Introduction
For many years, I was sure that losing weight was the answer to all my problems. Once I could fit into that dress or those jeans, I’d be happy, my career would take off, and I’d start dating. But only after I’d lost the weight. Only when I no longer looked like … this.
Until then, I’d continue to panic every time someone took my picture, strategically placing my hands over the parts I hated. Or cropping the picture so only my face showed if my hands weren’t big enough to cover those parts.
Until then, I’d cancel plans. I’d shrink emotionally so people wouldn’t notice how big I felt physically. I’d continue to buy books on weight loss, exercise equipment, and diet food. One day I’d be happy, but not today, not until I lost this weight.
Does this sound familiar?
Losing weight has become a cultural obsession, made apparent by the fact that weight loss has grown into a billion-dollar industry. My guess is that if you picked up this book, it probably isn’t the first time you’ve paid for something to help you lose weight.
Why does nothing seem to work? Why, when you have such a strong desire to lose weight, do your many attempts to shed the weight for good fall short? There’s clearly something missing, some hidden key to having a body you can feel proud of—but what is it? Is it exercising more, or doing a certain kind of exercise? Should you eat all carbs, or none at all? Vegan? High protein? In a world that’s constantly overwhelming you with contradictory information, what will finally make the difference in your quest to lose weight?
It can be summed up in two words: your emotions.
Your emotions control your beliefs about yourself, your weight, and your worth. They also control your actions. Have you ever made a plan to eat healthy only to find yourself halfway through a box of cookies, thinking, Did I really do this … again? Your emotions are the driving force behind every action you take. You may know exactly what you “should” be doing, but you’re not doing it because your emotions sidetrack you.
Emotions such as anger, fear, resentment, and guilt that are hijacking your best intentions are also impacting you on a deep biological level. Talking about this is an essential conversation that we’re not having. We hear so much about food and exercise, but what about the overproduction of cortisol, known as the “stress hormone,” that is directly linked to abdominal obesity? The research is out there, but we’ve been conditioned to believe that weight loss is only about eating the right foods and exercising more. If we don’t succeed, we blame our genes—or worse, we believe that there’s something inherently broken about us.
During many years of yo-yo dieting and unsuccessful attempts to keep the weight off, I, too, felt broken. I masked it with my smile and my desire to please everyone around me, but behind closed doors I was crumpling up clean paper towels and placing them in the garbage to cover the wrappers of the multiple candy bars I’d just eaten.
Like so many women who feel ashamed of their bodies and their weight, I was a closet emotional eater. It started when I was young. I remember my first solo binge so clearly. I was only seven, and I was faced with an entire plate covered rim to rim with chocolate chip cookies. I sat on the downstairs couch and ate the entire thing while listening closely to make sure no one was walking down the stairs. Even when I was that young, I already had the belief that what I was doing was shameful.
That plate of cookies was the beginning of a years-long love/hate affair with chocolate and other sugary, and occasionally salty, treats. For me the cravings were very real physical sensations that quickly overwhelmed my ability to reason with myself, or remember how sick I had felt last time. They came on suddenly and felt like a physical need that I had to fulfill. As that habit followed me into puberty, I found myself gaining weight, and then panicking and making desperate attempts to lose it.
For brief periods of time, I devoted my every waking hour to dieting and extreme exercise. Starving myself and working out were my punishments for being fat. After losing a few pounds, I began to relax. Then, as if suffering from amnesia, I turned back to food. I’ve been so good. I deserve this! I told myself. I’m so stressed out, let me just eat this one thing, I said to myself. Before long, I found myself looking at my reflection in the mirror, feeling defeated and heartbroken, overwhelmed by hatred, disappointment, and anger.
As Einstein so famously said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Simply put, I was insane. My diets were insane. Belittling myself, shaming myself, and using guilt in an attempt to help me “get my act together” were all insane.
Fortunately, in 2004 my oldest brother, Nick Ortner, introduced me to tapping, also called EFT tapping, a stress relief technique that involves tapping on acupressure points. Tapping would eventually bring an end to the insanity that had ruled my weight loss and body confidence journey up to that point. To be quite frank, though, when I was first introduced to it, it was tapping itself that seemed insane to me.
The first time Nick showed me what tapping was, I was so sure he was playing a practical joke on me that I refused to play along. When I finally gave in and tried it, I was shocked by how quickly I got results. After just ten minutes of tapping, a sinus cold I had at the time, which had been so severe that it had kept me in bed for two full days, disappeared. I remember being shocked that after tapping I could breathe through my nose again. It seemed like a mini miracle; after I tapped through my physical symptoms—and then through my stress and frustration that my career seemed to be going nowhere—my sinus cold symptoms vanished. It was the first time I realized how severely I had been underestimating the impact of emotions and stress on the body.
A couple of years later, Nick and I, along with his close friend, Nick Polizzi, began making our documentary film, The Tapping Solution, which shows real people’s results with tapping. The making of the documentary was not only a big risk financially, it also continuously tested the strength of our dream. With zero film experience or outside funding, the only way we could move forward was to deal with our own anxiety and limiting beliefs around what was possible. It may sound cliché, but we were only able to create a film about tapping because we used tapping personally every step of the way.
What is tapping exactly? Stay with me.
Although I was making strides in other areas of my life with tapping, during those early years, I never, ever used tapping on the one challenge that had controlled my entire life and happiness since childhood—my weight and body image.
My struggle with weight was a huge part of who I thought I was, but it was also something I felt ashamed of and was always trying to hide. Even when I’d lost the weight after weeks of extreme dieting and exercise, I’d obsess all day long about my weight and what I had or hadn’t eaten. Even during my “skinny” phases, I had no peace, no happiness.
My obsession with my weight, I later realized, had blinded me from seeing what was going on beneath the surface. Like so many of the women I now teach and coach, I had been conditioned to believe that losing weight was about willpower. For years I was convinced that I had entered this world without the willpower I was sure skinny people must have. Even after years of studying personal development, rarely, if ever, did I think about how my emotions might be impacting my struggle with weight.
Then, in 2008, something happened that forced me to stop the madness and take a serious look at the pain beneath my weight.
While attending a conference one day, I was approached by a woman who recognized me and immediately began raving about my work. By this point, the movie had come out and thousands of people had heard my interviews online. It was one of the first times I’d met a fan in person, so I was thrilled to hear such positive feedback. After showering me with praise, though, she made a comment that hit me like a bomb. “You’re bigger than I thought,” she said as she looked me up and down. And just like that, I went from feeling elated and excited to hopeless and deflated.
It was one of many, many times over the years that people had commented on my weight, and finally I had to admit that I needed a new approach. Her judgment hurt me so deeply because I was constantly judging myself. It was time to take a deeper look at my relationship with my body and my weight, not to please others but to finally address the pain I’d been hiding behind my weight. When I returned home after that conference, I began piecing together what I’d learned from the hundreds of tapping experts, personal development gurus, and psychiatrists and psychologists I’d interviewed, and I began applying it to myself.
Before I started using tapping to create a new weight loss experience for myself, I made just a couple of rules: I wasn’t allowed to diet or punish myself with extreme exercise. Neither had worked for me in the past, and I couldn’t let myself go down that road again. Also, I could no longer use my weight as an excuse not to be happy or go for what I wanted in life. That hadn’t worked, either.
I began to look at my relationship with my body, food, and exercise as well as sexual intimacy, pleasure, and perfection, and I realized that I wasn’t broken. I just had layers of beliefs that made life feel unbearable if I couldn’t turn to food for comfort.
It suddenly hit me—it was nearly impossible to take good care of something I hated. I’d spent so long hating my body that I didn’t know how to respect and nurture myself or my body. By focusing so much on my exterior, I also robbed myself of the opportunity to feel good about myself and my body, simply because I didn’t meet a cultural standard of beauty that is obsessed with thinness. That created stress that interfered with my weight loss and with my own happiness.
Tapping took the edge off so I could continue the process and address the feelings and beliefs that had held me captive for so long. It also relieved my stress and cleared the emotional baggage that had kept my body stuck in a state of anxiety and stress.
As all of that stress and emotional baggage faded away thanks to tapping, I could finally sense what my body needed to thrive. It was incredibly liberating to choose foods that supported my health and well-being—and take real pleasure in eating them. I also began to look forward to moving my body for the first time in my life.
The more I appreciated and loved my body the way it was, the easier it was to take care of it. I also allowed myself to appreciate my accomplishments, experience pleasure, and feel beautiful, even before I’d lost the weight. Using tapping, I was finally able to begin living my life and stepping into my power. The more I did that, the easier and more effortless weight loss became.
After spending more than ten years putting my happiness on hold because of my weight, I could finally see that I’d had the process backward. Losing weight doesn’t give you more confidence; self-confidence leads to weight loss and a stronger, healthier body. For me and the thousands of clients and students I’ve worked with in recent years, losing weight and gaining body confidence was never about the fat. It was always about how we chose to see ourselves and stand up in the world.
There is great power in awareness, in that moment when we get honest with ourselves and can suddenly see things more clearly. But awareness alone is often not enough. We may know consciously what is holding us back but still experience a disconnect between our thoughts and actions. That is where tapping comes in. I continue to be amazed by the results it produces, not just in me but in the hundreds of thousands of lives we have been honored to touch through our movie, The Tapping Solution, our online programs, and the annual Tapping World Summit.
I wasted a lot of time complaining that I had “tried everything” and “nothing works for me.” The one thing I hadn’t tried was loving and approving of myself. Tapping made that possible, and what followed were incredible results in my body and life.
About This Book
When I was first asked to write this book, I sat on my kitchen floor and sobbed. I felt panicked by the idea of sharing my journey in such a public way. I also didn’t want to be seen as part of the weight loss industry, which, in too many cases, has profited from making women feel bad about themselves. That’s not who I am, and that’s not the career I want.
The reason I eventually agreed to write it was that I knew that what I wanted to share wasn’t what you find in a standard weight loss book. I don’t believe in dieting, and I have no exercise plan for you to follow. Instead, I wanted to take women through the same journey of self-discovery and exploration that I took, and that I have guided thousands of clients and students on as well.
While the term “weight loss” is in the title of this book and my online course, the truth is that—provided weight isn’t interfering with your health—I’m not that concerned with weight for its own sake. For me, weight loss is a happy side effect of loving yourself more and feeling more powerful and beautiful in your own body. That is what I truly hope women experience from embarking on this journey, because when you feel those things, your entire life opens up. Suddenly, your internal and external realities shift in amazing and inspiring ways, and your dreams begin turning into your reality.
What’s funny is that while weight loss is never my top priority, the pounds come off anyway, and very consistently, over and over again in my students and clients. That’s really the magic of this process. By using this incredibly powerful tool—tapping—to clear stress and limiting emotions and beliefs, you can very quickly get in touch with what you and your body actually need. You can then put more focus on your emotions and your relationship with your body, and less focus on actual weight loss. As ironic as it may sound, that is when my clients and students are able to lose the weight and keep it off in a way that feels natural, even effortless.
While the weight loss is amazing, what excites me most is seeing the shift in how women feel and how they begin to live their lives. Before even losing the weight, women stop hiding; they fall in love with themselves and make great strides in their relationships and their careers; they celebrate their beauty, not just because of a number they see on the scale or in their closets, but because they feel beautiful.
As you may have already guessed, the process I share in this book is tailored specifically to women. While tapping is effective for weight loss in both genders, women have a unique experience with weight and body confidence.
I created the methods in this book for my students, and I’ve learned a lot through teaching them and interacting with them as they work their way through the process. I’ve tried to address some of their most common questions and issues throughout the book. Here’s a quick look at what you’ll learn as you work your way through the pages.
In Part I of the book, I’ll teach you the basics of tapping, showing you what it is and why it works. Then I’ll help launch you on your weight loss and body confidence journey by teaching you how to use this technique to move past the first obstacle many people face—panic. In Part II, I’ll walk you through the process of “peeling the onion,” looking at the deeper aspects of your weight and body confidence challenges. This will really help you release and clear old patterns and emotions that have interfered with weight loss in the past. And then in Part III, you’ll create a more empowering relationship with exercise as well as food, and learn how to implement self-care in your life.
As you read this book and experience this process, I encourage you to do all of the exercises and use all of the tapping meditations. My tapping meditations, which you’ll find at the end of most chapters, are designed to help you incorporate what you learned in the chapter. It is crucial that you do the tapping. Without tapping, this process may show you why you’ve struggled with weight, but it won’t consistently deliver the long-term weight loss and body confidence that it does with tapping.
Copyright © 2015 by Jessica Ortner, Foreword by Christiane Northrup, M.D.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
