My weight issues started when I was a child. I grew up with 3 brothers. Needless to say, my life was challenging as the only girl…. especially because I was always chubby. The teasing was endless and I would cry quite a bit and then mom would tell me to stop whining as she would take me in the kitchen and offer me a crème filled cupcake to help me feel better. Our house always had an abundance of soda pop, chocolate, coffee cake and any kind of baked goods that mom made that week. She was a fabulous baker and we all loved it.
By 5th grade I weighed 98 pounds and the only place we could buy clothes was at J.C. Penney in the Chubby Department. Yes, that’s was it was called. It was humiliating each time I needed to buy new clothes to head to the Chubby Department. You would think that would have helped me stop eating, but it didn’t. It kept getting worse.
Throughout high school I was up and down by 20 pounds maybe 4 or 5 times. Mom would bribe me with “things” if I would just lose some weight. The adults in our family and family friends would say to my face “You would be so pretty if you lost 20 pounds…. you have such a pretty face.” YES, THEY DID!!! When I look back on it and tap on those times, I realize now why I struggled so much on my eating issues.
I never had a boyfriend until after high school. You would think that would have helped me lose weight too! Didn’t every girl in high school want a boyfriend back in the 70’s? I continued to feel like such a loser. I was the tallest girl among my friends and overweight.
Weight continued to be a struggle throughout my adult years, which lead to some unhealthy relationships with men. I began going to the gym in the mornings before work when I was 30, but that just gave me permission to reward myself with too much food and bad foods because I was burning calories every morning. My weight was up and down by 30 pounds many times over again. I was on every diet I could find. I reached my heaviest weight at 40 years old and I was so angry with myself. Again, the humiliation and shame that I felt was overwhelming.
Even at 40 years old I didn’t know what was wrong with ME! At 42 years of age I went for my annual exam and my doctor told me that if I didn’t lose the weight now, it would be harder when shifting into peri menopause. That was the beginning of the life style change.
I started talk therapy, joined a new gym, hired a personal trainer, started yoga, researched healthy eating and still dealt with the frustrations, disappointments, self sabotaging behavior, shame, guilt and every emotion you can imagine throughout the next 10 years in order to lose 65 pounds. It was brutal and it was costing me a ton of money. I still never made the connection of my binge eating, food cravings and any other unhealthy eating habit I had created to any emotional trigger. I just continued to fight my body and was determined to win the battle.
In 2014 I saw a random email in my inbox talking about this “tapping” thing and how to relieve physical pain with it. I read this email that talked about moving energy in our bodies and releasing negative emotions and so forth. I knew I needed to know this “tapping” thing. Imagine my surprise that while going to school for EFT I learned that certain events in my life and unhealthy beliefs about myself have probably been triggering me to over eat my entire life. My life was about to change with this new education. Not only did EFT make me aware of what triggered me to eat, but it was helping in all other aspects of my life.
I am so grateful that I found EFT and have it in my life every single day. It not only has helped me be aware of what those emotional triggers are, but I now have the tool that I can use any place, any time in order to move past the moment and get out of self destruct mode. Losing the weight and keeping it off is much easier when we are not feeling shame, blame, anger, defeat, fear and all the other negative emotions you may have felt for many years.
Is it time for you to learn how to love and accept yourself completely, even with those extra pounds you currently carry? It all starts there and I can help you get there. Is it easy? Not all the time, but it’s so well worth it once the puzzle pieces start connecting.
Let’s set up a time to talk about your weight struggles and how EFT may be able to help.
