212: Brittany Watkins on How to Release Cravings & Emotional Eating

The Wellness Mama Podcast

00:00 / 00:54:51

As a mom, I’m ultra-aware that I’m the example my children look to when it comes to their view of food and healthy eating. Understanding the science of how our brain works and why we crave unhealthy foods is half the battle!

In this fascinating interview, EFT expert Brittany Watkins shares how she ditched her unhealthy emotional eating habits and retrained her brain so she could make better food choices without a struggle.

Episode Highlights With Brittany Watkins

The difference between cravings and emotional eating
Where these issues often originate and how to determine yours
Why willpower almost never works, at least over the long term
How childhood experiences likely influence your eating habits as an adult
The science of tapping and how it changes our brains
Why we crave certain foods at certain times
The real reason people are more likely to gain weight over the holidays
And more!

Resources We Mention

Learn more about Brittany at BrittanyWatkins.com

More From Wellness Mama

Is emotional eating a struggle for you? What has helped? Please drop a comment below or leave a review on iTunes to let us know. We value knowing what you think and this helps other moms find the podcast as well.

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Katie: Hello, and welcome to “The Wellness Mama Podcast.” I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com, and I think you’re really gonna love today’s episode because I am here with Brittany Watkins, who I met recently and is a new friend. She’s also a weight loss coach and author, and she’s widely known as one of the foremost experts in emotional freedom technique, or EFT, sometimes also called tapping, but especially for emotional eating and weight loss. I know I get a lot of questions from you guys about this topic and I know that she’s gonna be able to answer a lot of them today. Brittany has a lot of videos and online programs, based on 15 years of research that she’s done on weight loss and self-sabotage, and using leading-edge science to teach people how to apply these specific techniques to reduce binging, food cravings, and other forms of emotional eating. She’s helped thousands of women look and feel amazing, and her videos have been viewed millions of times. In fact, her students report a huge reduction in cravings for unhealthy food without having to use willpower, which is super key. And we’re gonna talk about her own story and her own struggle that she overcame to find all this information. And she’s beautiful inside and out, and I’m so excited to chat with her today. Brittany, welcome and thanks for being here.

Brittany: Thanks, Katie, I’m so excited to be here.

Katie: I know I’ve heard a little bit of it in person from you, but I would love if you could start by telling us your own story and how you came into this world of tapping.

Brittany: Sure. Well, let’s see. It started with me being a little bit of a troubled teen. I moved out of my house when I was 15. And one of the things that my parents sort of bribed me into doing was go to therapy, and I’m so glad they did because I met this angel therapist and we worked together for about a year. And I’ll never forget, one day, he came in and he said, “You know, I learned this technique over the weekend, and it looks completely ridiculous but I think it might really help you.” And I was in so much pain, at the time. I was just like, “Oh, anything to get me out of my pain.” And so, he walked me through this technique where I was, like, tapping on my body and saying I loved myself. And I’ll never forget how ridiculous I felt. I think my face literally, like, turned pink, I was so embarrassed. But I mean, 30 minutes later or 15 minutes later, whenever we were done, like, all of the yucky stuff and all of the hurt, and the pain, and the anger, and all the things that I was holding onto inside, like, left my body. And I remember I skipped out of his office that day, and I just felt the best I’d ever felt in my whole life. And so, every week that I would come back, I would say, “Steve, let’s do that tapping thing.”

And it was the thing that helped me so much and helped me make such rapid changes. You know, I went from, like, basically a homeless kid living on the streets at 15, to 19 years old I was running my own company. And three years later from that, I owned three houses of my own, and I know a lot of that is because of the rapid changes that I was able to make through this technique. And so, you know, once I decided that I didn’t really wanna just make money for the sake of making money anymore, I realized that my passion and my love and the only thing that I would do with my free time, is I would study tapping and I would experiment with tapping. And I learned how to do it on myself, and then, I learned how to do it with my friends.

And so, about seven years ago, I made the transition and I started teaching it, you know, specific for emotional eating because, while I was going through the troubled teenage years, I was also really struggling with binge eating. So that was kind of when I started binging and dieting and, you know, gaining weight and losing weight. And tapping helped me some. It definitely helped me with the emotions around it, but what I realized was, the regular way that I learned tapping from all the experts didn’t work for my problems. And so, seven years ago when I started my company, I just started experimenting with different techniques and I started pairing, you know, other things that I had learned, like NLP and, you know, shamanism, and you know, all these sort of like woowoo things, with tapping. And, over a period of a couple of years, I developed a system that definitely uses tapping but other modalities, specifically for my problems, which were emotional eating, food cravings, self-sabotage. And so, that’s the thing that I really focus on and that’s what I really help women with, and I love it. So it’s been a long journey but it’s been a really cool and rewarding one.

Katie: I loved that. And I wanna go a little deeper into the science of tapping and have you explain what it is. But before that, I’d love to talk a little bit more about just the emotional side. It seems like emotional eating is definitely an issue that affects women more often than men, and I feel like there’s an…even when you said, like, that you were tapping and saying things like that you love yourself, I know that that alone can be so hard for women to say. In fact, in therapy when I’ve had to say that, at times, I found myself crying. And I was like, “Why am I crying?” It’s like there’s so many underlying issues. So I’d love, if you’re willing and vulnerable enough to share, both from your own perspective but also from working with all the people that you’ve helped, why do you think this is affecting women so much more?

Brittany: Oh, well, we typically are more emotional than our male counterparts. There are definitely women that are more logical, but, if you break people up into you either process information emotionally or logically, typically, women process things emotionally. And I think that addiction, in our society, is really, really high, and food is a very easy acceptable addiction to have. You know, when we eat it, it soothes us, it makes us feel good. Right? So it’s really easy to eat a cookie rather than sit and actually feel and sort through your emotions.

Women also, especially mothers, we’ve been taught that we have to do everything for everyone. And I think that we, for, at least most of the women that I work with, I know me personally, our parents and our mothers didn’t set a good example of, “I’m gonna take care of me first, and until my cup overfloweth, and then, I take care of you.” I think especially, and you would know this better than me, there’s a lot of shaming that goes on with moms. If you’re not putting your family first and if you take care of yourself, it’s like you kind of feel guilty and bad about it. And it’s just backwards. It is absolutely backwards. Our society tells us that we need to take care of everyone before us, and so, it’s a really, really hard programming to change. But deep down, we know that we wanna take care of ourselves. So it’s just a really easy way to kind of take care of ourselves, to give us that little, like, soothing feeling of eating a cookie or, you know, eating some pizza, or eating some kind of, like, naughty food. It gives us this boost of serotonin, which makes us feel really good, and that’s actually what we’re looking for, we’re looking for ways to feel good. So I don’t know, does that answer your question?

Katie: It does. It makes sense. And I feel like we have this kind of vicious combination of both, exactly like you said, all of these emotional factors in society combined with the fact that they’ve been engineering foods to be highly rewarding. And so, we’re kinda fighting a battle on both fronts. And I know I get a lot of questions about tapping, and it’s not something I am an expert in by any means, so I’d love if you could just start, even for my sake, with a very basic explanation of, like, what tapping actually is and what the process looks like.

Brittany: Sure, sure, sure. Okay, so this is the part that I love because I find that a lot of people, when they explain tapping, they explain it in a sort of like…it is a mind-body energy technique but there’s actual science, there’s brain science. And my very first partner was the PhD responsible for EFT becoming a clinically-proven technique. So I actually understand what’s going on in the brain. So I’ll explain that part of it to you because I think it’s super, super interesting, and once people understand this, it’s like, “Oh, okay.” Even though it looks kind of weird, it’s easier for them to give themselves permission to actually do it.

So, essentially, what happens is we have this area of our brain called the hippocampus, and the hippocampus is where we store all of our memories. Now, with brain-imaging devices, when we go and we look at the hippocampus, we can see all these, like, tiny indentations on it. It kind of looks like a sponge, you know, a sponge with a bunch of holes. So what these indentations are, are basically negative memories. So we all have hundreds of thousands of negative experiences that happen in our lives. Right? It could be something really, really extreme to something like being startled by a barking dog or somebody dropping a cup and the glass breaking. Right?

So we have this storage center, basically, of all these negative memories that we have, and positive ones. And what happens when we are living our lives and something reminds us of something negative that happened to us in the past, this little indentation sends a signal to the amygdala, which is our body’s alarm system, and it tells us to feel stressed or sad or scared or have anxiety. And so, what tapping does, and this is what I love about tapping so much, is, when we’re working with it, we zero in on the problem. And so, you know, if you and I are talking about cravings, we’ll zero in on the actual memory that you have of eating that food. Or, if we’re talking about emotional eating, we’ll zero in on the memory and the negative feeling that’s causing you to want to eat emotionally.

And that actually, when we zero in on it, we zero in on one of the little indentations in the sponge, and then, by tapping… So we tap on different acupressure points. It’s the same point system that the Chinese have been using for acupuncture. I think a lot of people use acupuncture. So it’s basically self-applied acupressure, so we just tap on…there’s nine different points that we use, that we cycle through as we’re doing the technique, and they’re super, super easy to learn. Once you learn the point system, everything else becomes really easy. So as you tap through the points, what that does is it sends a flood of serotonin to this little indentation in the brain and it severs that connection, so it no longer sends the amygdala a signal and tells it to be upset. So this means that, if you were little, for instance, and you got bit by a dog, and then, in your adult life, you hear dogs or you see a dog and you kind of tense up like that, we could do one session together and you will never have that same reaction to a dog anymore.

So basically what happens is, it’s almost like the memory happened to somebody else. Which is so cool, it is the most rapid healing tool that I’ve ever experienced, that I’ve ever found, and it’s just amazing. I feel so sad that more people don’t know about it because I feel like a lot of people struggle, for years and years, in therapy or, you know, with problems that can be very, very quickly solved with, you know, a couple sessions of tapping. So, does that kind of make sense?

Katie: It does. And I love that it seems to really go at the root of it, things that maybe…like, I don’t think most of us even think of. When we have like, for instance, an emotional eating issue, we’re not thinking of like, “Oh, when I was a kid, this happened and this is why I’m doing this,” and instead, there seems to be this mentality. In society, you know, if someone struggles with their weight, it’s because they’re lazy or they don’t have willpower or, you know…and so, there’s all these other shame factors associated with that. And so, I feel like there is so much freedom in what you’re saying for people, of just realizing this actually goes back to so much more than just the willpower side.

Brittany: Oh, that is, like, one of my biggest motivations for teaching women about these tools, because it makes me cringe how much women blame themselves and shame themselves for not being able to stick to a diet plan or not being able to stick to a healthy weight-loss plan. Because it is so difficult, you’re right. And most of the problems that are connected to weight are happening in the subconscious mind, which means that, if you’re not trained and if you don’t know how to get to these problems, and if you don’t know how to get to these memories, you’re basically just fighting yourself. And yeah, I mean, that’s what all of my techniques do. And I’m all about self empowerment, so I want to…all of my students, even that just take my courses, they learn how to do these techniques to themselves. So they don’t always have to come to me or listen to a program or, you know, deal with a therapist in order to get the change. I love self empowerment, so it’s like if you have a food craving, this is the technique that you do. If you want to eat emotionally, this is the technique you do, this is how you get to that memory, and this is how you change it.

Because it’s not about willpower, it really isn’t. We have very, very strong memories and imprints that are causing us to crave unhealthy foods or causing us to eat when we’re not really hungry. And, you know, that’s why I do things like this to just educate women and let them know that it’s really not your fault. It is so hard to make the decision to lose weight when you have all this underlying subconscious stuff that’s going on that hasn’t been cleaned up yet.

Katie: That makes total sense. And so, I’d love to get a little more clarity on just a couple of terms. When we talk about, for instance, cravings versus emotional eating, can you kind of define what those are and how they’re similar or different, and what they both might relate to?

Brittany: Sure. Okay. So I love teaching people about this because it makes so much sense once you understand this concept. So, cravings are typically foods that you think of that you can’t keep in the house. Right? So like, you know, with some students it’s tortilla chips, with other students it’s chocolate, it might be ice cream or pizza. You know, they’re kind of typical, like, junk food type of foods. And these are typically foods that you will really go out of your way. Like, when you’re having a craving for these foods, or for this food, you only want this food and you will go way out of your way to get this food. So like, I once had a client that drove 35 minutes out of her way to get this certain ice cream from this certain place. And she wouldn’t keep it in her house because she knew that she would eat all of it as soon as it was in the freezer. So she didn’t keep it in her house, but when she wanted it, she would drive totally out of her way to go get it. So it’s those types of things. And people probably, you know, you’ll know, if you have one of these foods in your life, you’ll know it. Right? You’ll be kind of like nodding your head and smiling right now.

So, typically, with these foods…so, for me, it was chocolate chip cookies, I’ll just give you mine. For a lot of women, it’s chocolate. So, cravings, going back to the memories and the hippocampus, cravings typically come from memories of eating this food with someone we love, or during a time that was really positive for us. And so, just kind of as an exercise to have everyone do right now, think about the food that you can’t keep in the house, that you just totally devour if it’s around, and think about your earliest memories of eating that food. Who did you eat it with? What was going on in your life? Ninety percent of people who struggle with food cravings will go back to a positive memory. So like, maybe it’s ice cream sundaes. Like, every Sunday, I’d go get ice cream with dad, and that was such a special day and I didn’t get to see him a lot during the week. Or if it’s pizza, I hear a lot of times like, “It was Friday night Pizza Fridays,” and, you know, it’s that nostalgia of those positive memories that get wrapped up in this food.

And so, what happens later on in life as you’re an adult is, whenever you’re stressed out, you’re overwhelmed, you’re not feeling great, you eat this food. And because your brain has organized it in the filing cabinet of love…so it’s not in a food filing cabinet, it’s in a love filing cabinet. So when you eat it, you feel all this same flood of emotions, same feelings of love and safety and security, and mom’s love, or grandma’s love, or dad’s love, or whoever it’s connected to, and that makes you feel really good. And so, you’ll tend to overeat it because, I mean, who could ever get too much of mom’s love or grandma’s love, right?

So that’s where cravings come from. And when I talk about this, typically, like, you know, I’ll see people just like, you know, pouring tears down because they’ve never made that connection that this food is connected with those people. And it’s really, really easy to reprogram this so that you can eat those foods without overeating them. You basically just have to tell your brain, “Hey, this food doesn’t go in the love filing cabinet, it goes in the food filing cabinet. And the love stays in the love filing cabinet.” It’s just like your wires are a little bit crossed when it comes to these foods. Some people only have one or two of these foods, some people have a ton of them. I think I had like more than 40 different foods when I was first working on this. Does that make sense?

Katie: It does, and that’s super fascinating because, even as you are saying that, I was thinking, “Wow.” So, for me, it was never sweets. I’ve never liked sweets very much, but it was like warm bread. And it reminded me that that was one of my earliest childhood memories, like two years old, was making bread with my mom. And now, I can’t eat gluten so I haven’t had that in years and years. But it’s interesting how, like, that connection was immediate, or things like Mexican food, because we would only ever go out to eat like twice a year and it was usually for Mexican food. So that’s interesting, like, how there are those ties to childhood things. I hadn’t even thought about that before.

Brittany: Yeah, and it’s so cool. And when you understand these concepts, you start to realize that it really isn’t your fault that you’re overeating this. You’re stressed. Like, life is stressful, having kids is stressful, you know, running a house is stressful, or your business, whatever is going on in your life. It’s stressful. And so, when you realize that, you know, you’re using this food, you’re eating this food because it means love, you can start to kind of have some compassion for yourself when you overeat or when you eat these foods because you realize that it would be so hard. Basically, if you tell yourself that you’re not gonna eat warm bread, and you’re having a really stressful day, and you’ve told yourself, “Okay, I’m not gonna eat any warm bread,” you’re basically telling yourself, “I can’t get any of my mom’s love.” And that’s hard. It’s hard to resist that, at the end of the day, when you’re really stressed out. So that’s why so many women struggle with dieting, because they’ll typically cut out the foods that they love so much, but also, because they’re connected to these emotions.

And so, what I find with our students is that, once you disconnect these foods from the emotions, you can still have a little bit of bread and chocolate and, whatever your favorite foods are, but you just don’t overeat them. So it becomes a lot easier to stick to healthy eating plans. So I don’t talk about dieting, I don’t teach people to diet at all, but what I find is that when we disconnect the emotions from the food, they’ll find their own healthy eating plan that works for them and they’ll be able to follow it and stick to it and it’ll be like no willpower whatsoever. It’s great. It’s so fascinating.

Katie: That is fascinating. And I feel like it’s also such an important distinction because, being in the health world, I do think that, you know, there are some foods that are not good for our body. But that said, I feel like with the dawn of all this availability of health information, so many foods have gotten objectively painted as bad when they can be fine for some people. And certainly, if you have an allergy, they’re not, but I feel like we have this kind of tension now between people and food. And like, foods have all these negative connotations that they weren’t necessarily meant to have. And that makes complete sense, what you said, of, like, when you’re setting this up is like you’re keeping yourself from eating the things that you’re associating with love. Well, no wonder you’re not going to be successful at that. Not to mention that, like, we know the statistics about yo-yo dieting and trying all these different diets and why that doesn’t work and how it can actually mess with your hormones. So are you seeing, over time, that women, even those who have been through the gamut of just diet after diet after diet, are able to, like, release that pattern?

Brittany: I always say that if you have tried every diet and if you’ve been to every kind of personal growth workshop or therapist and nothing has worked, I will work with you and we will get you results because it’s so…it is all about the brain and it is all about your willingness to apply these techniques. So, in my programs, I really break down the different types of cravings. So there’s cravings, there’s emotional eating, there’s overeating. So a lot of people have been programmed to overeat foods. If, you know, you were one of those people that was like you couldn’t leave the table until all your food was gone, your brain has been programmed to override your own body sensations around how much food actually fills you up. So you have to kind of understand all these different aspects, but once you clear them and once you apply the techniques, it resets your body’s weight set point back to, like, where it should be. And what I find is that, you know, women will lose weight.

Actually, I was just on the phone with one of my coaches the other day, and she’s in my coach-training program, and she said, since March, she’s lost 50 pounds and she keeps losing. And she hasn’t tried, it hasn’t been conscious willpower. She just applied the techniques when I told her to apply them. So when you’re eating emotionally, do this. When you are overeating, do this. When you have a food craving, do this. And what ends up happening is that you don’t have to tell yourself no. I actually encourage people to feel it, to feel it and feel that desire, and then, when they feel the desire, they apply one of the techniques that I teach. And it resets their brain, and then, they no longer want the food in front of them. It’s really, really cool.

And so, we find that, in my…I have an advanced program that’s six months, and I have a lot more engagement with those people, I talk to them every other week, and what I find is if they apply my techniques, 50% of the time that they want to eat and they know they’re not really hungry, within three to four months, their emotional eating will be 85% to 90% of the way gone. So that means they’ll have a healthy relationship with food. And, at that point, they can decide how they want to eat, their body will be craving healthy foods rather than unhealthy foods because, again, we’re taking the emotions out of those junky foods. And so, typically, when we do that, and I have lots of videos where I’m teaching people how to do this, and it’s cool to see their reaction because they’re like, “Wait. I used to love this chocolate, and now, it tastes like chemicals.” So when you take the emotions out of the food, you’re actually able to taste the food for what it is, which you’re right, it’s a lot of junk and chemicals.

So, absolutely. I mean, there’s people that lose weight a lot faster than others. Some people come to me and they don’t have weight to lose, they just want to have a healthy relationship with food, and other people do want to lose weight. And so, you know, I don’t ever give a time frame, but what I have found is that, when you apply these techniques, you can heal that part of your brain and the results stick. You know, so I’ve been doing this for seven years now, my advanced program for five, and we’ve kept in touch with the graduates and nobody ever says that they go back to ever eating emotionally again. The people that lose weight, it’s permanent. So that’s been really, really cool and very rewarding because I think a lot of weight loss programs, it’s very difficult to maintain the weight loss afterwards.

Katie: Which makes total sense if you’re still trying to fight your brain and trying to fight your body. And I know, from interviews with a lot of neuroscientists, our brains, and especially, like you said earlier, our subconscious is so responsible for our physicality so much more than we realize. I think we’re starting to now understand, on a bigger level, that connection. But truly, like, it makes sense, you can’t continually fight that battle because your brain will always win. You also, in your writing, you talk about weight loss blockers. So can you kind of explain what those are and how to know if someone…like, how they would know if they have one of those?

Brittany: Sure, yeah. So weight loss blockers are cool. I’ve actually been talking about them without calling them weight loss blockers. So weight loss blockers, they’re basically the reasons that people hold onto extra weight. And when I say people, I mostly mean women. I’ll talk about one of the most common weight loss blockers. So one of the weight loss blockers is the craving blocker, which is, you know, when you have those positive connections with food. Another one is when you eat and you’re not really hungry, and that’s emotional eating. That’s the emotional eating weight loss blocker. And so, that requires a different technique, you’ve got to work with it in a different way. And so, I actually didn’t quite finish your question earlier. So I explained cravings. Emotional eating is when you feel bad and, all of a sudden, you’re hungry and you want food, but any food will do. So like, you know, I remember, one time, I went to the cupboard and I, like, opened a can of cold beans and, you know, that was good enough for me in that moment. So you’re gonna definitely want more junky foods in that moment, but it kind of comes from like a reaction rather than a forward motion of, “I just want this one food.”

And so, sometimes people don’t know which one is happening to them but it’s really important, over time, that you learn how to make that distinction because they require different techniques. Now, what’s so cool and what I love about this stuff so much is that, once you understand which craving you’re having and you apply the tapping techniques that I teach, you can eliminate that desire in 5 to 7 minutes, if you know how to do the techniques right. So it’s really, really cool. I’ve never found anything that were…you know, I don’t know about you, but I have tried pretty much every diet and, even when I got into emotional eating, it was like, “All right. Sit still, feel your feelings, call a friend, take a bath.” None of those things ever worked for me. And what I love about this is that you can change your brain chemistry so that you actually don’t want to eat the food anymore, rather than telling yourself that you can’t or that you shouldn’t. So that’s another weight loss blocker.

A third weight loss blocker that I talk about that I think a lot of people don’t talk about is, we call it the I’m too sexy weight loss blocker. And this is basically a fear that you’ll get more attention, sexual attention, when you lose weight or if you release the weight. And this can come from…you know, it’s so sad but so many women, including myself, have struggled with or have had some sort of sexual abuse happen in their past. But I define sexual abuse from anything from, you know, what we think of as sexual abuse to somebody just making me feel uncomfortable about your body.

I once had this client, who she could never understand why she would eat emotionally around her grandma. She’s like, “Gosh, you know, I don’t know what this is but my grandma is such a trigger for me.” She was in my class, and she went to go visit her grandma, and she came back and we were talking on the phone, on one of our calls, and she goes, “Oh my gosh, I get it. My grandma always comments on my body. She’ll either tell me I’m too skinny or I’m gaining weight. She’s always looking at my body.” And so, even something like that where somebody’s just, like, noticing your body and saying something about it to you, that can be a violation that would make you not feel safe to release the weight. So that’s another weight loss blocker.

And again, if you don’t know to look for these things and you just try dieting, like, of course you’re not gonna release that extra weight because your brain doesn’t think it’s gonna be safe if it loses this weight. So those things need to be addressed first, and then, it makes the weight loss and sticking to a healthy eating plan or exercising regularly so much easier. It almost becomes natural. Well, you’ve got to address these deeper-seeded things first.

Katie: Yeah, I totally get where you’re coming from with that. And I think, also, it’s important…like, most people listening are women, and so I feel like being able to even just talk about these things, it’s so important to be able to work past them. And so, I can say…it’s not something I talk about often but, from my own past, I also had a sexual assault when I was a teenager. And I remember, like, actually, like, something I’ve been working through recently, even in therapy, because I largely thought I was over it, but realizing I had put up emotional walls. And that they translate to physical walls of like, “I will never be hurt again.” And so, I had put up these walls, and having to break through that is very, very difficult. And so, I’m curious, like..can they come with more than one of these potential barriers? And if so, do you, like, work through them one at a time or do they have the tools to work through them all at once, or how do you handle that?

Brittany: Yeah. So there’s seven of them that we’ve identified, and, typically, people will have between, you know, four and seven of them. And yeah, so each one of them has a different modality and a different application for the technique. The cool thing is that I am a big fan of rapid results. And so, you know, I don’t dance around these issues lightly, whereas a lot of people that are kind of in the healing profession, they like to… It’s not that I take an aggressive approach but I just really like to get a lot of results in a very short period of time. And so, I found a way to sort of bundle a lot of experiences. So some people have had, you know, a lot of sexual abuse happen in their lives, so we’re able to kind of bundle a lot of those experiences and help you release them very quickly. Or with cravings, we’re able to kind of bundle a lot of those cravings and release them quickly. So yes, it is something that those things need to be addressed, first and foremost.

And, by the way, I’m so sorry to hear that you struggle with that, and I’m so glad you shared that because it’s so common. This was the number one thing, I was struggling with my weight for probably 15 years. And then, somebody finally identified that it was these sexual assaults that I didn’t even think were that big of a deal. You know, it didn’t seem like it was that bad, in my head. Like, I kind of categorized that. And I find a lot of women do this, especially like if they’ve been on a bad date, they’ll blame themselves. Like if a guy got kind of aggressive on a bad date, they’ll say like, “Well, you know, maybe, you know, my clothes were too revealing,” or, “I was being so flirtatious.” Like, they’ll kind of take that on. And even things like that can be causing you to hold onto this extra weight because your brain thinks, “Okay, we can never have that kind of experience again. You were thinner then, so you attracted this guy, and this might happen again if you release the weight.”

So these things are so important to focus on. And yeah, I teach people how to do this in my programs. We also have coaches and therapists that work for us internally. Some people just really need that one-on-one help, and so, we do provide that as well. But it is something that people can do on their own, and I teach them how to do that all the time. And we have a lot of people that make massive progress just doing it on their own, which I love. I think it’s so cool.

Katie: That is awesome. Because even as you’re talking of like your one client who had the grandmother and the comments about her body, like, I would guess those are things that are even difficult to, like, have to talk through with a therapist. And so, if you are giving women these tools to be able to start to handle that at home, there probably is like an empowerment there. And I know, for me at least, like talk therapy has been largely ineffective in my life. I just feel like, in a sense, it can make it worse, at times, or maybe I just haven’t worked through it effectively. But I love that you’re giving women the tools to actually start moving through it on their own, even if they’re not ready to work through it in a more public way.

I also know that it seems like as we get toward the holidays, this is maybe something that can be worse for a lot of people in that time of year. I don’t know, I’d love to hear your take on that. I know there’s all these…you know, every magazine cover, this time of year, is about how to not gain weight during the holidays. But after everything you’ve just explained, I also think, “Wow, well, you’re around your family, you’re probably around all these triggers and around all these foods that bring back emotions because they were tied to a holiday or a good memory.” So do you have anything specific, as we enter that time of year, where we’re around family, that could be both good or bad and trigger different situations, tools especially for that?

Brittany: Totally. I have to say I’m so glad you brought up the holidays because this is my busiest time of year. And it’s so funny that, you know…it’s not funny, it’s ironic that I have sort of like a weight loss business but our busiest time is during the holidays because, you’re so right, people get triggered, there’s tons of holiday food around, people start overeating, it’s food that you haven’t necessarily eaten all year. There’s tons of memories tied up with it, like family memories. And so, yes, there is an amazing technique. I used to just keep it in my programs for paid students, but I just got so frustrated, a couple years ago, that more women didn’t have access to this. And so, I just gave away one of my most powerful techniques for free. I’m happy to give it to your students. If you go to pushthefoodaway.com, there’s a 35-minute video of me walking you through a technique, the technique for emotional eating. So, typically, the holidays are very emotional. We get triggered by our family, it’s stressful, there’s a lot going on, we’re hosting people, we’re kind of running around like chickens with their head cut off. So that’s gonna trigger a lot more emotional eating than normal. And so, yeah, just as my gift to you and your listeners, and just doing good to the women in the world, please go watch this video and learn the technique. You can actually tap along with me. It’s a video of me walking you through it. So it’s super, super easy. But that is probably one of the best ways to get through the holidays, is to use this technique.

And what you will find is the more you use this technique, the less triggered you’ll be. So you might use it one day, and then, the next day or later on that night, you’ll notice that you aren’t going over to the dessert table or you ate way less at dinner than you would normally. So these are really, really cool techniques that work with your subconscious so that you don’t have to willpower your way through eating less. That is so uncomfortable and it just doesn’t work, and it creates stress and it makes you cranky with your family and, you know, with the people that you love. So, don’t do that. Use this technique instead and you’ll notice massive changes.

Katie: Got it. I’ll make sure we have that link.

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Katie: I’m also curious, so you mentioned that, like, your master program is like six months, and that women see pretty drastic changes within six months. On the lifelong aspect, I’m guessing there’s a more intensive period of having to do the tapping more often as your body is relearning where the emotions go. But then, is there a point where it is, like, more of a maintenance or it’s less work over time? I’m just curious, is it something where, for instance, someone has to tap every time they’re around a certain food for their whole life or are they able to actually repattern and move past that?

Brittany: That’s such a great question. So I explain it, going back to the sponge…I love doing this visually on videos, but going back to the sponge. So if you envision that sponge, which is your hippocampus that has all these negative memories in it, what we notice with brain imaging devices is, every time you tap, these indentations actually get smoothed over. So imagine, over time and over a period of tapping, section by section, corner by corner, all of these little indentations are becoming filled up. So, over time, you have a sponge with no holes in it anymore or, you know, maybe very few holes in it. And that’s typically when you only use tapping for maintenance. So yes, that’s a great question, you don’t have to keep doing it every single time you have a craving or every single time… In fact, actually, when you use this for cravings, cravings are a one-hit wonder. So the thing is, you have to work with cravings individually. But like, for instance, if you have a problem with chocolate, we can do one session around chocolate. And, it’s not that you’ll never want chocolate again, what it is is your relationship with that chocolate will be that of like a normal-eating person. So you won’t have that desire to overeat it anymore.

So, it is great and, like I said earlier, what we’ve noticed is that, usually, within the three to four month period, if you’re applying the technique regularly, it’ll be about 85% to 90% gone forever. And then, sometimes, you know, you’ll have something that will trigger you that’ll come up, and then, you just do one session, you’ll know exactly how to use the techniques. Again, I love it, it’s total, like, self empowerment, you learn how to use the techniques on your own. So if you’re at a family dinner or if you’re stressed out, you can go into the bathroom or just get some space for 10 minutes, do this technique, and come back to the dinner, and you’re totally relaxed and you don’t have that trigger anymore. So yeah, it is permanent results, you don’t have to keep using it. But the results are best if you use it frequently over a period of time. Like within, you know, three to six months, I tell people to use it regularly.

Katie: Got it. And I know another thing that I occasionally get questions about, I’m curious if there’s a tapping-type solution for this, is like late-night eating. For some reason, there seems to be more cravings, or more something that’s happening at night, and I get asked that a lot. I’m curious if you have any specific insight as to why…especially women seem to crave things like chocolate or like sweets more at night?

Brittany: Yes, that’s a great question. So that would fall into the category of emotional eating. So you’re eating because, you know, the kids have gone to bed, you’ve had a long stressful day, this is finally your time. But it’s actually coming from a desire to get away from stress. So nighttime eating, if you watch that video and if you imagine yourself…or if you do it at night when you’re craving some foods, you’ll notice, within five to seven minutes, that you won’t have the desire for food anymore. Also, just from a tactical standpoint, this typically comes from…there’s a couple reasons that women do this. Number one, they’re not managing their stress well during the day. Number two, sometimes they wake up and they start their day off dieting and they don’t eat enough during the day also. And so, you know, you wanna make sure that you have given yourself enough fuel, because during the day is when you’re the busiest and that’s when you need the most amount of fuel. And I find that a lot of women, they’ll kind of wake up with a diet mentality, like have like a 200-calorie protein shake and a salad for lunch. And that’s just not enough food for the first part of your day.

So I always tell people, make sure that you’re looking at that as well. And then, you know, obviously, managing your stress and releasing your stress, which I know is really hard. It’s hard for all of us. But yeah, so if you start your day with a deprivation mentality and if you’ve been stressed all day, it’s definitely gonna make you overeat at night. So you can either do the technique that I teach in that video, or you can kind of flip-flop your food and see if that works, or you can just, you know, find ways to manage your stress a little bit better throughout the day.

Katie: Got it. I’ll make sure I link to that. I know you have some good blog posts on your website about this. And I think that’s such an important point. I feel like, with all of these diet trends, and also just with all of the emotions related to women and weight, so many women are actually not eating enough food too. Do you see that as well, like, across the board with your clients?

Brittany: Oh, all the time, all the time. I don’t teach people how to eat, because that’s not what I do. I typically focus on the psychology of it. But when they’re using the techniques and if they’re still struggling, that usually doesn’t happen. And then, if that does happen, I have them write a food journal, and absolutely, 100% of the time, they’re eating, you know, maybe 500 calories throughout the day or 1,000 calories until 8:00 at night, and I’m just like, “This is just not enough food for your body.” So it’s from years of living in a diet culture, and so, I get it. I get why women do it. And it’s really scary, if you’re one of those women, it’s scary to start eating more. But I just tell people, “You know what? Like, try to flip it for a week and start eating more, in the beginning of your day, and then, see if that nighttime eating is still happening.” Because I would guess that you’ll notice a massive change in just using that technique.

Katie: That makes sense. And it’s probably also helpful with the addressing the emotional side, for them to be able to shift and start thinking of food as fuel and not just this negative thing. And I love that you talk about that, because I feel like this is harming women a lot. My side being in the nutrition side, I definitely see that. And so, I’m glad that you’re giving people tools to actually start healing that. And, on that note, I know when we were in person, we talked about this a little bit and I’d love to go on the record with it because you mentioned that so many of these emotional-eating issues go back to like a positive experience in childhood, or even sometimes maybe a negative experience in childhood. So, for all the parents listening, I’d love to hear any advice you have for parents for keeping kids from craving unhealthy foods, or how can we avoid these associations or teach our kids a healthy relationship with food from the beginning?

Brittany: Such a great question. And I had to kind of think about this because I don’t do a lot of work with kids. But when I really thought about, “Okay, when I’m working with adults, we’re always going back to childhood,” and so, I actually do work with kids a lot, I just don’t work with kids in person. So what I think the most important thing to do is to change your relationship with food. Because kids are very intuitive. If you’re eating ice cream and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, this is so good. This is the best ice cream. I love it,” that you’re very emotionally-charged while you’re eating ice cream. That’s very different than somebody that’s eating ice cream and going, “Wow, this ice cream is really great.” You see the difference in the energy there? So, because kids are so energetic, they are gonna be picking up like, “Oh, okay. That’s how you eat ice cream,” and so, they connect…some kids, not all, and I don’t know what makes the difference between kids that connect emotions with food and kids that don’t, but one of the best things that you can do is to work on your own…have a healthy relationship with yourself and food.

The second thing is to watch how you…well, it’s all about energy. Watch the energy that you put behind sweets or certain types of foods. So like, for example, you probably know that my sister has three kids, and when she wants to get them to do something really boring, she’ll say it with a really exciting tone, like, “Don’t you guys wanna come in the car with me and go to Costco and run errands all day?” They’re like, “Yeah, totally.” Right? And so, when you use that same energy, like, “Hey, you guys wanna go get ice cream and cookies and hang out and eat pizza?” Like when you have that kind of energy around it, it sometimes, for some kids, can make that connection of like, “Oh, this food means, like, joy, and pleasure, and fun, and excitement, and relaxation.” But if you kind of have like a more neutral tone about it, like, “Do you wanna get some ice cream?” or, “Hey, do you want a cookie right now?” it’s very different. It’s just neutral. It’s like this isn’t something that is something to be overly excited about, it’s just normal. It’s like saying, “Do you want a slice of pizza?” or, “Do you want a chicken breast?” or, “Do you want to eat dinner tonight?” So those are the two big differentiations that I see. And then, also not putting a lot of negative energy around food. So some parents go the extreme and, like, won’t let their kids have anything that’s unhealthy. And I think that’s also…that can create a negative relationship with food in a different way. So that can create secret eaters, kids that will hide food in their room and eat it because they’re kind of, like, shamed or it’s taken away from them.

So I’d say just create healthy boundaries around food, let them have a little bit. And, you know, they’ll complain and they’ll want more and things like that, and it’s fine to not let them keep eating, and I’m definitely not saying let your kids gorge on unhealthy foods, but make sure that there’s a balance and that if they want some candy or some unhealthy things, that they get that sometimes. Because, you know, real life is that, when we’re adults, like the 80/20 rule kind of applies. Right? Like, I eat healthy 80% of the time but 20% of the time I eat sweets and treats and things that I want. And so, I think, you know, using that method with your kids as well just really helps them create a healthy relationship with food, over time and as adults.

Katie: I love that. And I think, you’re right, it’s so key that we address it in ourselves first. And, as an additional…just to add on to that, I know one thing we really try to focus on with our kids, for instance, is not tying sweets especially, but foods in general, to a reward. So if there’s gonna be a dessert or something, it’s just on a normal night. It’s not like, “Oh, you did something good, therefore, you get this treat.” And so, the same with birthdays, and in any celebration, where you really don’t focus on the food very much. Especially birthdays, we try to make it about an experience. And so, my hope is that they’ll associate like those positive memories of birthdays with like, “Oh yeah, we went to the zoo,” or, “We went to laser tag. Let’s go do something fun.” Just thinking, like, long-term, that’s what I hope that they’ll take into adulthood, is like when there’s celebration or when there’s happy times, it should be with people you love and doing something you love versus just eating something you love.

And I love those tips that you gave for that as well. I think it’s something definitely to be aware of. And, on that note, I would guess there’s a lot of people listening who are hearing a lot of the things that you’ve said and it’s really resonating on a deep level, or maybe they’ve never considered that it’s not just about willpower or that there’s something deeper besides just a need to eat fewer calories. So, on that note, where would you suggest people start? It sounds like there can be a lot of things at play, so where is the best place for someone who’s new to tapping and new to this idea, to really get their feet wet?

Brittany: Well, that video that I told you about earlier, I think it is one of the best techniques. It’s the most powerful, it’s been viewed by over four million women, we get emails every day from women saying, “Oh my gosh, this has changed my life. I never understood my connection with food. I never was able to lose weight until I watched this video.” So if people want more, if you’ve heard something in today’s podcast that has resonated with you and you wanna look at these things deeper, I do have a six-week program. It’s not a six-week program like, you know, “Lose 20 pounds in six weeks,” type of deal, although we do have people that lose weight in six weeks. It’s more of a toolkit. So each one of the weight loss blockers that, you know, I talked about a few of them today, they all have a different technique. And you’ll learn how to use these different techniques for all these different problems, basically, related to weight loss, so whether it’s cravings, emotional eating, if it’s overeating, if you like to nighttime eat, you know, if you crave junk food and not healthy food, there’s all these different types of things that require a different technique. And so, what I love about this program is that I train you on how to use these techniques. And so, when it’s coming up for you, in your day-to-day life, you’ll know, “Oh crap, I’m craving this food. Let me go do this technique.” And, within five to seven minutes, you can go back and look at that food and you won’t have a desire for it. You’ll be able to just eat a little bit, you won’t be overeating. And it doesn’t require willpower. Your subconscious mind just won’t want it anymore.

So I love this toolkit for that reason, because it’s really about empowering you to know what to do in those moments. And so, women fall victim to, like, “It’s my fault, I don’t have willpower. I don’t have self-control.” And this basically gives you that willpower and that self-control back. People, if they watched that video, you’ll get a link. And if you want to buy that program, we do have a special discount for Katie and for your listeners. We typically sell it…well, we sell it on the website for $1,000, and then, we give people a discount to $500. And then, for you, we have given them an even bigger discount of just $149. So if you want that six-week program, you can also get it at pushthefoodaway.com.

Katie: That’s awesome. I’ll make sure that link is in the show notes as well. And I think what you’re doing is so important, because unlike when people have an emotional or an addiction relationship with like, for instance, alcohol or drugs, those things you can actually avoid your whole life, but you can’t not eat your whole life. And so, it is something you have to heal that relationship. You can’t fight through that your entire life. And so, I love that you are giving people their freedom in that, and I’m so appreciative of your time and the work that you’re doing and for what you’ve taught us today. For anyone listening, make sure you check out the show notes at wellnessmama.fm. All the links will be there, the video will be there so you can keep learning more and connect with Brittany. But Brittany, thank you so much. This has been awesome.

Brittany: Thank you, Katie. It’s so great to be here and to teach this information. I really hope it helps a lot of women.

Katie: Absolutely. And thanks to all of you for listening and for sharing your time, your most valuable asset, with us. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of “The Wellness Mama Podcast.”

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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212: Brittany Watkins on How to Release Cravings & Emotional Eating

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