Emotional eating is something that countless people struggle with. Whether it’s self-soothing with a pint of ice cream after a difficult day, making your way through a bag of potato chips to assuage feelings of loneliness, or simply continuing to eat a meal when you're already full, using food to avoid or reduce stress or painful emotions is a habit that can be very easy to fall into, and very difficult to climb out of.

Whatever form emotional eating takes for you, while temporarily making you feel better, it probably also makes you feel worse, with an uncomfortably full tummy, accompanied by feelings of guilt, shame, and regret.

Tapping to the rescue! Using EFT to release the feelings you have that lead to emotional eating, as well as tapping directly on the behavior patterns themselves, can help you to become free from them.

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HOW TO USE THIS SCRIPT

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As with all of my tapping scripts, these statements can be used as is, or modified in any way that makes them resonate more fully with your experience. Some of them will fit for you, and some will not. Just use the ones that fit your experience and have an emotional charge.

You may notice that when you start tapping on these statements, thoughts and feelings will arise that you can then turn into new tapping statements, which will then give rise to still more thoughts and feelings, which you can use to create additional tapping statements, and so on. 

I call this following the thread, and it’s a very efficient way to heal and release a lot of painful feelings in a short amount of time.

Before you start tapping on a statement, give it a number between 0 and 10 which indicates the level of fear, stress, or concern that the statement brings up for you. Then, do your best to tap on the statement until it is a 0, which means all of the emotional charge is gone.

There is a lot of material here! I recommend spending anywhere from 20 to 60 minutes on this, but not more than that. That means you’ll only have time to tap out a small number of the statements on this script in one session. 

If you’re thorough, and tap things down to 0, you’ll likely feel MUCH better after tapping out just a few of them. You can attend to other ones at another time.

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PLEASE NOTE

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When doing EFT tapping on your own, if you aren't able to completely heal the issue you're working on, so that when you think about it, it no longer causes any stress, emotional pain, anger, or fear, I recommend working with a professional EFT practitioner. If you decide that this is the best course of action for you, click here to schedule a session or free consultation.

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THE TAPPING STATEMENTS

Right now I’m feeling ____________ about __________________, but I don’t want to feel that because it’s too painful, and I know eating ___________ will make me feel better, at least for a little while.

When I’m stressed or upset, sometimes food is the only thing that makes me feel better.

When I’m stressed/upset, I crave sweet/salty/carby foods.

Sometimes it feels like food is my only friend.

When I’ve had a hard day, I know I can turn to food for comfort.

Sometimes feeling my emotions is too painful, and food helps me avoid them.

Food is always there for me, even when the important people in my life aren’t.

I can always turn to food.

Food makes me feel better when I’m lonely.

Food makes me feel better when I’m sad.

Food makes me feel better when I’m angry.

Food makes me feel better when I’m stressed.

Food makes me feel better when I’m worried.

I stuff my feelings by stuffing myself with food.

When I don’t want to feel my feelings, food helps me escape.

If I couldn’t use food to get relief from painful emotions, I think I would drown in them.

If I couldn’t use food to make me feel better when I’m hurting/stressed, I don’t know what I would do.

I wish there was some other way to find relief from stress and emotional pain that was as easy to turn to as food.

If ___________ found out about the emotional eating/bingeing I do in secret, I’m afraid he/she wouldn’t want me anymore.

Food was how my mom/dad soothed/rewarded me when I was growing up, and I just don’t know another way.

Food has always been there for me, and I know I can turn to it when I’m down.

When I’m having a hard day, I know I can turn to food when I get home, and it will make me feel better.

I feel ashamed when I eat for emotional reasons.

I know I should only eat when I’m hungry, but sometimes I feel I just have to eat in order to feel better.

Eating when I’m not hungry makes me feel bad about myself.

I often eat in secret, which makes me feel even worse.

The worst part about bingeing/emotional eating is the way it makes me feel about myself.

Sometimes it feels like I have no control over my eating.

I always feel guilty after I eat when I’m not hungry.

I often eat past the point of being full, and that makes me feel bad about my self.

I wish I could control my behavior around eating, but usually it seems like it controls me.

I wish I could figure out a way to stop the behavior of emotional eating.

I wish I could wave a magic wand and make my emotional eating behaviors effortlessly drop away.