The Tapping Solution for Weight Loss & Body Confidence by Jessica Ortner Page A

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    A couple of weeks into my class, after taking moments throughout the day to tap on her stress, she experienced a drastic change. While riding in the car one day with her husband, just as they were nearing their favorite hot fudge sundae shop, he asked, “Are you going to ask me to pull over?”
    Much to her shock (and his), she replied, “No, I don’t really want it,” with a smile.
    Without the extra stress, she didn’t need food to celebrate “surviving” another hard day. That same week, she found herself at the grocery store filling her basket with fresh produce and having no desire to walk down the cookie aisle. “It feels like my brain has been rewired,” she said of how tapping has impacted her. Without feeling even a hint of deprivation, Tess is eating healthy food and enjoying it, able to reward herself in new and different ways that feel even more satisfying than sundaes.
    Exploring “Secondary Gain”
    Throughout the process of digging deeper into the underlying causes of our weight struggles, we’ll be talking a lot about a crucial concept: “secondary gain.” Secondary gain doesn’t necessarily refer to weight; instead, it’s a psychology term that refers to the secondary benefit of various conditions, such as illness, pain, and weight.
    Years ago when I first began digging deeper into my own weight challenges, the possibility that I was holding on to weight for some reason kept occurring to me, but every time the thought crossed my mind I quickly found a reason to focus on something else. One day, however, I decided to ask myself two questions related to secondary gain that I’d learned from Carol Look, a tapping expert I’d interviewed for The Tapping Solution movie. The two questions were “What’s the benefit of holding on to weight?” and conversely, “What’s the downside of losing weight?” My initial answers were clear— “nothing.” For years I’d wanted nothing more than to lose the weight . Not being thin was the issue, the obstacle standing between me and happiness, me and success, me and my fabulous future.
    As I continued tapping on these two questions, however, I had a major breakthrough. The floodgates opened and a stream of answers poured out of me. I was so stunned by what I’d discovered buried inside myself that I wrote the answers down. Here are some of them:
If I’m successful at losing weight, I’ll have to be on a restrictive diet.
If I’m successful at losing weight, I’ll be harshly judged by other women.
If I’m successful at losing weight, I’ll be giving in to cultural pressures that I resent.
If I lose the weight and pursue my dream and fail, it will mean something is wrong with me. I won’t be able to blame the weight.
    That breakthrough, which could not have happened without tapping, was the beginning of an entirely new relationship between me and my weight. As I continued tapping on all my resistance, I shed pounds faster and more easily than I ever had before and also began to feel lighter, more energetic, happier, and more confident in my own skin.
    Like I once did, many of my students initially resist the opportunity to dig deeper into their weight and body stories but then have similarly significant breakthroughs as they look at the secondary gain of their own weight struggles.
    While the process of digging deeper into your weight and body story may feel uncomfortable, even unsettling at times, I urge you to continue moving forward with this process. With tapping you don’t need to go deep into the pain to find relief. You do, however, need to have the courage to take personal responsibility and face the parts of yourself and your life that you have been neglecting. You need to be willing to air out the parts of your life that are so desperate for attention that they are showing up as physical weight. With tapping, the process gets easier and is soon accompanied by positive physical and emotional changes.
    What’s the Downside of