Thank you for all of the congratulations and awesomeness and general enthusiasm! To answer a few quick questions:
1. The book will probably come out in the spring/summer of 2009. The only variation on that probably would mean the book would come out later. These things take time, especially since we haven’t written it yet. *laugh*
2. The working title is Screw Inner Beauty: How to Live With the Body You’ve Got, and it is (currently) 30 practical steps toward achieving body acceptance. We deal specifically with being a fat woman but this stuff is all true for anyone of any size, dammit.
And now, on to the outrage! My friend Dr. Sheila sent me this link and I spent a good five minutes just starring at the screen with a dropped jaw.
Okay, maybe not LITERALLY five minutes but time slows down when you can’t believe that you exist in a certain reality.
You don’t have to follow that link, actually. It’s for a new television program on TLC (which stands for The Learning Channel) called I Can Make You Thin: The Secrets of Naturally Thin People.
The title of this show alone is pretty gross when you think about it. I mean, I am not the world’s most compliant person so maybe it’s just me, but the idea of someone making me ANYTHING implies that I would cede control to them in some important way. That they know what is good for me better than do I.
And, you know, sometimes people do know what is good for me, better than do I. Those people are trusted doctors of a variety of types, trusted friends and loved ones, trusted advisors. They are NOT some “weight-loss guru” (even though he does have a really good suit.
Paul McKenna is a British hypnotist. He has a doctorate, but it is in neuro-linguistic programming and hypnosis (and the business with LaSalle could have happened to anyone so I’m not holding that against him). Neuro-linguistic programming is an interesting idea but it is not proven by any means.
Let me say right now, I don’t actually have a problem with Paul McKenna. I am not as skeptical about alternate therapies as perhaps I should be sometimes so I think hypnosis probably CAN help people stop smoking, feel more motivated, whatever. What I have a problem with is TLC presenting this program, based on McKenna’s 2005 book of the same name (and I think there was a British television show, as well), as though it is a magical cure, as though this finally will be the magic bullet you need to be thin.
Near as I can tell, Paul McKenna helps hypnotize you into a permanent diet. Also, he introduces a special tapping technique to help you overcome emotional eating.
What’s that you say? You aren’t fat because of emotional eating?
But it’s a special TAPPING TECHNIQUE! How can you resist?!
Later show descriptions include him teaching you to assign negative associations to things like chocolate and sweets — foods to which you are obviously addicted (also you have no power over your cravings) as you are fat. After all, chocolate and sweets have no negative associations now and teaching people about “good” foods and “bad” foods has been sooooooooooooooooooo effective in the past.
TLC promises Paul McKenna will teach you to assign positive associations to things like exercise and good food – so you can get off the couch and lead an active lifestyle, dammit! Except, wow, in the first shows they promised to make you thin without having to get off the couch. Oh, TLC, how you bait and switch us. And, you know, make assumptions about why people are fat without talking to any actual fat people who are already both active and fat and healthy! ARGH!
He’s also going to teach you happiness, confidence, and self-esteem RIGHT THROUGH YOUR TV and IN A MATTER OF MINUTES! About the only observation that TLC has offered up that is true is that losing weight will not make you happy – there is no freedom in that alone.
Hypnosis and neuro-linguistic programming (also know, courtesy of Tony Robbins as UNLEASHING YOUR PERSONAL POWER) are interesting concepts. But they aren’t going to “cure” fatness if your body’s natural set point is set at fat. TLC is making promises, just like the diet industry does, because they know people want to keep on grasping for that pie-in-the-sky (mmmmm, pie) — thinness. So many people seem to think the Fantasy of Thin, the Romantic Myth of Being Thin is their only option. I don’t think Paul McKenna is a bad person but if he tried to tell me he was doing this out of the goodness of his heart, I might have to laugh. He’s doing this because it pays EXTREMELY well.
And, I mean, really? A special tapping technique? FOR SERIOUS?
46 Comments
Huh. I wonder if it’s EFT Therapy, because that’s good stuff. But what a horrible name for a TV show. What a horrible concept.
You totally need your own TV show. I can see it now
“Screw Your Inner Goddess?”
*pout*
But all of the depictions I know of the goddess are fat. Especially the one I wear as an earring.
Embracing goddesses (especially my inner one) has been the key to embracing my fat self.
D’OH!
The number one secret of naturally thin people?
They are NATURALLY THIN. And I am not. So I’m pretty sure a special tapping technique isn’t going to do it for me.
Sarah, I am not familiar with EFT. Can you give us a short synopsis?
Ilona – multimedia EMPIRE.
Kmd – I absolutely don’t have any beef with goddess identification – and maybe that is something we need to talk about in the book. But we are reacting to a lot of self-help that is all very take-a-bubble-bath-and-love-your-goddess-body without offering any practical ways to overcome the constant societal messages reenforcing body hate. I LOVE me some bubble baths, but bubble baths don’t hold a lot of water (ha!) against a lifetime of dieting. I also find it really problematic when fat women are positioned as Real Women or goddesses and thin women (and everyone in between) are not – fat doesn’t make anyone a real anything; I am a woman regardless of my weight. Actually, I think that is my primary problem with the You Are A Goddess messages – they always seem to be positioning fat women as superior to other women and I don’t buy that any more than I buy that thin women are superior. Does that make sense? I have no problem with the idea at all when it comes to individuals, just as it is applied on a demographic level.
Also, as I meant to say in my last comment, embracing goddesses in a religious/spiritual sense is, I think, worlds different from what the self-help books that suggest it prescribe.
IThe idea behind EFT is that negative emotion is caused by an imbalance in energy (please note I am not saying that I think fatness is caused by negative emotion or energy imbalance) and there are points on your body (that correspond to the meridians involved in accupuncture) where tapping can help rebalance the energy. Think accupuncture without needles. I don’t think there have been any major efficacy studies though.
And a belated congratulations on your book! I can’t wait to read it.
Pssst… working title is Screw Inner Beauty. We changed it, ‘member?
Ha! I am the biggest dork, ever. Kate, we went through so many titles I reverted back to that one without realizing! I will fix that in the post.
Umm, I’m naturally thin and I have no secrets. Well, unless intuitive eating is a secret. And not worrying about food or weight so much. And not yo-yo dieting. And realizing that the starving kids in (India, Ethiopia, wherever) are not actually going to benefit either from me eating less or more as no one is going to ship the extra over there.
Then again, I guess most people don’t really get these things. So maybe they are secrets. HEY! I should write a book! Or do y’all have it covered?
Well, Karen, you obviously aren’t a REAL woman if you didn’t become thin through hard work and lots o’ self-disgust! Kidding, of course.
TR, I also have a problem with the concept of “real” women being fat or curvy, and I am loathe to use my “Real Woman Dollars” at Lane Bryant for this same reason. One of my friends growing up was very thin and quite flat-chested, and she admitted feeling less than womanly because of her natural shape. No one should ever have to feel that way.
Does this remind anyone else of Office Space?
“He’s a great therapist–he helped [gf whose name I can't remember] lose weight.”
[pause]
“Peter, she’s anorexic.”
“I know, he’s really good!”
I’m reminded of a skit by George Carlin, where he’s talking about how there’s a magazine for everything.
“‘Walking’, for chrissakes. ‘WALKING’.”
s/walking/tapping/
*amused*
I wonder if that special tapping technique is that old ‘rubberband on the wrist and snap it when you’re hungry/want a cigarette”? I’ve seen that one pushed for whatever bad habit you’re trying to end (like eating is a bad habit that needs to be broken, only if you don’t feel like living much longer, duh).
And congrats on the book deal, that’s awesomeness indeed.
I’ve seen the commercials for that. Mostly during Big Medicine, which I also find highly disturbing yet from which I cannot avert my eyes.
Why can’t TLC just stick to showing “What Not To Wear” 24/7?
PS – Congrats on your book deal!! YAY!
“Secrets of naturally thin people,” huh? So he’s going to engage in genetic manipulation? Tall order for a hypnotist.
(Now, if we could somehow combine this with “Everyone Loves Hypnotoad,” that’s a show I’d watch.)
It seems kinda disrespectful to screw one’s inner goddess. I know gods usually bone everything in sight but I feel like I should let the woman have her dignity.
Which is yet another good reason we didn’t go with that title, Fillyjonk!
Though, arguably, the goddesses were getting their kicks as well. *grin*
Actually, despite the appalling title, and the fact that it IS a show that aims to help people lose weight, it’s not as bad as you fear. The “tapping” is Thought Field Therapy/Emotional Freedom Technique stuff, which works with your meridians as someone says above, and is used to deal with negative emotions about all kinds of things – he’s using them here to help people deal, not with hunger, but with the desire to eat emotionally, especially if that has negative feelings for you.
And the advice he gives about eating is very simple and spot on HAES stuff – eat when you’re hungry, eat what you really want, eat consciously (i.e. pay attention while you’re eating), and stop when you’re full. He gives a couple of hypno-type visualisation techniques, mostly if you’ve got particular food cravings that you want to get rid of. The secrets of naturally thin people, however, seem to be that they eat when they’re hungry and stop eating when they’re full, even if there’s still food on their plates, and they eat what they actually want. He doesn’t hypnotise anyone in the course of the show, or try to get anyone to go on a diet. You can see most of the advice at the SkyOne (UK TV station) website, if you’re interested.
I’m looking forward to your book!
Aversion hypnosis, huh? Didn’t Laura Fraser in Losing It say she did that as a teenager in the 1970s and it didn’t hold, other than permanently grossing her out about sausage?
Anyway, I don’t WANT anyone to “hypnotize” me into hating chocolate, not unless I develop some kind of deathly allergy to it, or come down with a case of uncontrolled diabetes, and even then I think the deathly allergy or prospect of hospitalization will be enough of a deterrent for me.
Though, arguably, the goddesses were getting their kicks as well.
Ah, but you didn’t propose to call it “Screw Your Inner Goddess With Finesse and Skill.”
Maybe you should implement a special tapping technique in which you tap that ass.
One of the many, many ways my parents and I tried to lose weight together was by spending what I’m sure was a tidy sum on hypnosis. It was–at least in this instance–a total crock. We went into some hotel room and got “hypnotized” and then were supposed to listen to the tapes while we slept. They included such useful techniques as aversion therapy (”Imagine the most disgusting thing you can turning into your favorite food.”) but no tapping. Perhaps that’s why the only thing that got lighter was my parents’ wallets?
Oh man! I should have checked your blog first! I wrote about this today, too. Oh well. I didn’t know about the tapping thing-gross.
http://community.livejournal.com/fat_the_power/18680.html
Just to address therapeutic techniques:
What he’s doing isn’t EFT. EFT is Emotionally-Focused Therapy, a well-researched and highly effective therapeutic technique developed by Susan Johnson and Les Greenberg for use with couples that is also being tested with families.
I believe the previous commenter is thinking of TFT, Thought Field Therapy. All of the studies that have been published of it have serious methodological flaws, and in fact one of the authors of a study that purported to show TFT’s effectiveness has reversed her conclusions and disassociated herself with the technique. The one controlled study of TFT showed no difference in outcome between the “precise sequences” of tapping prescribed by TFT and random tapping sequences.
It’s a pseudoscience. Neuro-Linguistic Programming, which wossname seems to have gotten his “doctorate” in, is also a pseudoscience with little peer review or empirical validation.
But then, weight loss in general is a pseudoscience, so I suppose it’s a perfect fit.
The tapping thing does sound like EFT, which is as Sarah described it above. I use it and have found it really effective for CFS and emotional issues. It can also be used in treating addictions and eating disorders.
EFT could probably help people who have emotional issues around food, and that could result in weight loss (if, for instance, a person with BED was ableto stop binging, she or he might lose weight as a result). Most of the “EFT for weightloss” stuff that I’ve seen makes the assumption that people are fat because their eating is “out of control” and they can’t just put down the chocolate. If there is no underlying emotional reason as to why someone is overweight (meaning, if you’re natually, genetically fat), EFT is probably not going to help you lose weight.
Aside from the misguided “EFT for weightloss” stuff, most websites and info about EFT are great, and, like I said, it’s a really effective technique.
Ah, doing more research I see people using “EFT” to describe “Emotional Field Therapy.” Which is even more poorly researched and documented than Neuro-Linguistic programming, and still doesn’t hold up in tests against controls or tapping on “fake” points.
Just another pseudoscience.
Yes, I really care about this stuff because as a therapist and a teacher of therapists, I care about perceptions of the field and the prevalence of these glamourized, un-tested “miracle cures” that seem to be most effective at lining the pockets of their practitioners.
The secrets of naturally thin people, however, seem to be that they eat when they’re hungry and stop eating when they’re full, even if there’s still food on their plates, and they eat what they actually want.
Except that I do this for the most part and have since I quit dieting almost 20 years ago. I’m still fat. And while some of the naturally thin people I know do the same, others eat well past the point of satiation on a regular basis and they’re still thin. Somehow, I don’t think Paul McKenna is going to be much help.
Like others have said, I can see how EFT, NLP, etc. can be useful in changing behaviors and attitudes. I myself have used NLP and found that it helped me break thought patterns I’d been stuck in for as long as I could remember. Thanks to them, I’ve actually come to believe I could do all kinds of things I had given up on for years.
But it ain’t gonna ramp up your metabolism. If you are one of those few people who is fat solely because of binge eating and your metabolism is normal, you might lose weight from it, but if you are someone who is very calorie-efficient it’s not going to change your weight very much.
I have used the EFT as well to help with anxiety and general “issues”. Even if it is a pseudoscience it is about freeing blockages around the bodies energy system, which is not a new concept.
Still fat, but by combining intellectual techniques such as intuitive eating and HAES with physical rebalancing of my bodies energies, my relationship with food and life is healthier than in the past.
Just another tool to help get through this life.
So I’m having trouble with the idea that the fatosphere is so into using Junkfood Science to discredit studies that purport to show weight-loss techniques, but we have commenters here who are enthusiastically promoting “therapies” that have been poorly studied and/or widely debunked.
40% of all therapeutic change can be explained by simple “therapeutic alliance.” That’s a well-known result from meta-analysis of multiple outcome studies. When comparing counseling/therapy methods, any therapy is better than no therapy; in other words, even crap, poorly documented, poorly performed therapies are better than sitting on a waiting list or not getting any help at all.
That does NOT mean that these pseudoscientific “miracle cure” therapies that promise big results in short amounts of time and without, you know, actual *counseling* are efficaceous. It means that a relationship with someone who seems concerned about you, combined with a helping of placebo effect, can seem to create change.
I am really glad you aren’t using Screw Your Inner Goddess as part of the title because I know a lot of pagan women would find that really offensive – fat and skinny women. I have been a pagan for over ten years now and I have yet to hear Goddess made out to be fat over skinny. I have yet to hear fat women made out to be superior to skinny women. Ever. And I have been very active in a lot of online groups and a lot of real life groups. The whole idea is that ALL of us are goddess. All the fat women, all the skinny women, even the men! Everyone has the sacred feminine within them. So with that in mind I am very glad to hear you have decided not to use Screw Your Inner Goddess as part of the title.
As for EFT (tapping) for fatness. Riiiiight. I am a qualified social worker and a qualified counsellor (two different things here in Australia) and I have also used EFT myself (for reasons not related to fatness). While I can see it can have some benefit for some things, I don’t think it works long term and I don’t think it works as a stand alone method. I also think using it to “cure” fatness is totally ridiculous.
The TLC thing makes me want to barf, all I can think of is Tender Loving Care.
Elusis, I am pretty game to try alternative therapies and whatnot, but, yeah, there is no such thing as a miracle cure and the phenomenon you describe is a REALLY good thing to remember before buying into stuff like this.
Fat Gal, as I said above, that version of the title was never a commentary on pagan views of the goddesses. It was DIRECTLY in response to self-help books on body acceptance.
As for TLC – EW! I had forgotten about that version of the acronym! Oh, now this whole show is twice as gross.
When I first started my Venus of Willendorf Project one of the people that mooched a book from me was from India…I joined this site bookmooch.com…to get points so that I could then mooch diet books from other people…anyways I asked him if he could send me a diet book in Hindi…he said there weren’t any…( dah they are all starving…) although many of the people who speak English and have Jobs that keep them infront of their computers are becoming more and more fat over time and obesity has become an issue there too…to make a long story shorter…he told me that I must buy Mckenna’s books. I did…but I have never cracked the spin…not even temped…it will only be to rip the pages out and plaster them on to the venus’ big round belly!!! I can’t tell you how freeing it is to be able to buy all the new and temping diet stuff…and know that I never have to feel bad for not reading or using them…it’s for my art…This has been one of the most effective ways I have found to free myself of my body loathing, and come to accept myself as I am.
Ok, when I hear anything about tapping, I think of this sexual inside joke I have with my friends. *snickers*
Elusis,
I feel compelled to respond to your comments “debunking” alternative therapies. There have only been a few studies on EFT, but there are masses of anecdotal and personal accounts of the therapy’s effectiveness. Not only that, but many claim to benefit from FREE self-application of EFT, without seeing a therapist (myself included).
I judge therapies by what works. Nothing has worked for me until EFT, and it was not as a result of a “therapeutic alliance” since I have not worked with a therapist. I had years of traditional therapy, by the way, which did NOT help me to resolve my issues the way that EFT did.
I never touted EFT as a “miracle cure,” and please see above for my comments on why I don’t believe in EFT for weightloss. However, I think it’s a bit presumptuous for you to deny the real experiences of myself and the other commenter on this board who claim to have been helped by this therapy. EFT was free for me to learn, it’s free for me to use, it’s effective for me, and it has vastly improved the quality of my life (I suffer from CFS and depression). It’s a shame that some less scrupulous people, like the presenter of the show, exploit other people’s insecurities for money, but that does not invalidate the effectiveness of the therapeutic technique they are touting (when it is properly employed).
I judge therapies by what works.
Me twelve. Because the brain is more difficult to study than almost any other part of the body — and it’s even harder still to “scientifically document” what goes on in someone’s emotions — psychiatry and psychology have always been far more experimental than any other field of medicine. Antidepressants, for example, “work,” but often one has to go through a good four or five different ones to find the “right” one, and some people have depression that is refractory to medication or can’t tolerate the side effects or for whatever reason simply can’t bring themselves to use it. Therefore, alternative therapies are very important, even if we stress that they are experimental and will not necessarily work for everyone.
I “kicked” Effexor about 14 months ago because I grew weary of the side effects, and now use a combination of amino acid and other “alternative” treatments with the help of practitioners, including NLP. My psychiatrists warned me repeatedly not to do this because I would become suicidal again. They were wrong. I don’t blame them for telling me that because they needed to cover their butts, but “allopathic or bust” is not really something you can universally apply to mental health, IMHO.
But that does NOT mean I would necessarily tell everyone on Effexor or any other antidepressant, “You don’t need your drugs, get thee behind me.” I’d certainly be willing to talk to people about my treatment regime if they’re curious, but I’m not going to run around shoving it down everyone’s throat as THE answer, because there isn’t one. There never will be.
Congratulations. If you’ve used an “alternative therapy” and it has worked, really, I’m glad you feel better.
But you’ve experienced the placebo effect.
And as far as I can tell, if it worked for you, you’re in approximately the same category as the people for whom dieting “works” – statistically unlikely, not proof of sound science, but given two possible outcomes, we’re always going to get some results in both categories.
Seriously: if we’re going to be skeptical of scientific studies related to dieting, let’s be equally rigorous about alternative treatments, and that includes mental health.
“The placebo effect”? How can that possibly apply to mental health? Are you trying to tell me I didn’t really get better, I only think I did? And is it really possible for someone to think they are depressed when they really aren’t, or vice versa? Depression is one of those things that people break out of in all kinds of different ways. There is not one proven method that works for everyone. But it’s very real and often very debilitating and yes, sometimes life-threatening. Dieting, on the other hand, does not work for most people because the “problem” it is trying to treat — weighing “too much” despite normal eating patterns — is a made-up problem, a social problem rather than a true impediment to functionality. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison.
Oh no. The Master has finally arrived on Earth!
A placebo effect “occurs when a patient’s symptoms are altered in some way (i.e., alleviated or exacerbated) by an otherwise inert treatment, due to the individual expecting or believing that it will work.” (quick and dirty wikidefinition.)
It doesn’t mean the problem is imaginary, just that the result is brought about by patient expectations rather than by an actual treatment effect. It accounts for up to 40% of the “action” of pharmaceuticals in some studies.
I’m well aware of the realities of depression, given that 1) I have it and 2) I work in mental health.
And I still feel strongly that if we’re going to reject dieting based on incisive wisdom about the poverty of the science involved in demonstrating its “effectivness,” we should apply the same standards to other treatments. The “alternative therapies” practiced by this TV huckster and discussed in this post have no strong, repeatable, documented evidence that they work, and in some cases, well-designed studies that show that they do not meet a stringent test of efficacy.
People do break out of depression in all kinds of ways. I know people who have had near-death experiences that afterwards, provided perspective for them that seemed to cut through the depressive cycle. Almost dying seemed to treat their depression pretty effectively. But I’m not going to adopt it as a therapeutic method, any more than I’m going to adopt the recreational substance use, anonymous sex, sudden religious conversion, etc. etc. that I’ve seen somehow alleviate other people’s depression. Maybe it worked for them, but it’s not very replicable.
Just like I’ve seen people adopt disordered eating habits as a way of losing weight and keeping it off, and miraculously, for some people, it sometimes works and occasionally doesn’t result in the weight coming back or the disordered eating becoming lifelong. We don’t know why that strategy workes for a few people but for most people it’s totally ineffective. Fortunately the fat acceptance/HAES community has done a good job at deunking the studies that allegedly show these strategies work for many or most people. It doesn’t change the fact that there will always be some people for whom they really did work, but it changes the larger perspective on whether they should be recommended.
I almost threw up when I saw that show. And I love most of TLCs shows. Booooo TLC. Boooooo.
You know what Paul McKenna should do? Hypnotize the world into thinking being bigger is beautiful. We’re already there, but imagine if the rest of the world was. Wow, that’d be great.
My Therapist (whom I’ve been going to for years and is an actual medical doctor), taught me the tapping technique last year to deal with two major (for me) emotional issues.
It’s worked really well for one (anger), but not as well for the emotional eating.
I see it more of a time out. A distraction so you can figure out what the underlying feeling is.
We’re working on it though.
No tapping last night (I think that’s next week) but what I saw seemed fairly in line with what I know about intuitive eating — granted, that’s not much, though I’m trying to learn.
I totally forgot to watch the show! Oh noes!
Elusis,
Your tone is really condescending and insulting. Considering you appear to have little knowledge of EFT, I don’t know how you can make the claims you are making that it (and other alternative therapies) works entirely via the placebo effect. There is a vast literature of literally thousands of accounts of EFT’s efficacy.
Human beings do not require scientific studies to validate things that we already know are true, or that we can easily discover through our personal experiences. How many “rigorous scientific studies” get published nowadays that you hear about and go, “Duh!”? It wasn’t until recently that scientists started discovering the specific healthy properties of fruits and vegetables, but, through our collective experience, we KNEW they were good for us. The studies didn’t make them any more nutritious. And there are plenty of things that have yet to be subjected to “rigorous scientific study,” but that doesn’t make them less real, or true, or worthy of our attention and investigation.
BTW, Elusis, if I’m experiencing the placebo effect now, how come I never did when I tried the 15 or so different antidepressants back in the day? How come I didn’t get a placebo-type lift from talk therapy, or from any of the scores of other alternative meds and therapies I have tried? It would seem to me that one would have to have a susceptibility to the placebo effect in order to experience it, and I don’t seem to.
I agree with Meowser that there is a major difference between mental health issues, which affect your normal ability to function and cope with the world, and obesity, which mostly only affects your quality of life because assholes try to make you feel bad about being fat. One is a real health problem which requires some kind of intervention to alleviate symptoms that interfere with normal functioning, the other is not. If it aint broke, you can’t really fix it, no matter what therapies or interventions you use. That’s why allopathic weightloss interventions work as well as alternative weightloss interventions (as in, they don’t).
It may seem that I’m taking your comments personally, and I am, becaue your comments invalidate my experiences and insult my intelligence. I suppose that you won’t consider that to be true until it has been rigorously scientifically tested, though.
This tapping technique (EFT) is something that I experienced with a local “therapist” when a certain person decided that my culture shock with whOrlando was “anxiety problems” (btw, thats bs….) anyway, you basically talk about stuff and the guy taps on the top of your hands to somehow work both sides of your brain supposidly. Whether or not it works is still up for debate in my head – the “issue” we were working on are not really an issue anymore because well, I now feel stupid about the whole process and my attitude towards the issue is not not outrage (as it was previously), but “meh, whatever, can we go get sushi now I’m tired of talking about this bs”. Not certain that it is indiciative of a “healed state” but more of a I can’t be bother to care anymore about the issue. Of course this might also be that I don’t want to go back to any form of therapy because it just seemed like the therapist wanted to make me cry and call that “progress”. I don’t like getting upset, it ruins my whole week. For the record, the EFT process itself did not make me upset, it was the baited questions I was dealing with.
Not sure about this tv show, I think the main problem is the title – the whole “I can make you thin!” sounds like he’s going to pull a rabbit out of a hat in the left hand while hitting you in the head with a magical emaciator-wand in the other hand. Perhaps Benny Hinn can get in on this and “heeeeaaaaaaalllll” and start smaking people in the forehead to make them thin.
BTW, did I mention I don’t like the word “thin”? I think it implies weakness, and I keep seeing folks throw people into 2 categories – fat or thin. I know I fall into the “thin” category, but the word “thin” sucks, it makes me think of scrawny weakling emo dorks.
I just saw an episode of this chap McKenna’s series on TLC, and ran across this site while researching some background on what was said. I noticed that TLC had a disclaimer before each segment “this show is for entertainment only”. Anyway, Dr. McKenna was rather shallow in his televised approach, but everything he said about eating patterns and possible ties between strong emotions and eating too much, or eating inappropriate things, agrees with what I have read in other places. As far as the tapping technique, which he demonstrated, if I understood him correctly, it seems to be a way of accessing the subconscious parts of your brain which might be reacting to stress by sending signals for you to engage in some ineffective coping/calming strategy — in this case, eating.
I actually have several coping strategies besides overeating or poor eating. None of them work very well, but I have not been able to access the part of my brain that is “convinced” that they work, and sends those signals when stressed. If this tapping technique acts on major nerve junctions (a Western way of describing acupuncture meridians), it might be useful in disrupting the automatic actions in the subconscious.
McKenna also demonstrated techniques that oblige one’s attention to rapidly shift from a “right-brain” focus to a “left-brain” focus and back. If this does nothing else, it will certainly help one to stop “reacting” and starting thinking about what you are actually doing or planning to do (such as eat when you are not hungry). It might also literally distract the subconscious portions of the brain that are involved in these actions. I would suppose that further research might show what, if anything, is being accomplished at the brain chemistry level.
So, yes, i also found the television show title and the circus-like atmosphere off-putting, but there does some to be some interesting potential, if mindless, emotionally-triggered eating happens to be a problem for you.