Emotional Freedom Technique

Photo courtesy Rita Thompson

Robyn (my naturopath) is always telling me to use the 'Emotional Freedom Technique' or EFT to help with my anxiety. The problem is I am a sceptical neurotic. She taught me how to practice it myself, at home, whenever I'm feeling anxious, worried or tempted. It's also called tapping. The site all about it is here. (You can download a free manual and watch a video to learn more about it.)

When she first showed me how to do it I had come to her in tears, angry at myself for gaining/not losing weight, feeling suicidal and hopeless. We did a tapping session and she had me measure my anxiety about gaining weight and my fear of eating on a scale of 1 to 10. I said my anxiety was a 20!! When we finished she asked me again, I rated it at and 8 out of 10. Again and it was down to 4. We kept tapping until all my fears had gone and I felt calm and in control.

I couldn't believe how much it helped. EFT makes you feel VERY silly, at first I couldn't stop giggling as I was imitating her tapping... but then I started listening to the things I was saying and realised I could let my fears go. It went something like this: "Even though... the thought of eating makes me feel out of control and guilty, and I'm afraid I'm going to get fat, and I feel like I need to hang on to my eating habits to have some kind of sanity, and I feel like I let myself down by eating, and if I stop these rituals I won't know what to do.... I accept and love myself." Then I'd exhale a really deep breath and relax. It was SO HARD to say those last words when everything inside me was screaming "NO YOU DON'T! YOU'RE A WASTE OF SPACE! A FAILURE! YOU HATE YOURSELF!" After about 5 or 6 repeats, I started saying the last phrase with some conviction. The fears I had been worrying about were what was making me fail and hate myself.

I've been thinking about it a lot and I'm going to start doing it daily. Every time Robyn calls and asks me if I've been doing it at home, I say "No, I just feel stupid" or "Oh, I forgot" or "It seems like a waste of time". (She puts up with a lot from me.) But looking back, it really did help me let go of my anxiety about eating. Actually, on that day I went home and ate lunch and dinner and started to nourish myself with real foods again. The day before all I had eaten was a diet coke. The week before I had eaten an average of 500 calories a day (I know because I kept journal upon journal of food intake, calories and exercise). After that breakthrough, I stopped my obsessive calorie counting, threw all of my diaries away and put the scales in the garage. I ate again.

Despite my initial misgivings, I'm going to ignore the sceptic inside with the loud voice jeering and caterwauling and start doing EFT myself. I'm going to focus on my exercise with EFT. We've been managing to do weights 3 times a week and I've been doing a walk/run about 2 or 3 times a week for 45mins. What's holding me back from doing more cardio? Laziness. I can't get out of bed (it's lovely and warm, the covers are so snuggly... just a few more minutes...)! Also my fear of getting sweaty and dirty. So I'm tapping on those things this week and I'll see if I can manage to step up the exercise a bit more. All I want is a little more intensity and a little more frequency, I don't want to overtrain, but I do want to get fitter, stronger and gain some serous Beyoncé Butt!

Has anyone heard of this technique? What are your experiences? Has it helped you to overcome an emotional hurdle?

The wonderful world of Kefir!

As a Kefir initiate, I'm so EXCITED to share with you this wonderful probiotic drink! I was lucky enough to be shown how to make it at my cheese workshop. Dinking Kefir (pronounced kee-fear) is like drinking a living zoo of microorganisms to help foster a healthy gut environment. Even more diversity than you would find in fresh yoghurt (although you need yoghurt too)! When your gut is healthy, YOU are. You can assimilate and utilise nutrients and energy from food better with no nasty bowel problems like gas or diahorrea.
For the low down on all that is Kefir check out Dom's site.

Elisabeth gave us our very own kefir 'grains' (not a grain but a culture that looks like grains, see picture above) to grow some of our own at home. It only takes 24hrs! I made some yesterday and drank my Kefir smoothie for breakfast today, put on another batch this morning ready for tomorrow's brekky. It's very easy, even easier than yoghurt because there is no heating of the milk at all.

So what does it taste like? Very similar to natural yoghurt with a sharper sourish aftertaste. Sometimes Kefir can have a slight alcohol content of about 0.5%, but not enough to stop you driving! You can drink it straight, very refreshing, or have it in a smoothie rather than milk. As it is a fermented food, the milk is much easier to digest, the bacteria in effect 'pre-digesting' the milk sugars. People with lactose intolerance might find kefir a tasty alternative to milk. You can use kefir as a started for sourdough bread, to make kefired cream and kefired butter. I've also read it can be used as a culture for making cheeses.

As for where to get good kefir grains.... I don't actually know! I was fortunate enough to be given some at the workshop, but as far as I know it has been handed down for thousands of years and originated somewhere in the middle east. Kefir grains multiply so the excess is usually shared around to members of the community. You can buy dehydrated grains, but I'm not sure what kind of quality they are. Previously, I had only read about kefir and had been unable to source it, let alone taste some!

So today I ate the fruits of my labour... well, not much labour really. I still made it though!

Kefir Blueberry Power Smoothie

1 1/2 cups cultured kefir
1 cup of blueberries
1 small ripe ladyfinger bannana
1 scoop cold filtered unsweetened whey protein (20g)
Tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg

Serve over ice.

It was HEAVENLY. I thought foods that are good for you are meant to taste bad too!