Holistic Alternatives to Ozempic for Weight Loss

EFT and Intermittent Fasting for Food Cravings and Type 2 Diabetes

Subcutaneous injection of Semaglutide once a week for life

While you are indulging in your candy bunny sugarfest on Easter morning, you can take comfort that all you will need to do to manage the resulting diabetes and obesity is a very expensive drug with multiple side effects that you will need to take forever. If instead you tapped away the cravings for that carb bomb breakfast and waited until lunch to eat the low-carb hard boiled eggs, you would be combining the two best holistic approaches using Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) and intermittent fasting.

One of my former EFT workshop participants from 2017 is the inspiration for this blog. He had previously used tapping successfully to manage symptoms of MS and get off his blood pressure medications. Recently, he decided to tap to deal with food cravings and lose weight after two attempts with Ozempic. He initially had success using the maximum dose of the drug, but it eventually stopped being effective with reversal of the weight loss. The second time was similar with the weight coming back again.

Frustrated with that double pharmaceutical failure, he instead lost weight without drugs using EFT as outlined in this script. He began with the set-up phrase “I am obese, but I am a good person and deserve to lose weight.” After tapping to uninstall the negative obesity malware program, he shifted toward self-hypnosis to install a new positive program, “I lose weight in a safe and healthy way. I lose weight by not being hungry. I achieve my weight goal joyfully. I am mindful of eating for my own health.”

EFT can be combined with mindful eating to overcome the most powerful junk food marketing slogan in history courtesy of Lays potato chips, “You can’t eat just one.” By using the raisin meditation method, you can slow down and eat mindfully to replace that slogan with a new phrase, “One and done.” Often, the client’s actual experience of the junk food will change to it being too sweet or artificial. Rather than using will power they actually find themselves forgetting that they crave that formerly irresistible addiction.

When I work with a coaching client for weight loss, I use 3 stages of tapping. This first video addresses the cravings. This second video focuses on whatever trauma occurred the last time they were at their ideal weight which precipitated the weight gain as a metaphorical form of protection commonly referred to as emotional baggage. This third video is about removing the barriers to achieving weight loss goals which are usually based on limiting beliefs stemming from past negative experiences. 

The science behind this approach actually began with the origin story of the CDC’s Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study. “Dr. Vincent Felitti asked a patient who had lost a great deal of weight in a weight loss program why they had dropped out. That person expressed that they believed the weight loss made them feel too vulnerable. Many of those he questioned also disclosed experiencing childhood sexual abuse and that they thought deep inside that the excess weight protected them from attack.”

While teaching EFT at the former Duke Rice Diet in the early 2000s, I read Fat Like Us by a “Ricer,” Jean Anspaugh. She did a survey of 25 of her fellow dieters. “Many of the women had been raped during adolescence. We had responded to the violence perpetrated against us by building a defensive wall of flesh. We internalized the horror, spoke rarely of it, and instead let our bodies say what we were unable to voice.” I’ve heard similar stories from clients at the Structure House and the Duke Diet and Fitness Center.

Fortunately, there is now a growing evidence base that tapping is effective in reducing cravings and facilitating weight loss, in part due to providing emotional release from these childhood traumas. The lead researcher is associate professor of psychology Peta Stapleton from Bond University in Queensland, Australia, author of The Science Behind Tapping, who has published nearly 100 peer-reviewed scientific articles, including an fMRI study showing brain changes after tapping.

The other promising evidence-based approach to food cravings, weight loss, and type 2 diabetes is intermittent fasting. It is also known as time restricted eating simulating the feeding patterns of our primitive hunter ancestors who lived from one wild game kill to the next without refrigeration capabilities to enable a 3-meals a day routine. Despite the time-honored advice that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, skipping breakfast is the simplest way to start this fasting process.

Mark Twain is famous for his opinion on fasting. “A little starvation, can really do more for the average sick man than can the best medicines and the best doctors.” The benefits include weight loss and fat reduction by decreasing calorie intake and enhancing hormone function, and improved insulin sensitivity to lower blood sugar levels and reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes. The initial goal is to reduce the period of eating to 8 hours or less during the day, allowing 16 or more hours of fasting. 

The longer the fasting period, the more opportunity for your cells to perform autophagy, a process that isolates, degrades and recycles abnormal proteins within the cells. It is particularly valuable in eliminating the spike proteins stemming from a COVID-19 infection or vaccine. Abnormal proteins also play a role in aging-associated human diseases such as cancer, metabolic disorders and neurodegeneration, including the tau protein in Alzheimer’s disease which may result from type 3 diabetes.

Dr. Paul Marik, FLCCC chief scientific officer, is a proponent of intermittent fasting, as he used it to get off all drugs and cure his type 2 diabetes. Of course, any such diet must consistent of whole foods with limited carbs, and healthy fat and protein as described by my wife Dagmar Ehling, LAc, in her 4-hour video course Integrative Nutrition for Optimal Health. Also, when I coach a diabetic EFT client, I encourage them to think metaphorically about making their life sweeter instead of their blood.

Here is an EFT for Intermittent Fasting video you can use to experiment with skipping or delaying breakfast. While you are exploring time restricted eating, you also have a choice between using the profitable Big Pharma drugs to chronically suppress the symptoms originating from your emotional burdens or tapping on those childhood traumas to lower your effective ACE score and heal yourself. My next in-person workshop will be Where the Healing Happens: Transforming Symptoms in the Lower 4 Chakras, on 3/14–16/2025, at the Art of Living Retreat Center in NC.