Stressed out? Well then forget about losing weight!

Ways to Tap In Help
The Clearing Cure

In my studies of tapping out emotional connections to food and helping people lose weight, I have recently run across some new information that has helped me more than anything else at losing the weight and getting off my plateaus. The epiphany was this: “There is a direct correlation between weight loss and your stress level!” I actually always knew this in a way, but really did not understand the full impact of stress on our bodies until I started to research it.

The dictionary definition of stress is “any real or imagined threat, and your body’s response to it.” This can be a good thing, as well as a negative thing. Stress is not entirely negative. Some stress can be avoided and other stress cannot, and some stress can even be beneficial, but it becomes a problem when the stress starts impacting your body in a bad way.

When you have an understanding of psychological acupressure, you know that emotions impact the body in every way possible. Emotions can actually create physiological changes. These changes include your skin, heart rate, digestion, joints, muscles, hair, systems, organs, and even your brain.

Stress is one of these emotions that can cause harmful side effects and when we eat in a state of stress or anxiety, which is pretty much all the time for most people, there are particularly bad side effects. The best way to explain this is to outline what happens when you are stressed. Our bodies are made to react to a stress emotion by getting ready to flee or to fight. It’s called the “fight or flight” response. It increases your blood pressure, heart rate, and increases the blood into your arms and legs in order to get ready to flee. With regards to weight loss, however, this response is not helpful because it shunts blood away from your midsection and virtually shuts down your digestive system.

When you eat under stress, even if you are eating the healthiest food in the world, you will not be able to fully digest and absorb the food and nutrients from that food and your body will not be able to burn calories effectively. Since all that blood and oxygen are being used elsewhere, your metabolism also suffers, plus you will see a decrease in the enzymes in your stomach. Your cholesterol and triglycerides then go up because of the decreasing stomach flora, which then leads you to be more sensitive to food, which then, in turn, creates allergies, gastroesophageal reflux, and heartburn.

If that isn’t bad enough, the most important factor, when your body creates this stress response, is that your cortisol and insulin levels rise. These are two very important hormones! When your cortisol is consistently elevated, as it is when we are in a state of low-level stress response, you have difficulty losing weight or building muscle. Cortisol is also responsible for gaining weight around your midsection. This is the type of fat that builds up around your internal organs known as visceral fat. Visceral fat is a major contributing factor to developing diabetes and having metabolic syndrome.

Metabolic syndrome is a particularly negative thing with regards to weight loss. It is closely associated with insulin resistance where the body cannot use insulin effectively. This syndrome also leads to high cholesterol, which can then lead to all sorts of heart problems, raised blood pressure, central obesity, and a proinflammatory state. It definitely is not up there on your list of diseases you want to have.

Having stress is bad in so many ways. But what, if anything, can we do about it, especially with regards to losing weight? It’s not like you can eliminate stress entirely from your life. However, there are ways to minimize and reduce stress in our bodies, especially with regards to psychological acupressure.

Some of the emotions that accompany stress and weight loss are craving closeness, feelings of insecurity, self-rejection, and your body’s need to protect you. Traumas that you stuff inside are kept in your fat and when you have feelings that are unfulfilled, that is stuffed inside as well. These are all emotions that need to be released from your weight and the traumas surrounding them. We also sometimes use food to substitute for affection, and when we are feeling the loss of that affection, that stresses the body, creating a cyclical process that keeps you holding on to that stress and that fat.

Ways to tap out these events/emotions would be to just take a moment before you eat and try to evaluate whether you are truly hungry, stressed, or emotionally needy. If it is stress or emotions that you sense more than hunger, try tapping the emotion/stress out first then reassess to see if you are truly hungry. A sentence to do this would be something like, “Even though I feel so alone, and I am using food to substitute for the need to have someone holding me, I deeply and completely accept myself.” Then tap at each point, i.e., inner eye, outer eye, under eye, under nose, on chin, collarbone, and under your arm, making negative statements like, “I am so alone,” or “I am eating to substitute for love,” etc. Do the same thing with traumas that you can remember where you felt those same emotions.

One other thing to do is to tap in order to calm the stress response in your amygdala. Your amygdala is the part of the brain that is responsible for the “fight or flight” response. Tap this statement three times at your karate chop point: “Even though my amygdala is hyperactive causing a low-level stress response in my body, I choose to be calm and centered.” Then, instead of tapping the usual points, just go straight to your 9-gamut point on the back of your hand, about a half inch behind the middle point between your ring finger and little finger knuckle. Tap that point and state: “My amygdala is hyperactive and causing a stress response in my body.” Then do your eye motions, which tie in the parts of your brain with the emotion you are trying to clear. These are: Look up, look down, close your eyes, open your eyes, look down hard to the right, look down hard to the left, roll your eyes one way, then back the other, and then sing a few bars to any song (right brain), then count from 1-5 (left brain). Tap on top of your head and make the statement, “I choose to be calm and centered.”

After calming down the amygdala, it should calm down the low-level stress response and put you back into a good metabolic and digestive state. However, stress has a way of coming at you again and again all day long. Clearing past trauma associated with the amygala is important, but until you can do that, just keep clearing your amygdala three or four times a day for awhile to keep you in a good calm and centered state. That should aid your metabolism in getting back to normal and what you eat can now be digested at optimum levels.

So, you are now EMPOWERED. You can choose to tap, or not to tap, but I have now given you the key. The next step is yours.

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