Renegade Health Inner Circle Interview with Dr. Carol Look

Transcription

1 Renegade Health Inner Circle Interview with Dr. Carol Look Welcome everyone. This is Kevin Gianni from RenegadeHealth.com. Today we have a special interview. We always have these special interviews for you. All of them are special because we hand-pick our guests. Some of them go through a pretty rigorous application process. I know this guest because we ve interviewed her before. This time we didn t have to jump her through the hoops and everything. This is Dr. Carol Look. She s a pioneer in the energy psychology field and has brought unprecedented innovation to the application of emotional freedom technique, which is EFT. It s a hot topic because of my good friend Nick Ortner and Carol and Gary Craig and has produced outstanding results for her clients around the world. She has a ton of books and programs. Attracting Abundance with EFT, Success and Abundance with EFT, How to Lose Weight with EFT - The Key to Successful Weight Loss which is an ebook, How to Lose Weight With Energy Therapy which is a manual, and Quit Smoking Now With Energy Therapy. She also has a book about vision, which I actually have and have used with a little bit of success. Her website is So Dr. Carol Look, I want to welcome you. Hi Kevin. How are you? It s good to have you back. I m doing well. Thanks for having me. We re going to talk about something very near and dear to the hearts of our listeners today, which is cravings. I tell you, I talk around the country and the one thing that people always come back to is, how do I get rid of this pesky craving for X? Insert whatever it is - sugar, salt, fat, whatever. Let s talk about what people s cravings are first, and then we ll move on from there. They really are annoying, aren t they? Oh yeah. I have them, too. They re so strong. Cravings are like a compulsion. You can t stop it. It s like a 1

2 compulsion to want to eat. If we re going to just focus on food and not smoking and alcohol and the other substances. You feel like you can t not have it and that s what drives people nuts. I m not going to have it. I m not going to have it. And then they walk right into the kitchen and eat it. It is so powerful, cravings. Again, people do crave drugs and alcohol and people and drama and many other substances, but food cravings are really frustrating to people. Let me ask you this. Is there any difference between a craving for a food or alcohol or for a person or drama? With a person or drama it s a little different in the chemistry. It s still the same as far as the person thinks, I have to have it or else I will die. I must have it right now. But when you have alcohol in your system or you ve had a lot of sugar in your system and you re trying to detox from it, your physiology is a little different when you get a craving for a substance that s already been in your body. But that mechanism of swearing it off and then saying, I ll never do it again, and then you say, I have to have it. I have to call that ex-boyfriend right now. That is actually the same as far as the brain goes. But there s a little different chemistry when it s something like sugar or heroin or alcohol. So the food cravings are coming from physiological addiction, but what about the other factors? In general, we always start with looking with stress. People say, I m not that stressed today. Well then why were you eating a bag of chips and a whole bag of cookies? What s going on? What stress does to us is change our chemistry. The problem is when a craving happens it feels 100 percent physiological. The person says, I don t understand what s going on with my body. I have to have it. Well, it s in your body now and in your mind now because of the stress that s been building up all day, all week, all month or all year. But when you actually get a craving it feels like your mouth is watering, your stomach s having issues, your brain s having conflicts. You don t associate it with stress, you just think, If I don t have the chocolate I m going to scream. But you must go back to stress. Now of course, long-term you want to look at emptiness, emotional emptiness, spiritual emptiness, other physical factors, are you exhausted and tired. When people are very tired they can also have odd cravings for foods they don t usually have. But really, if we unpack what a craving is, it s all about the stress, the stress response in your body and what happens with your physiology, your chemistry, your endocrine system, all the hormones in men and women. That s what eventually leads to the end result is a craving. If I don t have this I m going to scream. 2

3 Some people do scream. Exactly. Let me ask you this question. A lot of people that I talk to on a regular basis, they re dealing with cravings and their relationships or their job are major sticking points in their health. Is it possible to eliminate cravings without changing those two factors, if those are one of the biggest factors that are causing the stress? Well, the factors could remain the same, a very stressful job and a very stressful relationship, because what s important is our reaction to those dramas or those feelings or those situations. So if you can work on yourself so that you re not over-reactive and you re not letting your boss run you ragged and you re not letting your relationship get you really depressed or down, then yes, you won t have cravings as a response to, Get me out of these feelings. That s what people use cravings for as well. They don t want to feel. What s a great way to feel? You start eating. You start drinking. You start smoking. Under stress--i quit smoking years ago and under profound stress, I still want to smoke. It ll suddenly come over me under extreme stress. Suddenly come over me and I actually start thinking, Huh, I wonder if anybody would notice if I started smoking again? That is a crazy, crazy, crazy thought because I quit 10 or 15 years ago. But that actually happens because the chemistry changes. The stress is so bad and my association with stress is, what used to help? Cigarettes. So when you put something in your mouth it is distracting, it s interesting and it takes away your feelings. It immediately anesthetizes your feelings. That s what people are looking for. Is that how all cravings are? Is it a relationship between an object and an emotion or a pacification of that? Yes. And again, even when people say, But you don t understand. I ve been trying to get off cocaine and I m having a terrible craving. Right, but you have less cravings when you re getting enough support, enough sleep, you re dealing with your emotions so they re not coming up and biting you from behind. Then you don t have as many cravings. So it all goes back to that stress release. I m trying to relieve my stress by not thinking about it. I want to put something in my mouth. I want to call somebody. I want to stay surfing on the net for three hours. I want to go to work and through myself into my work and become a workaholic 3

4 because I don t want to feel my feelings. It s often so unconscious that people will say, I wasn t really upset yesterday. What do you mean? They re not even connecting that they reached for the sugar, the box of cookies, whatever, that they reached for, they re not even connecting. That s the thing. We are disconnected from those emotions, from the stress and then we wonder why we start having cravings and start putting on weight. Well, because you re eating too much because you re not dealing with the feelings. These days everybody is so darn busy they re not even paying attention to how stressed-out they are. When you ask them they say, No, I m fine. You look at them and you know they re not fine. You can hear it in their voice that they re not fine. I want to talk to you about EFT. But there s some groundwork that I want to keep laying here, because I think it s really important. Food cravings are seriously one of the biggest challenges because of the fact that when you re dealing with, say a cocaine addiction, you don t have to have cocaine every day to survive. Some people may think that if they re extremely addicted to it. But for food it s something that you have to have, some people will say every three hours, some people will say three meals a day, some people will say two meals a day. There s a whole bunch of theories out there. But we have to eat every day. This is a big challenge. What I say to people that s not fair if you feel addicted to food because that means your addictive substance has to be in your life. You re right about cocaine. If somebody s getting off of coke, what they do is they rip up the phone number of their dealer, they no longer go to the place where they used to buy it, they don t hang out with the people who sell it to them, snort it with them etc. So they actually can get away from it so it s less tempting. But if you asked a cocaine person, a cocaine addict, to snort a half a dozen lines every three hours. Are you kidding? At some point it would trigger that incredible compulsive behavior, which is they can t stop no matter what. The definition of compulsion, you can t control the beginning or the ending of something. That s when someone says, I m going to the bar just for a drink and they have seven and come home, they don t relieve the babysitter, they haven t called, they re completely drunk, they get in the car. All these things happen that they didn t intend to have happen because of compulsivity. If you ask this cocaine addict to use lines several times a day, it would trigger that compulsivity and they would be gone. So it s not fair when someone is addicted to food because that s like putting cocaine in front of an addict and 4

5 saying, Just do a little bit, not too much and you can have some more in three hours. It s crazy. So really, the food issues drives people nuts because it is so challenging to be around the very thing that you feel addicted to and not be allowed to use it compulsively. A lot of our viewers and listeners are into raw foods, they re into a vegan diet and some people consider that an extreme diet. There are some people that are in it for health benefits and some people are in it to hide from their own food addictions. How can they themselves identify their own food addictions to see if they re actually addicted or if they re doing it for health? Or how can someone else kind of point it out and give them support that they may need? I m sorry, Kevin. I don t really understand what you re asking. No problem. Let me try it again. The group of people that are listening from us are probably more raw foodists, people into a vegan diet. So my question is, how can they identify whether or not they re doing it for health reasons or is there some sort of underlying addictive-type reason? I find a lot of people who go into raw food may actually come from addiction in the past. Are they just transferring the addiction? How can you tell if you re doing that? It s interesting. There s always a continuum of extremes and of what s healthy. So raw food is fantastic for you, right? They ve done study after study after study. It can make you feel much better and certainly reduce cravings. I believe when you re off of all that processed food your body is really happier and isn t craving, isn t looking for Oreo cookies. But what happens is that some people use an extreme diet plan as a way to control themselves. So if they can t be around regular sugar, and that s what they re using the raw foods for, then they probably had some kind of addiction. Do you know what I mean? If people can t be around something, they can t get near it, it means they re sacred to death and they probably had some--you don t have to call yourself an addict at all. It s helpful to look at the food as also an addictive problem because the same things happen, right? Addicts are looking for anesthesia for their feelings. You don t like calling yourself an addict? Leave the term. That s fine. You can t control the beginning or the ending of something. So someone who s an addict of sugar, they say they ll have one cookie and 20 cookies later they re still eating. We just resort to our favorite channel of what we re used to or what we really want. 5

6 If you re addicted it just means you swear it off. If you look at the diagnostic manual for psychotherapy, addicts swear off their substance, they say they ll never do it again, and eventually they go back. That is in the official psychiatric manual. There s a couple of features. You get in trouble with your family or with the doctor. Like the doctor says you re overweight or unhealthy or your family members say, I don t like your drinking or your boss says you re coming in late because you re hung-over. Something happens in your life that is a warning sign. That s always a feature of addiction. You swear it off and it lasts for just so long. So of course that happens with cigarettes, with people who have affairs, with people who like drama, with people who are on the Internet for hours and hours ruining their marriage. So it can happen with anything. You swear it off and then sure enough you re back to it. So you re really not in control when you use an outside plan to make you in control. I think that s what you were saying. Even before the call you and I were talking about that. Some people look healthy and it s a good thing to, to be on these much more careful diets, but sometimes it s not really scratching the itch that s necessary. They still haven t dealt with the emotions and conflicts that were making them crave unhealthy food to begin with. If you ve ever seen someone go off a vegan diet, They go back to Or raw food. They have one day off and suddenly they re eating three ice cream cones. The bounce back can be incredible if they re not quite dealing with the emotions or the conflicts underneath it to begin with. Do you think any sort of extreme, like 100 percent anything, might actually be some sort of addictive behavior? I m sure it can be. Each situation is different. You d have to take it that way. 100 percent or absolutely nothing of something I can t go back to smoking because I was addicted to smoking. I can t ever go back. I can t have one. I can t just do it on New Year s Eve. I can t do it on my birthday. I can t do it on Saturdays. I ll be done for. I know me. I ll be back in a minute. I ll be a smoker again. Whenever someone is that complete about something You ve seen people do spirituality in a way that s not healthy. So yes, you can do good things - spirituality, raw food, jogging, meditating, being healthy - you can do anything and take it to an extreme that actually ends up not being good for you either. I love that definition. If you swear off of it and you inevitably come back to it. It s so perfect. I think everyone has experienced that. It means it still has, the chips still have their hands around your neck. 6

7 All right. Let s talk about how we can get those hands off of the neck. We re going to talk about EFT. Some people may not know what EFT is. Let s start very basically with that and then ramp it up. Great. EFT is a form of meridian tapping. What we re doing is tapping on the points, the acupuncture points on the face and body, we re tapping there to move energy through the body. They may know it as TFT, EFT, there are lots of forms of it. EFT is the most popular. But the point is we re doing psychological acupuncture. We re not using needles. We re doing a light tapping motion on the same points, which relieve stress and moves energy through the body. The reason we care about that is because if you have a symptom, and a craving is actually a symptom, it s not normal. Like right now you and I are sitting here and we re not having crazy symptoms for alcohol or sugar or anything like that. It s an abnormal physiological and emotional response. It s a normal response to stress, but it s not typical. Not everybody is having those symptoms. So when you have a symptom it means your energy system is out of balance. What we do with the tapping, meridian tapping, EFT, what we do with the tapping is we re-balance our energy system. When your energy system is balanced you no longer have symptoms. That can include pain, insomnia, illnesses, cravings, you name it. We have seen it go away, get relieved, get eliminated, by balancing the system in your body. It s a very delicate balance of the circuits of energy that travel through your body. So our cravings are energetic? Well, cravings are a symptom that mean the energy is out of balance. So it s not that they re energetic. It means that something s awry in that system. If you actually are walking down the street and suddenly you re craving a donut so much you walk into a store even though you swore them off. It means something s out of balance there. So when we re trying to target our cravings, what do we do? How does EFT kind of fall into place when we re running to the cabinet for the corn chips or something like that? Here s one of the things I tell my clients in my workshops all the time. Do not wait until you are in the car on the way to Dunkin Donuts to do your tapping. Because you won t do it. That addictive feeling about got to have the donut right now or I ve got to have the ice cream cone, is so overpowering. That s why people hate themselves for it. They feel ashamed. They say, I swore it off. What 7

8 am I doing in the car on the way to get an ice cream cone? The first thing I do is say to people don t wait. If you re in the car you re not going to pull over and do your nice, healthy tapping. So you need to have a program of doing the tapping, every day, on your stress, on what s getting you sort of twisted up and making you want to have cravings. What I do with people in my office or at workshops is I actually have the substance with me. I say, OK, take a look at that ice cream. Or, Look at that chocolate. How s the craving? They ll say, Oh my gosh, on a scale of 0-10 it s an 8. How are you feeling? Really anxious. I really want it right now. Then we do the tapping. We do EFT while they re looking at the bar of chocolate, while they re looking at the bag of chips. Whatever it is that gets them all excited. Tap, tap, tap. We do the system of tapping and they look at it again and smell it again and they go, That s strange. It s only a minute later and I feel like I can walk away now. That s how they then understand it s not just physiological. The people who say it s just physiological, they say, I m totally out of control. It s my body. There s nothing else I can do. When you start tapping you start unpacking the layers. Then people say, You know what s strange? I actually feel and they ll come up with an emotion. So the craving will go down. On a scale of 0-10 let s say their craving was an 8 for a chocolate bar. We do the tapping. The craving goes down. They say, Wow, it s about a 3 or a 4. I could walk away. I don t have to have it now. Which means they just bought themselves a few more hours of staying on a wonderful, healthy eating plan because they re not compelled to eat the chocolate bar. But then something else comes up. They say, It s weird. I m not thinking about that chocolate bar anymore, but it brought up loneliness. Or it brought up a feeling of hurt or, Right now I m really mad at my boss. Because the underlying emotions which drive us to crave things that aren t healthy to begin with, we can now see them, feel them, hear them because the craving, which is screaming loud has been put off to the side. That s what s so confusing to people, because they say, You don t understand. The craving has blotted out everything else in my life. I ve got to have it. If you ve ever known someone who is addicted to alcohol, they will sell their child for a drink. Not because they re mean, not because they re bad people, but because the cravings feel life or death. Now it s different with food. It s often not quite as desperate as that, but for some people I have met plenty of people where it does feel that important. So they think it s all about the food, it s all about the chocolate. At midnight they re 8

9 going to get into their car, drive to the store to get something. But if they stopped and tapped, they would understand, Wow, the craving is not that important right now. You know what s important? My emotion of grief. My emotion of sadness. My emotion of anxiety about what s going on in my life. So that s the next layer. Then we tap on the emotion and then the craving completely goes away. I did a workshop one time and we were tapping on donuts for this woman. Her craving had been a 10, as high as it could possibly be on our scale. After a round or two of tapping she took a look at the box. I said, Smell them again. How much do you want the donuts now? And she said, Wow, it s not about the donuts anymore is it? She totally got it. It s not about the donuts. In the moment, when you want a cigarette, when you want a donut, when you want the chocolate, it feels like it is 100 percent about the substance and nothing will satisfy you except that substance. But it s not true. What satisfies you is calming down the electricity, the energy system, balancing yourself. And then it s like, Chocolate, hmmm. I like the taste of chocolate but I don t need three chocolate bars right now. We re about 25 minutes into the call. I just wanted to tell everyone that you can find out more information about Dr. Carol Look at Now Carol, what if you go out to Dunkin Donuts and you drink the coffee or the triple mocha latte or you have the 16 munchkins or whatever happens. Can you deal with it after or is it too late? What you have to deal with afterwards, and this is what I ve dealt with with so many people is the shame, the frustration, the discouragement and the selfhatred. So if someone has sworn it off, they re on a great plan, they love how they re feeling and looking and they have more energy and they re not getting into the junk food, then they have a craving binge night, like that, what do you have to deal with? You have to deal with the feelings. You can t do anything else but deal with what happened and keep working on your stress levels so that you don t do it again and don t do it again and don t do it again. It s almost like you build a muscle of learning how not to do it, because part of it is habit. You and I, under incredible stress, we re not looking for heroin. But as I said earlier, under incredible stress cigarettes occur to me. I would never do it, but it s like huh, because that was something I used for stress as an adolescent. It was really built in there. 9

10 For me I think it s corn chips. Corn chips. Under incredible stress the corn chips come up. You know what we really need to help clients with to understand? The reason we have addictions and compulsions and cravings is because they work. What better to quiet down and shut up your emotions than a bag of corn chips. It works everybody. Don t be mad at yourself for it. It works to anesthetize, to calm down your feelings. Eating salty chips, eating sugary something, drinking something, the coffee, the alcohol, whatever it is, it s distracting emotionally. It s very hard to be really upset about something when you re stuffing your face with food. It seems to me a lot of really emotionally-intelligent people pacify themselves over and over again. Is it because they re afraid to just get out into the world and be who they are? Pacify is the right word. It s actually really easy to do that. In other words, when you think of we re all a little stressed out, we re all incredibly busy with our families, our lives, the society and our jobs, etc., it is the shortcut. The shortcut is buying a bag of corn chips. The shortcut is having a beer. The easy route is to say, I ll deal with my sibling issue, I ll deal with my issue with my parents, I ll deal with the issue at work or the colleague, I ll deal with that later. Why don t we get into the cookies now? So it s just easy to do and it can be hard work to really deal on a regular, daily basis with emotional stress. You ve had times of ups and downs in your life, when things didn t seem they were going as smoothly or as wonderfully as you want. Look back. How did you handle it? Some people actually use emotions to hurt other people when they re upset. They get very aggressive or very angry and they use that almost as an addictive substance, too. But it always goes back to the stress. If we re not dealing with stress, being over-busy, feeling anxious, we don t have enough time, we re upset, we just had a fight with our spouse or whatever, when we re not dealing with that, that s when we re vulnerable to having the cravings really take hold of us. So we know we have to do EFT and we find ourselves too stressful and too busy to even sit down and do it. What s the issue there? Well the issue is really self-care there. What I m focused on now is I do a lot of 10

11 groups for supervision for practitioners and coaches and life coaches and therapists. I d say the number-one issue that we must do for ourselves, because we re then modeling it for our clients, is self-care. If you can t take 10 minutes out of the day to do a meditation or your tapping, or your chi gong or juicing or whatever you need to do, if you re not taking 10, 20, 30 minutes a day for yourself, it s going to catch up with you. Now for some people it takes a long time to catch up with them and eventually their relationship falls apart or eventually their body starts to pop symptoms or their home and office and life and car is a complete cluttered mess. It eventually catches up with us on some level.we can get away with it for a pretty long time, unfortunately. I m picturing my car right now. But if someone is not even taking the time, you have to look at that self-care, self-love issue. Why not? Are you not worth it? Oh, I m just too busy. Really? I work with someone who had terrible migraines, I mean terrible migraines. I gave her a combination of meditating and doing the tapping every day because that helps incredibly well. She would come back week after week and say, I didn t have time. I said, If you don t have time to do 10 minutes of tapping I m not really doing much for you in the session. We talk and talk about other things and then she gets to the end and says, I want to do tapping for my migraines. But she wouldn t take the time for herself. Five, ten minutes a day. It sounds ridiculous, right? You ve experienced the tapping enough and so have I. Five minutes a day can make a difference. Is that enough time to spend on taking care of yourself? No. We need exercise, we need gratitude, we need nature, we need to be quiet, we need to play with our animals, we need to interact with people, we need to have silence, music. There are many things that are helpful and healthy in our lives. But we ve got to put them on the list. They fall off the list really quickly. Even 20 seconds of tapping is effective. Anything at this point because if you re getting wound up and really stressed out Sometimes what I recommend that people do, they read their s, right? And they get all upset and all stressed out. They start to write a nasty to someone. I say, before you push the send button, would you please do some tapping. I bet you will re-type the letter, re-type the answer. Our reactions, when we get really exhausted and stressed-out, one of the things we do is overreact. One of the things I use tapping on, and EFT on, originally for myself, and I didn t 11

12 even know I was doing it but it cleared up the problem, is long-term insomnia. The tapping helped me clear that out completely. When someone is exhausted, stressed-out, not sleeping well, their cravings are going to be worse because their bodies are out of balance and it s much easier to go down a street and get some pizza then take the time to cook yourself a healthy meal or eat raw and whole. It s just easier. I want people to be easy on themselves about it. It s very common. It happens all the time. But if you want to reduce the number of times you go out for those foods that are really, really not healthy for you, you ve got to address the stress in your life. Tapping is the best technique. I ve been in the mental health field now for almost 20 years and I say to people, when I find another technique that s better, I will do it in a minute. I will cross over in two seconds. I will drop EFT like a hot potato. But I haven t been able to find anything. Nothing compares in my work, and I have worked with profound trauma, veterans, smoking, eating, all the addictions, abundance work, pain control. I ve worked in every single aspect of mental health. I have yet to find something that is as powerful as any kind of the tapping techniques. I want to be clear for everyone who s listening that you re a trained psychologist. This is not someone who stumbled into EFT and started using it on people. You were working with clients and patients before and then you found this and started using it, correct? Yes. I m a psychotherapist with a master s degree in social work as well as a doctorate in clinical hypnosis. I was working at an agency for years and I stumbled across the tapping. Actually, a hypnotist friend of mine introduced me to it and I ve been training in it and studying it for years. But yes, I know the psychology and the inner workings of people and stress and all of that. That s my field to begin with. Right, which is great. So enough talking about it. Let s give a demonstration. I think that these are very useful. Let s give a demonstration for cravings and we ll walk someone through it. So if you are listening now, let s do some tapping together. How about that? Excellent. OK. Kevin, you re going to be my pretend client. What we would do, in your case, since you ve mentioned corn chips, what I would do is I would start by opening a bag of corn chips in front of you and tell you to smell it. You can pick one up if you want. I would say, How high is the craving on a scale of 0-10? 12

13 Let s pretend, because I m pretty good and not stressed right now at all. Let s say it s like a 9. So everybody listening, you can either imagine a food or open something and see if the craving is high. Maybe listening to this call you ve been having cravings and feeling the stress. What you want to do is just measure how high the discomfort is on a 0-10 scale. Then what we do is we start tapping right away. I m right-handed so I do it with my right hand. I take the fingers of my right hand. Actually, I can send you a document of a picture of the points, if that would be helpful for your people. So I take my right hand, the fingers of my right hand, and I tap on my left hand, what they call the karate-chop point. The side of your hand where a karate master would smash through a board, that place on the side of the hand. Tap there. It s a major acupuncture point. An important piece of tapping is acceptance. That reduces and lowers stress. So we say, Even though I have this craving Repeat after me. Even though I have this craving I deeply and profoundly accept myself anyway. I deeply and profoundly accept myself anyway. Even though I have this really strong craving Even though I have this really strong craving I accept who I am and how I feel. I accept who I am and how I feel. Even though I have this craving Even though I have this craving and I really want what s in front of me and I really want what s in front of me I choose to feel calm and peaceful. I choose to feel calm and peaceful. 13

14 Now because I m right-handed I take two fingers of my right hand and the first point we tap on is an acupuncture point. It s at the beginning of your eyebrow, either one, above your nose, the beginning of the hair of one of your eyebrows. You just tap there lightly. I m tapping. You just tap there and you say the problem. You have to call up the file. It s like calling up a document. You have to be in the document in order to edit it. So you call up the document. You just say this really strong craving. It helps you to focus. Then the next point is on the side of the eye. It s not far back into your hairline or your temple. It s just on that little corner there where your crow s feet are. This strong craving This strong craving Then under the eye there s a little round bone there. It s called the bony orbit. Underneath your eye. You just tap there. In your case you might say, This really strong craving for corn chips. Someone listening could say, This really strong craving for sugar or This really strong craving for cookies or whatever it is. We just go through these points. The next point is underneath the those, a critical acupuncture point. Tap underneath the nose on your upper lip. Just say the problem again, This craving for this food. This craving for this food. The next point is what we call the chin point. It s above the chin and below the lower lip, right in the middle there. You say, This craving. This craving. The next point is actually called K27 in acupuncture. It s the kidney meridian. It s right below one of those collarbone knobs on your chest. Just tap right there and say, This really strong craving. This really strong craving. The next point, four inches below your armpit. It s as if you had a seam between the halves of your body, right on the side, underneath your arm. You just tap there. This craving. 14

15 This craving. We end on the top of the head, which is a very important meeting point of acupuncture points. You tap around in a little circle on the top of your head and you say, This really strong craving. This really strong craving. Then you take a deep breath. What I would do with you is I would say, look at the bag. Smell it again. Take a chip out if you need to. Measure the craving again. Nine times out of ten it goes down right away. Then the next question is, did any emotions come up? When we get that layer of the craving out of the way we can understand what the craving is being driven by. Then the stress comes up, or the loneliness, or the hurt of the frustration, or the resentment at your boss, or whatever it is that needs to come out. Then that usually surfaces. It s really interesting what happens. Some people need to do two rounds, three rounds, four rounds. Some people they drop it from an 8 to a 0 in one round and they say, That s weird. What just happened? I m looking at the box of chocolate and I have no interest in it. What did you just do? What did I do? I led you through a technique where you balanced your energy system and you no longer have a symptom such as craving something that s not good for you or craving something that s off your eating plan. Does that make sense? Yes. It s so incredibly relaxing. Right now I did it with you and I feel very calm, very relaxed. Other things do come up. Just thinking about cravings, I think about stress and I think about lack of time. All these things just kind of bubble up. I love the expression peeling layers of the onion. We re human. That s what we re made of. I have people doing the tapping who are very skeptical. The ones who are skeptical, what they ll say to me is just what you said, I feel very relaxed. I don t know if it helps my problem, they ll say. If we re working on a trauma or something, if they re not really open to it, but they ll say, Wow, my body feels more relaxed. It should feel more relaxed because what we re doing is accessing or getting into that meridian system, that circuitry or energy, and we re calming you down, relaxing, getting the flow of energy. If you read anything about acupuncture, traditional Chinese medicine and 15

16 acupuncture, they ll say health in the body depends upon the smooth and even flow of electricity and energy throughout the meridians and throughout the organs. So that s what we re doing. But we re doing it with a percussive movement on the points, instead of sticking a needle in. We re about 40 minutes into the call. I just wanted to remind people that you can find out more information about Dr. Carol Look at You can even go to CarolLook.com, which is easier for me to spell. You can check out how to lose weight with EFT, the key to successful weight loss, success and abundance with EFT. Carol s Attracting Abundance program is really, really awesome. So Carol, let s talk about EFT first. I have some other questions I want to go through, but EFT, what happens if you just tap through the craving and something like, I m stressed out because I don t have any more time or lack of time comes up, and you don t address that? It s likely that there are a couple of things that come together that make you have a craving. Then it s likely that each person who has cravings has had them for a long time. So you can tap through a craving at six o clock on a Tuesday night, that s likely not enough. You re going to need to address stress as an ongoing issue in your life if your typical channel is to go eat something unhealthy for you. If that s common, if you reach for the sugar, you reach for the chips when you re upset or stressed-out, you re going to need to do a daily stressrelief program with the tapping. You may have to address cravings many times. I ve had people, one woman in a workshop and she did the tapping for M&Ms. She didn t even tell her husband. She came back a year later and said, By the way, I never told you what I tapped at the workshop. I tapped M&Ms. I haven t had anything. She said it was even Easter-time and her grandchildren had bags and bags of M&Ms around the house. She had no interest whatsoever. She wasn t repulsed by them. That s not what it does. But she didn t need them. She didn t crave them. She wasn t sneaking them anymore. So she was an example of someone who did it once. Many times you have to do it more than once and the craving comes up the next time. Then the craving comes up when you re doing a project late at night and you want to feed yourself with something. Then a craving comes up when you ve had a fight with someone. So you have to get to those stressors that are fueling or driving the craving. Remember, if we go back to just the simple what we know about stress is that the problem, let s say you re overeating sugar, used to be the solution. Cravings 16

17 work. If you want to not feel something that s unpleasant, go get a bag of chips because it works. Smoke a cigarette. It works. It s just not good for us and we feel terrible later and we kick ourselves and say, Why did I start eating that white flour and sugar again? I swore it off. That s what happens. But remember, we re doing something to protect ourselves. What we need to do then instead is learn how to handle the emotions that are stressful and then we don t need the protection from them. We can handle them. We understand, OK, it was stressful. OK. I feel resentful. What my friend said to me hurt. That s OK. I can handle it. I can handle it. I can tap on it. I can address it. I can write about it. I can talk a walk in nature. There are many things you can do instead of eating, instead of indulging your cravings. But remember, there s a real shortcut to indulge your cravings. Those of us who are over-busy and don t have enough time, it is so easy to go buy something at a store that s easy to eat. Sometimes it s laziness but it s really because we don t want to feel. We don t want the emotion to interrupt what s going on. How can someone tell--you may not need the answer to this, but it s curious to me right now. How can someone tell if they re craving something because their body needs more calories or it s emotional? What are some of the indicators? It s often hard to know the difference between body hunger and an actual craving. Body hunger is appropriate. If your body is hungry, you need calories. You never need M&Ms. You do not need corn chips, oreo cookies, processed foods. That is not a natural need of the body. Calories, yes. Healthy, crunchy, delicious nuts and fruits and vegetables are wonderful, right? But if you re craving really refined processed foods, that s not a need for calories, that s a need for something to calm down and pacify the feelings. You were trained in hypnosis. Do you consider EFT sort of a self-hypnosis? There are pieces of EFT that can seem hypnotic in the relaxation and in the going over the same thing over and over again. But it s not hypnosis because we re actually entering the electricity of the body. That s a key component. The tapping on the acupuncture points is really, really important. It doesn t work without that. So we have several components. We re focused on the problem. People say, I don t want to focus on the problem. Yes, you do, because you ve got to call up the document in order to edit. We need to be in it. So you need to focus on what s bothering you, because your brain and mind is then there. We do the tapping. It s the second component. We re tapping on acupuncture points. The other very valuable piece that some people think is very underrated is, I deeply and completely accept myself. Right when you say that--people hate themselves for indulging themselves in cravings, right? The minute you say, 17

18 I deeply and profoundly accept myself, everything changes. You relax. You feel better. You re not beating up on yourself. That reduces stress right in that moment. I know professionals in the field who think that s almost as important as tapping on the acupuncture points. Those are the three major components. Some people say, Hey, it reminds me a little bit of hypnosis, but Or, It s a little bit like acupuncture, but it s got some meditative features. So it s got a little bit of all of that, but those three components are critical to the EFT practice working. Is it more effective than hypnosis, in your opinion? In my opinion it is. Now, I ve got as much training in hypnosis as you can get. I have a doctoral degree in hypnosis. I was a good hypnotist. I wasn t a fabulous hypnotist. But when I found EFT what changed is I felt it gave me much more ability to empower my clients. So instead of saying, Close your eyes and relax and I m going to tell your unconscious mind you re now a non-smoker, I gave them the power. I thought it was incredibly empowering. They re not just putting away symptoms or closing their eyes and relaxing and eliminating something. They are in it. The clients are really working on it. They re so conscious of everything. They feel empowered. They have the self-help technique they take home. They can do it any time of the day. So I found it much more effective, much more thorough actually. You can sweep up anything with EFT. There are a lot of energy techniques and some people say, This one is better than that. The reason I don t do the other energy techniques is this is the best tool in my hand. I have worked with profoundly traumatized people, which is the worst thing that could happen to people s bodies and minds, and I ve had exceptional results. I don t need the other techniques because this is the best one in my hands. Somebody else might say, Oh no, hypnosis is my favorite tool. Great. Then use it. I had some success with hypnosis with cravings and weight loss with clients, but it never lasted. The EFT seems to last so that s why I ve stuck with it. So when do we do it? I say if you re not conscious of when you re going to do it in your day, you re not going to. It s a little bit like exercise. If I don t do it first thing in the morning it s not going to get done. That s me and that s what I know about my body and how my day goes. If you don t have EFT on your list for the day, I m going to do it for five minutes before each meal, just to calm myself down so I enjoy my meal 18

19 more and I don t eat too quickly, even that is a great use of the tapping. So if you re not consciously putting on your list, the same way people have to say, What time do I meditate? I meditate at five in the afternoon. I meditate before I go to bed. Somebody else says they meditate at six in the morning. If you re not conscious of that and aware of that, you won t do it. So I say put it on your list, try to do short segments. There are people who do it for an hour at a time. That just doesn t fit into my schedule. I do short segments of it. So five, ten minutes. I play with it. See what comes up. One of the biggest concerns that people have they say, Yes, but I don t know what to say. What do you say? You say the truth. So while you re tapping you say the truth. I really want these chips. I want them so badly my mouth is watering. I really want to eat this. I d be so anxious if you took it away from me. I really want it. You just tell the truth. It s almost like you re telling a story while you re tapping. I want this chocolate so badly I want it right now. People get hung-up a little bit about doing it right. As long as you re focused on the issue and tapping consistently and saying the statement, And I accept myself anyway, you re doing it right. Can someone tap on the disbelief of tapping working? Absolutely. Reluctance to tap, skepticism. But they have to do it. What you need with tapping is you need a specific target. Your target can be sugar cravings. Your target can be cigarette cravings. Your target can be anger at your spouse. Your target can be skepticism that something like this works. Your target can be pain in your arthritic knees. Your target can be a headache. Your target can be anxiety. Your target can be anything. But choose a target. Belief is a wonderful technique to work with. That s how I help so many people with the attracting abundance, is eliminating beliefs they have. Many people have limiting beliefs around their bodies and weight loss and whether they can stick to a whole and raw diet or a vegan diet. It s really wonderful for that as well. They get discouraged. Even though I don t have what it takes. That would be your phrasing. Even though I don t think I can stick to this new healthy plan, I deeply and completely accept myself. We always sabotage ourselves when we feel discouraged and down. That s when we re the most vulnerable to sabotage. If you can accept yourself where you are, accept that you had a bad day yesterday and maybe you barked at one of your kids and didn t get something in on time and maybe you ate too much of something you thought you shouldn t. If you can just accept it and be more calm and more compassionate with yourself, you re on your way, you re on your way to a much easier life, full of acceptance and compassion and just relaxing about everything. 19

20 That s why the rigidity around diet plans and food, a lot of people say to me, You have to give me a nutritional plan. No, I don t. I m a psychotherapist. I m not a nutritionist. No, you have to. As if the food is that important, as if the diet is everything. It s not about the food. It s about your stress levels, it s about your cravings, it s about what works for you. You see people eat a variety of whole and raw foods. There are some people that are better suited for something weighted a little bit on one side of that plan and weighted a little bit on the other side. It s never a one size fits all for people. It s just really important to accept yourself where you are, how you re doing. So you ate cookies last night. OK. End of the world? No. What are you going to do about it? You re going to tap. Forgive yourself and find new ways to help yourself with stress rather than using cravings. This has been great. Where can someone find out more information about you? Great. All your programs are there. You have articles and a few other things, too, correct? Yes. Articles and programs. Lots of free resources. Yes. Great. Carol, it s always a pleasure. I want to thank you so much for being a part of the call. Thank you, Kevin. To everyone else out there, this is Kevin Gianni. On behalf of myself and Dr. Carol Look, we want to thank you for joining us. Your time is important. We know how important it is. We re glad that you are committed to your health. Take care everyone and talk to you soon. 20