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Articles & Ideas

Professional

Conversations with Dr. Mercola Part 3

Important Note: This article was written prior to 2010 and is now outdated. Please use my newest advancement, Optimal EFT. It is more efficient, more powerful and clearly explained in my free e-book, The Unseen Therapist™.  Best wishes, Gary

part 1 part 2 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7

This installment discusses the use of both EFT and proper nutrition for optimum health.

Hugs, Gary

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Note: I personally recommend that you visit Dr. Mercola's comprehensive web site at www.mercola.com and consider joining his informative twice-weekly email list at www.mercola.com/forms/subscribe.htm These are impressive information sources.

Dr. Mercola,

Allow me to offer more of my non-medical observations on achieving good health.

To me, whether we have good health or bad health is largely an "inside job." Sure, there are circumstances outside of us that contribute to the quality of our health (e.g. car accidents, polluted ground water, hurricanes, etc.) but, for the most part, our health comes from within. Obviously, the things we choose to put in or on our bodies have major influences on our health. When we choose to eat ice cream and denatured fast foods instead of organic green beans and broccoli, we are making decisions that drag us towards disease. This is, indeed, an inside job because it comes strictly from our personal decisions.

Isn't that strange? We KNOW that we are putting improper fuels into our bodies and we KNOW that we are likely to pay health consequences for doing so. Yet we still do it. By contrast, we wouldn't dream of putting inferior gasoline in our automobiles because we know it will surely cost us down the road in expensive repairs and a shorter "car life." This is insanity. Yet how often do we choose to temporarily tease our taste buds in exchange for compromised health?

Interestingly, there also seems to be an emotional "inside job" that contributes to our less-than-pristine health. It has been known for decades that our bodies produce dramatically different chemicals as our emotions shift between positive and negative extremes. For example, when we are dwelling on our angers, grievances, fears and guilts, our body chemistry pushes us in the direction of disease. On the other hand, when our thoughts are filled with joy and laughter our body chemistry changes in a manner that pulls us toward health.

It seems obvious to me that negative emotions often drive us toward poor nutrition choices. Dwelling on negative things is a downer. it doesn't feel good and often creates a sense of anxiety or unrest that can be temporarily tranquilized by poor food choices. Thus when people are engaging in "nervous eating" they are usually munching on chocolate, sugar and heavy fats. They rarely head for the celery. It makes me wonder what our nutritional choices might be if we were at perfect peace. That is, if we had zero anxiety and no negative emotions whatsoever, would we still choose to be garbage pails?

I think not. EFT'ers who are successful with addictions and overweight issues, discover that the true cause of these unhealthy states is a list of unresolved negative emotions. Once these emotional drivers are properly neutralized, the need for unhealthy life habits diminishes.

It also seems obvious to me that, for many people, a vicious circle is created between their emotions and poor food choices. We have already seen how negative emotions can drive one toward poor food choices. However, poor food choices are toxic to the system and are clearly capable of creating the same negative moods that beg for yet more poor food choices.

This circle must be broken, of course, and I'm hoping that you have some examples that might address this.

My best, Gary
www.emofree.com

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Dear Gary,

I agree with your observation. Further, it is my observation that there are very few EFT therapists who are trained as primary care physicians. It seems most of the EFT physician practitioners are psychiatrists. So I thought it would be best to share my experience with the use of EFT in the setting of a primary care physician using natural medicine to improve people's health.

I have about 20 to 40 people call my center for new patient appointments every week. However, my staff makes it quite clear that it is our expectation that they need to make a commitment to follow my eating plan that can be found on my site at www.mercola.com at the top of any page under Nutrition Help. Typically less than half of the people who call will schedule an appointment once they understand this commitment.

Prior to my use of EFT nearly half of the people would not return to see me for their one month follow-up visit (this was primarily related to their inability to follow the eating plan). My suspicion is that this was largely related to their use of willpower rather than addressing the emotional contributions you so wonderfully expand on. Since I have introduced EFT to nearly all of my new patients, there has been a major improvement in the number of people who are returning for their one-month follow-up, as now most of them can successfully follow the program.

In this setting, I have noticed two different classes or levels of eating challenges. The first are simple food cravings where a few rounds of EFT is all that is required and the person is able to maintain compliance with the dietary recommendations. All they need to do is tap on their specific food cravings over the next few days and that is enough to get them over the hump. Most people only seem to need to do this a handful of times in the one month period. However, these times are critical as it allows many of them to have their insulin levels finally normalize.

This is largely related to the fact that most of the physical reason for food cravings is related to elevated insulin levels. If a person is able to successfully avoid all sugars, most underground vegetables, and all grains for about 72 hours the insulin levels will normalize and those strong physical cravings will dissipate.

It is quite amazing that this is so consistently effective.

The second class or level of eating challenges are far more complex as they involve a spider web of complex emotional stressors that contribute to the maintenance of their eating choices. Occasionally a few rounds of tapping will help bring out the issues. One example is a 31 year-old woman I recently saw who had been about 10% below her ideal body weight for about twenty years. I helped her trace it back to when she was ten years old, when she and her family went on a weight watcher's program.

Prior to that she had received many negative comments from others about her weight. Her mother was both emotionally and physically abusive to her and her father was an alcoholic who was never there for her. So she had quite a bit of negative programming around her self-image. When she lost the weight she received an enormous amount of praise for her good looks from friends and relatives, which reinforced her system to maintain a relative degree of anorexia.

We did a number of rounds of EFT around this issue and I suspect she will now be able to maintain her ideal body weight. This is important as she had some of the beginning signs of MS and without the proper nutrition it will be difficult for the disease to go into remission.

But for the vast majority of the more complex eating issues I have elected to have my chief therapist hold a series of six four hour sessions which we teach much of Carol Look's work and use your system of group tapping to resolve some of these deeper emotional issues. I have just started the group work so it is too early to know how effective this intervention will be, but I am optimistic that it will be a useful tool to help bring our patients to a higher level of health.

Regards,

Dr. Joseph Mercola
www.mercola.com

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