eating at odd hours and sleeping at weird intervals throughout the day, so exercise was not on the top of her list. She barely had time between multiple jobs to even care for her child, let alone herself.
Depression and financial worries had really kicked into high gear, so she assumed that this weight issue would go away when she had a little more money to buy healthier food and a little more time to hit the gym. Wrong. Changing jobs corrected her sleep issue and her financial strain, and having those two things in place was relieving a bit of the depression, but when she stepped on the scale she was still 50lbs heavier than she had ever been before.
So now… it was time to get to the damn problem. Because she thought she had and that wasn’t it!
After a few days of doing the work, she was off her medication. A few weeks of doing the work and she didn’t wake up feeling sad or lonely anymore. At first, she worked with a couple of incredible practitioners who helped her see the beauty in herself and all the ways she was selling herself short by believing in old programs and old memories.
One in particular helped her realize that her low self-esteem had stemmed from memories as far back as junior high that she had never addressed in all her years of therapy. She tapped on all of the feelings, memories, statements and perceived truths one at a time. It helped her understand the WHY of her diminished self-value.
In a VERY short period of time, the shifts started to show. She was able to push her depression right out the door. It was great. She was happy again, feeling big moves in her self-esteem and her ability to be present for her family. Even her fiancé noticed a big change.
Suddenly she was interested in being out and about more. She wanted to see people she had been avoiding when she felt fat. Yet, even with all that progress… She hadn’t lost any weight. What was she doing wrong? What wasn’t she seeing yet?
After another couple of sessions about the connection between her self-esteem and her finances, it finally hit her like a ton of bricks… The thing she hadn’t addressed had nothing to do with food or her weight or her self-esteem. It was a fear of money. Specifically, her fear of not having it and thus, not wanting to ever waste what she did have.
You see, when she was a kid, they always had food. Not having food wasn’t the issue. It was that every time she’d reach for something, someone in the house would remind her how much it cost.
“Finish your whole plate because it costs _____” “Don’t open that box unless you plan to eat it all because it was _____ amount of money” “Those are the expensive ______so don’t stuff your face!”
When she moved out of her parents’ house she had a lot of hang-ups about money and hadn't realized in all these years that those hang-ups affected more than just how she treated my finances. It was affecting how she was treating food, her body, her child, her friends, her roommates, her partner, her job choices, her self-worth and on and on. It wasn’t just the way her family treated food as currency, but the way that money mattered so much in big milestones in her life. With these big milestones came good and bad memories that changed the course of her adulthood in profound ways. The anxiety that surrounded money was directly affecting her health long after those milestones had passed.
It was amazing to hear her tell this story, because it was like the clouds had parted and suddenly everything became clear. She started to tap when she felt the anxiety coming up. She started counting every penny less and enjoying being where she was and what she was doing more. As her practitioner told me to do, she had started throwing away what was left of her meals once she stopped feeling hungry, but before she started feeling full.
“Take the power out of the food,” her practitioner said. And she was doing that. Satisfaction had now become her quitting point rather than “eat it all because it costs money!”
The weight had started to fall off. She was so proud of herself.
Then her in-laws came to town…
Those in-laws LOVE to party. They were going out three meals a day, drinking more in a week than she would usually drink in a year and she had made every excuse in the book why she didn’t have to stick to her tapping.
That didn’t happen though.
She ate everything she saw, but not for the reason you might think. She wasn’t coming off a diet. She wasn’t coming off a workout plan. She ate everything she saw because when they would stand up from a table of half-full plates, what she saw left behind wasn’t food, it was money. LOOK AT ALL THAT MONEY THEY WERE LEAVING ON THE TABLE!
Well… she put back on all the weight she had worked so hard to lose and then some.
So, she started tapping again. Within a few months she was back down 21 lbs lighter. Over the course of the next couple of years, she’s kept it off - through having babies, money struggles, a break-up, a death in the family, and everything else life threw at her. She kept tapping and she kept getting healthier in her mind and in her body.
Today, three years after we first met, she’s still tapping and she still feels like eutaptics® FasterEFT™ was the key she needed to change her life.
A message from Maggie:
“I wanted to share my story because you’ll often hear people say that eutaptics® [FasterEFT™] takes work to see the results you truly want. They’re right. Though you will see big changes really fast, you still have to put in the elbow grease to make those changes last. You’ll hit peaks and valleys. You’ll trek through some treacherous waters to get to paradise. This work is filled with intention that sometimes derails, but with a little bit of compassion for yourself, you can find your way back. It is a journey, that much is true. But it’s a journey worth taking.”
eutaptics® FasterEFT™ has helped thousands of people all over the world make huge transformations in their lives. It is so effective that people begin to see changes after their very first session. But how much you get out of the work in the long run depends on you and the intention you put into your eutaptics® practice. The goal is simple: find the real root of the problem and yank that root out of the ground. Only then can you start to make big alterations to your life.
Join us every Tuesday and Thursday for weekly tap-alongs. In September we start fresh with “Mental Training for a Thinner You” and “Your Forum, Your Choice.” These weekly tap-alongs will change your life, so don’t miss your chance to start your transformation and get the results you’ve always wanted! We also have a few web-events that you may be interested in if this story resonated with you. Click here to see our upcoming events!